Adam has tweaked his back. Apparently, he bent down funny to buckle his boot with the result that he is now hobbling around like a man twice his age. I've never seen him this way, and though I chuckle a little at he who likes to gently rib me about my own fitness levels, I am also sympathetic. The bike seats are only marginally comfortable for a full day of riding and can't be helping his recovery any. The Advil supply is again being plundered, this time to ease a non-flu related ache. I am mostly back to my old self post-influenza save for a lingering cough that I try to suppress, especially while our helmet radios are on.
We had a lovely twisty ride out of Phong Nha yesterday, through some of the most uninhabited areas of Vietnam that we've yet encountered. We even lost cellphone service for awhile, so far were we from human settlement. By common agreement, Adam and I have decided to ride the western Ho Chi Minh trail (the singular road that is so designated today), keeping inland and enjoying the hill country. We had some bike maintenance to attend to yesterday however, so we ducked eastward to the coastal city of Dong Hoi.
As part of out motorcycle rental agreement, we are required to pay for an oil change at a licensed Honda dealer every 1,000 kilometres. This service interval is as spelled out in the owner's manual and the strict adherence to it by the rental agency gives us some degree of confidence about the bikes we're driving. As motorbikes are the ubiquitous form of transportation in this country, Honda dealers are easily found in every city but the inland hills are dotted only with small rural towns so we had to find a larger urban centre.
The oil changes were effected in a trice, out on the sidewalk where we'd pulled in, so I was under pressure to quickly select our hotel for the evening. I opted for a seaside resort hotel that was a very reasonable $23 USD for the night. And though our room was very comfortable, it was a bit strange having the hotel to ourselves. Apparently the (predominantly Russian) tourists don't arrive for another month and a bit so the seaside restuarants and cafés are all shuttered for maintenance and refurbishment. Unfortunately, being some ways out of town, we had to ride our bikes back in for our evening meal, a middling banh mi.
Until this evening, the food has thusfar been a bit of a disappointment though this may have as much to do with the limitations of our use of Google Translate when ordering, as it has had to do with the food itself. We have had some reasonable bowls of breakfast pho but some less delightful treats as well, including lukewarm hot dogs with sandwich bread and tang as one notable breakfast offering. The meal this evening was a delicious affair of seafood and fried veggies with garlic. Maybe we just need to practice our ordering skills more.
I have also at long last discovered the delights of coffee, in iced form. This treat, enriched with copious quantities of sweeteened condensed milk, arrived instead of tea after some arm-waving and terrible mis-pronunciation at a roadside coffee stall in the middle of nowhere. I haven't yet found its equal, but I shall continue searching.
Today's ride took us up into a cloud bank and some gentle rain for the first time on the trip. Most of the drive was through areas of subsistence farming. We judge the prosperity of areas based on the mode of transportation used by students heading home for lunch. In many areas, the school kids are on e-bikes and bicycles, but today most of the kids were on foot with only a few having bicycles to speed their way home. Goats are also terribly popular in these parts, adding a new hazard to the roads as they have free run like their brethren of cattle, dogs, and chickens.
We had expected the run down to Khe Sanh to take longer than it did. The museum there is short on interpretation and long on bias. The photos were interesting, but one could gain no real sense of the scope of the US firebase that once occupied the spot. There are a couple of helicopters, a few tanks, and a mouldering C130 scattered about the museum grounds but most distracting were our two pursuers around the site, shaking trays of Armed Forces paraphernalia and entreating us to buy the cap badges and zippo lighters purportedly dug up at the site. I can't blame a person for trying to earn a living, but we had no interest in buying and simply wanted to better understand the history of the area.
