HCM (Saigon) to a little shop near K’Bang: 511 miles

Around 200km out of Saigon, my chain snapped. I was surprised but not too worried. After all, I had prepared for this moment! I had a chain tool (which I thought I’d never use), some spare links (to appear professional) and had been walked through the “unlikely” repair process at a family BBQ.

Besides, I wasn’t landing a plane or defusing a bomb. I could take my time. I even set about refreshing my knowledge with a YouTube ‘how to’, before getting to work.

I never actually made it to the end of that ‘how to’, as I was interrupted by an enthusiastic teenage helper.

‘Snapped chain?’, he asked, “Oh my God – so E-A-S-Y!!”

‘Thanks – I just want to watch this video, all the same though.’

‘Really, it’s very easy’, he insisted.

He was trying to help so we had a little chat about his studies and what not whilst I got on with it and sure enough, it was pretty easy to ping off the broken link and attach a new one. Only, a little distracted, I ended up reattaching the chain over the frame.

If you can’t picture this, it’s the mechanical equivalent of putting your trouser on the wrong leg, (then bonding it there with a permanent metal link). You’re not going anywhere!

Never mind, I had two more links, I just needed to break the chain and start again. This time I broke it in the wrong place though. To continue the metaphor – I now had a belt with two buckles and no holes. Crumbs!

Somehow I messed up the last link too, all while my helpful assistant watched on. “What a disaster” he said, shaking his head, “what a disaster!”.

Several solutions were proposed to remedy the situation:

1. He could tow me the last 10km into town from a rope attached to his motorbike

2. I could sit on the back of the motorbike whilst supporting my bike and luggage in my arms (perhaps 30kg +) – “very easy”, he assured me.

3. We could ask his Dad (across the street) to help – “he’s a professional”

The ‘disaster’ was totally my fault – there was really no need for these guys to help at all, but it was getting dark and there was no way they were prepared to leave me alone at the side of the road. The boy’s dad was indeed a ‘professional’, of what I’m not sure, certainly nothing to do with bikes! He had a lot of tools though and for the ‘easy’ job of repairing the chain arrived an angle grinder, a massive mallet, pliers and a box of chisels. I tried to explain that it was a delicate kind of job – perhaps his dad would like to use the chain tool? “Don’t worry”, he said, “he’s a professional”.

Amazingly, after a sea of sparks from the power tools and half an hour of pounding and chipping away at the thing, the chain was back on the bike, and I was good to go!

Before I arrived in Vietnam, I’d come across so many negative stories online. The country was beautiful but full of ‘scammers’, the Vietnamese were ‘dishonest’, and anything that went wrong was ‘typical Vietnam’.

I was so grateful to the pair below. I asked them to wait whilst I bought a few beers and Pepsis to say thanks. They were pretty confused as to why I’d done this and tried to give them back to me, before eventually sending me on my way with an armful of cake.

‘Typical Vietnam’, indeed.

I cycled slowly, with the now fragile chain, and a lady on a motorbike pulled up for a chat. She said she worked as a cleaner but loved studying English at the weekends, “I’m so excited to see a foreigner in my town!”. We chatted at each set of lights until it was her turn off. Another ‘scammer’, I presumed.

Looking back at the photos, the 200km or so from Saigon to Phan Thiet (site of the chain incident) seems a nice ride.

I left HCM at 5am, before first light

Hopped on a motorbike ferry

And passed a series of impressive churches on my way down to the coast

I loved the dragon fruit plantations – often strung up with light bulbs

The (to me, strange) fishing coracles

And the wilder stretches of coast, which arrived at intervals

For the first time on the trip though, I was actually feeling a little ill and all I could really think about was the scorching heat; the hot wind that rolled off the sea, totally unsympathetic.

Phan Thiet, where I’d spent the night, is a very functional seaside town, serving the nearby Russian resort of Mui Ne. It’s no biking mecca – but after the chain had snapped and then been put through the wringer by the previous day’s ‘professionals’, with no spare links left, and the prospect of a hilly couple of weeks ahead – I felt I should look for a replacement. The ‘shop’ below was the most specialised I could find.

