Tragedy befell my phone yesterday during a nav check at the end of a farm track. My old iPhone 4S landed face first on jagged concrete and smashed to smithereens. I'm amazed the phone still works at all with little shards of glass chipping off with every swipe across the face. Adam gave me a bit of gentle ribbing - he knows how lost I feel without being able to double-check his routing. But during one of our breaks, he was also researching options for repair or replacement at our destination city for the day, Hà Tînh. The old iPhone came along because it was expendable, though one never actually expects for the worst to happen and I felt unmoored without a phone.
Once we reached Hà Tînh, some lovely young women at the Viettel store across from our hotel got me set up with a new Vivo phone. I'm slowly coming to grips with Android but enjoying having a larger screen again. And I'll be delighted when I can crosscheck Adam's proposed tracks through the rice paddies as we travel onward to Phong Nha today. The phone came with a new external battery pack, and very incongruously, a six pack of Budweiser. So our intake of Bia Ha Noi has been briefly interrupted by the consumption of Budweiser. My phone also has a flash rose gold protective case, but when language is a serious impediment and the friendly young women think rose gold is the appropriate choice, you roll with it and save your battles for insisting that they show you the English configuration switch.
We have made it into the coastal flat lands now. The scenery is less enthralling but opportunities abound to stay off the main highways as the fields are bisected by hundreds of tracks of varying degrees of robustness. There are signs everywhere of the main roads being upgraded and one imagines that in a decade this country might be less appealing to visit by motorcycle. By small motorcycle anyhow; the big GS touring bikes will have their day when highways become the default way of getting anywhere. I would by no means inhibit development in the country but I will delight in being here at this time when it is possible to stay off the main truck routes and explore the rural areas up close.
The only serious scraps we've been in over pricing have been at the fuel pumps. For reference, the Vietnamese Dong is currently sitting about 20,000 VND to $1 USD. It takes some getting used to all the extra zeroes on the money and things are generally quite cheap by our standards, although not always consistently so. We've spent anywhere from $1.25 to $8 on a couple of coffees. But for some reason about half of the gas station attendants that we've encountered have tried to make us pay double what the pump reads (for two bikes even though we filled off a single pump) or pocketed extra cash as we've tried to make sense of the large bills. Sure, we've paid too much for a couple of bottles of water but too much ($2 for 3 litres) is still really reasonable in our estimation. The rudeness and duplicity of the gas jockeys has been really frustrating and beyond any other degree of price negotiating we've experienced.
While on the road yesterday we encountered our first example of a brutalist monument at Truong Bon, marking the north end of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Associating as I do the hammer and sickle iconography with cold war films from the 1980s, or satirical efforts produced after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I find the straight-faced use of the Communist imagery to be strange, and just slightly unsettling.
