Sapa to Sin Ho

After an interesting trip on an overnight train from Hanoi (where we met Bryceson, a fellow scholar studying in India, and his wife, Jenna)  we departed from the train station on a bus destined for Sapa.  

       Upon our arrival, we were greeted by Black H’mong women, hawking various trinkets.  Not particularly pushy at 0530, they seemed more interested in practicing their English with us, which was surprisingly good.  We had a following of one 20 year-old girl (with a 5 month-old baby strapped to her back and one 17 month-old at home in the village) and a 60 year-old woman.  They both were burdened by their loads, but in fantastic shape.  I suppose walking up and down the mountain roads, Sapa is nestled in the mountains at about 1600 meters or 5280 feet, will do wonders for one’s physical conditioning.  We asked them where their husbands were.  Their reply was, “In the village, we come here every day to sell our crafts.”  Our guide later told us, as we suspected, their husbands don’t particularly do anything but drink.  “The women come down and sell their things, while their husbands sometimes come into town to drink whiskey.  The women go home at the end of the day carrying their babies and their husbands,” he laughingly told Shara.  

After a nice breakfast- thank you French colonialism for the great bread- we got our bikes.  I started on a Minsk piece of garbage.  As I’d never driven a clutch motorcycle before, I attempted to quickly learn.  After an unsuccessful few attempts on figuring out the touchy clutch of the Minsk, the bike-owner said it would be easier for me to drive a manual that is more similar to the automatic I ride in Bangkok.  It took all of about ten seconds to figure out the manual, the same for Shara and Bryceson, and we were on our way to weave the road from Sapa to a small H’mong village, some 2 kilometers away.  

In the village, we saw a few shops and a few static displays of daily village life.  These included: weaving hemp with a loom, old rice milling, and fabric dyeing.  There really wasn’t anything spectacular to see in the village besides the spectacular waterfalls and rice farming techniques.  As the village is in the mountains, the rice paddies are arranged in tiers.

We returned to Sapa to make final adjustments to our equipment, put on our protective gear, and headed out on Highway 4D towards Tram Ton Pass and Bihn Lu.  The road out of Sapa was nice, as we cruised along around 40-50 kph.  I took up the back, while Bryceson, Jenna, and Shara pushed out in front of me behind the guide.  The views were spectacular as we headed uphill toward the pass.  On top of the pass, we saw an Australian couple who had been mountain biking all over Vietnam.  They had a few other Aussies around them, so we didn’t speak with them.  The view from the pass was as spectacular as the rest of the ride.  

We stopped just past Bihn Lu for lunch.  The lunch was fantastic, but the entertaining part of lunch wasn’t the food, it was the Vietnamese tour group that was getting completely hammered on “Menvodka” and Bia Hanoi.   Between the six of them, they finished three liters of vodka and three large beers.  As I excused myself to go to the restroom, I followed one of the Vietnamese ladies to the restroom.  I arrived to hear her retching in the toilet.  By the way, she was the tour guide.  After I found another restroom, I returned to the table to see she was back in the game again- puke and rally, baby! 

We headed toward Lai Chau (the new Lai Chau, as the old one is now under water, after the government decided they would build a reservoir in the old location- we’ll see it tomorrow) and ran into a detour.  There is a lot of infrastructure building going on right now, and the new provincial capital is scene to a tremendous amount of this work.  We took the detour and bumped into a roadblock where a backhoe was loading jackhammered limestone into the back of a dump truck.  We parked and walked ahead to a cafe, while our guide waited with our bikes.  As none of us speaks Vietnamese and the menu was also in Vietnamese (not a lot of whitey in these parts, folks), Bryceson had the task of explaining what he wanted to the owner in pantomime- picture charades using the fruit and his hand as a knife.  I was easy: coffee.  The road opened up while we were ordering, so we rode our bikes with the guide up to the cafe and finished our drinks.  At this point, the guide explained that we had 60 kilometers to go before we’d be done for the day.  We’d cover that in about two hours of absolute winding fun.  

Going up and down the mountain roads was cause for celebration, though nobody cheered.  We were all too tired to do anything other than steer our bikes.  We made it to Sin Ho in one piece without any incidents, ate dinner, drank a couple of beers, and are now getting ready to crash for the night.  Today’s total was around 150 kilometers of total riding.  Tomorrow, we head to Dien Bien Phu, site of the 1957 French Paratroopers’ defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh Army.  All told, we’ll be riding 200 kilometers.  We can’t wait!