Unfortunately the chain they sold me was too short!

And the only other one I could get my hands on, a “Shimano”, the proprietor proudly assured me, was undoubtedly a fake. It would have to do.

After some stress darting around town, nervously fitting the chain (ok this time), and still feeling a little ill, I did what any other self-respecting, hard-as-nails long distance cyclist would do: I took myself to an afternoon screening of Disney’s ‘Malificent 2 – Mistress of Evil’. In this, Angelina Jolie’s character has to deal with a double crossing queen-in-law that succeeds in turning the entire human kingdom against the often misunderstood world of the supernatural (…and I thought I had problems!).

Feeling better the next day and with the bike good to roll, I headed for the hills.

The plan was to climb a scenic set of roads toward the pines and coffee plantations of Dalat, before heading north-west toward the Laos border.

I loaded up on some delicious supplies

Raced these boys (who, at two to a bike, were admittedly at a disadvantage)

Then paused to catch my breath. That’s when I met these guys – apparently the self-styled cycling club of Phan Thiet! (Perhaps it was a mecca after all…)

We had a bit of fun over some cane juice and iced tea, but then things got serious: it was photo time!

The man below (in the middle of the road) directed us to the line of focus, whilst another guy (with a giant zoom) crouched in the grass

They made me repeat my approach twice to secure the killer shot!

After saying bye I approached my first climb aware something was amiss: motorbikes were passing…but silently. Engine trouble? If only. The climb I was beginning, (for them the descent), was so long and steep, it just wasn’t worth wasting the petrol!

A hard ride, more impressive though was the fact that these same steep slopes were actually being cultivated by a hardy but cheerful workforce, for maize, banana and bamboo.

I came across two groups of these workers on the way up, grilling forest creatures they’d trapped on makeshift fires in the middle of the road – a big thermos of rice to go with the meat and a swig of local sprits to wash it down.

I politely declined their invitation to join (I was only just feeling better!) and was lucky instead to get a lovely home-cooked meal from this lady running a kind of ‘café’ (just her house really), half way up. We had a chat on Google Translate whilst I saw off a bottle of ‘Sting Energy’, each of us, I think, wondering what the other’s life must be like.

Eventually I topped out on some coffee plantations – this was pretty exciting. The red dirt, beans in the sun, neat green slopes and village kids all felt familiar. A sign, I’m sure, of too much time spent in chains like ‘Pret’ that plaster their walls with such rustic scenes in a boardroom effort to appear ‘human’ and ‘friendly’.

In reality the coffee communities I rode through over the next few hundred kilometres were vastly removed from the world of flat whites, leather sofas, George Clooney and Nespresso. Most families live in simple one room wooden houses, often with grandparents, in isolated communities some distance from basic services, cooking on wood fires and 100% reliant on their crop. Many growers are independent and quite exposed, if there is a poor harvest for instance, the big companies don’t step in, they just buy from elsewhere.

After a heavy day of climbing the plantations, I rested in the town of Di Linh, but had a strange start to the next day when a man pulled alongside on his motorbike (as I was riding), and remained there for a good 15 minutes. Friendly at first, he soon became insistent that I pulled over, blocking me in and refusing to leave me alone. It was all the more sinister due to his face mask and helmet, standard garb for the road, but in this case a bit creepy. I don’t know what his plan was, (he became increasingly aggressive), but eventually a shop appeared and I shot across the road ready to call these banana guys to my defence.

I’d obviously picked well, as my would be assailant sped off immediately. Though having told him where I was headed in our initial exchange, I remained paranoid he might appear around every bend for the next few hours. All a bit silly, but so it is travelling on your own sometimes.

By early afternoon I’d forgotten about him and paused to shelter under the awning of a small shop as it began to rain. This roused the curiosity of those inside – a bunch of barbers it turned out, all brothers. We had a bit of chat and I asked if there was anywhere to eat in the village.

“Right here” – their spokesman announced.

I looked around, it was definitely a barber shop.

“You can eat with us!”, he clarified. I looked out again at the drizzle and accepted the kind offer without further hesitation.

In the traditional way I was given a tiny bowl, everyone loading it up with bits of this and that, as soon it was half empty. As is also traditional, (regardless of the hour), rice wine was the compulsory accompaniment. I managed to excuse myself from the worst of this, on account of the bike, but they were pretty deep into it themselves with one of the six soon passed out in the barber’s chair. Another brother was going beserk in the background with my instant camera, and whilst all this was going on, another got up to give a customer a quick haircut!

Meanwhile food was still being loaded up. Did I want an egg? ‘Sure!’, I didn’t want to turn down their hospitality, ‘I’ll have whatever’, I gestured.

This was the wrong answer (anyone that read my previous post will know why…)

It was of course not any old egg but a duck egg (…an embryo duck egg!). Deep joy: ‘Can someone please pass me that rice wine!’.

Actually, I should be grateful for the egg. It got me some good credibility allowing me to turn down their next offer: giving me a haircut!

‘It’s stopped raining now – I better get on’

‘But we’ll do it for FREE! We can give you a shave too!’ – hmm… a cut throat shave by a drunken gang of barbers on an isolated hilltop

‘Really guys – you’ve been kind enough!’

It was actually no exaggeration, I really did need to get on, there was a fair distance ahead of me. The climbing continued and the scenery was wonderful.

I had a great game of ‘Hello, what’s your name?’ with these kids at the top of a pass. The rules are: they ask, I tell, we repeat

All very scenic – though I had to descend carefully on some pretty rough roads.

I had a Nha Nghi (motel) in mind for the night, but it was really in the middle of nowhere and as it began to get dark, I wondered if I’d make it, or (given how isolated the road became), if it even existed. After climbing for two days the air was mild and the final descent quite cool after the sun had gone down.

When I eventually saw the lights of Nha Nghi Phuong Lan I couldn’t have been happier to check in to the ropey £3 room. After gunning it pretty hard to get there, I was beyond delighted when the lady also offered to cook me dinner for another £1 on top.

With the morning’s highway bandit foiled, the ‘Good Samaritan’ barbers at lunch and now this isolated truck stop, a kind of 20th C coaching station, it felt like a proper old fashioned day on the road.

I woke rested and with the coast far behind me, I was now properly into the Central Highlands, an area of minority communities, more coffee and hills, and some (increasingly vulnerable) primary forest. It was here that some of the fiercest battles of the war were fought at places such as Hamburger Hill, Pleiku, the Ia Drang Valley and Khe Sanh airbase. The scenes I’d encounter over the coming days – simple wooden villages, water buffalo, fields dotted with conical hats – were ones I’d first come across in black and white photos, studying napalm and carpet bombing as a teenager doing my GCSEs. It was a little eery at first to ride these roads with that frame of reference, and with my recent visit to the war photographers’ gallery in Saigon, fresh in mind.   

Taking my cue from a motorbike guide I’d read, I planned to follow a largely new road, the mythically titled Duong Truong Son Dong, ‘Road East of the Long Mountains’; mountains which would shadow my progress until I reached the trans-national HCM Road, near the Laos border.

The surrounding area was heavily cultivated for the most part, but interesting. I passed a small (maybe M’nong) floating village on Ho Lak Lake

Longhouses of the Ede minority – apparently matriarchal, though I don’t think I would have noticed just cycling through

And frequent patches of corn, rice and coffee drying on the road

Pretty well everyone said hello (here I am with a particularly intimidating group!)

In Buon Ma Tout (Vietnam’s coffee capital), I sadly had no coffee, but learned how to roll my own spring rolls – gỏi cuốn

And in the morning, just as I was leaving, was invited to breakfast with a guy from the motel’s cousin (himself a coffee roaster that had studied English in the ‘80s)

Back on the road, I was then challenged to a game of pool by an elderly gent in military fatigues and a pith helmet, drinking rice wine in a rudimentary shelter among the cane fields. At around 9.30am, I decided it was pretty early for all that! And cracked on instead on the largely empty Truong Son Dong road.

If you can’t grow coffee, it seems you can always grow cassava.

Overburdened trucks like these, labouring up the hills, were often my only company on these empty roads. I decided a collision would be a complicated affair:

“What’s cassava?”, people might ask, ‘Is it like taro?’, ‘what about manioc?’

I gave them a wide berth.

Buon Ma Tout had been the last major civilisation I’d see for a while – towns of any size were now getting sparse and I was heading for a few days that I’d have to plan for carefully in terms of supplies and stopping points as I headed away from the plantations and toward some sections of virgin forest.

Before I got to that point though, the heavens opened, and it began to get very wet. Young children, sometimes two or three of them, squeezed under their parents’ ponchos, clinging on tightly, on the backs of passing motorbikes; smoke from wood-fire kitchens gave an earthy scent to the air and a low mist hung in the valleys.

I carried on, pausing briefly for a bathroom break. A woman pulled over on her scooter, unnecessarily close (I felt!) to the spot I’d picked, making it a bit awkward. It turned out she was just worried to see me cycling in the rain without the usual monster poncho and produced a spare of her own to gift me!

So nice! But also – way too hot, I had to say no. ‘Crazy foreigner’, I’m sure she thought.

I was a bit damp though so was happy when a small rural shop appeared, and called in for some Milo and biscuits

‘Forget the Milo!’, the lady said – ‘you need a poncho!’ (…I’ve just been through this..), ‘besides, it’s freezing – don’t you want some noodles?’, well, I guess that’d be pretty nice, I thought.

As the lady prepared a big pack of instant noodles, I looked around me: cooking oil, petrol, coffee, biscuits – the fuel of the Central Highlands. We got chatting with our phones. The tragic story of the Vietnamese lorry deaths in Essex was still unfolding. We speculated on that for a while, both agreeing it was very sad and hoping the investigation would go well beyond the driver.

The lady, whose name was Mai, was still worried about how wet I was. ‘You need to dry your clothes’, then she typed something into her phone: ‘Just stay here, in the shop. You can ride your bike tomorrow when the rain has stopped’.

I’ve always been fascinated by Asian grocery stores and perusing the overstocked, cramped aisles of the Vietnamese and Chinese shops in Deptford, Peckham and Lewisham remains a favourite pastime. Whole lives are played out in these places; homework, meals, computer games, the ancestral shrine, business, entertaining, with no discernible distinction between work and leisure. To be invited in to stay in one of these shops – a ‘real’ one in Vietnam! – this (for me), was really something. But it was only 2pm in the afternoon. What was I going to do with Mai and her husband until the evening?

Not much it turned out, and that was perfect! Mai put my clothes to dry and set me up a little bed behind a shelf of cooking oil. I hung out here reading and messing about on my phone, under the gaze of Ho Chi Minh, whose portrait hung on the wall, as the rain got worse and worse, putting off all but the most determined customers, who had to venture into the family space to get Mai’s attention.

Her husband, Tien, was apparently a dedicated Arsenal (and Barcelona) fan. I asked him when the shop closed: ‘I close it and open it whenever I feel like it’, he laughed, ‘it’s my shop!’.

The rain sounded worse still and Mai prepared a delicious meal which we ate together on a cosy mat in front of the TV. The weather forecast caught my attention – a meaty looking typhoon (Tropical Storm Matmo) looked like it was about to slam right into us. ‘Is that heading here…?’, I asked, ‘Yes, tonight’, they said, ‘a big storm!’. (Sheesh!)

A big storm it was, sounding much worse due to the corrugated iron roof, which at one point I worried might blow right off!

By the morning though it had weakened and moved on, my clothes were dry and it was time for me to get going too.

The neighbour’s papaya tree had blown over and when I saw some of the damage on the roads, I was even more grateful for this lovely couple’s kindness, they’d taken me in without question and wouldn’t accept any money for the things I’d had from their shop.

‘Typical Vietnam’, I smiled, thinking back, ‘typical Vietnam!’