Hello, hello, HELLO!!!

I have been cycling for 6 consecutive days from Hai Phong to Hue and have covered a total of 527 miles. It seems the past week has consisted of waking up, getting on the bike, cycling for 30-40 miles before stopping for lunch and then another 30-40 miles before finding a suitable 'nha nghi' - hotel to stop at for the night, showering, finding dinner and going through the trauma of trying to communicate what we would like to eat, and bed. Showering is interesting over here - there is no concept of an actual shower or a shower curtain, the bathroom is your shower, so it's more like a wet room. This means that everything gets wet and I think if the odds are against me, and it is my time to go, then I think it will be slipping over in the bathroom, and not on the crazy roads here! In one of my last posts, I wrote that hotels were pretty easy to find, but they seemed to dry up along some of the Highway 1 road we have been traveling along and there were a few times when it was looking a little sketchy and the sun was coming down (about 5.30pm, so quite early), but we were saved at the last minute, and it is amazing how the worry of not finding somewhere to stay disappears like weight off your shoulders. 

The landscape has changed from towns and paddy fields to large open and beautiful countryside. I have also seen my first mountain, crossed over more canals and rivers and seen glimpses of deserted white sandy beaches. We have also cycled through affluent towns, government towns and seen poor farming villages. As a result of the latter, not only do I need to look out for scooters, cars and trucks etc, I also need to negotiate the road with chickens, cows and buffalo, which is a challenge as cyclists are not as agile and quick moving as the scooters who easily scoot around them. 

Mount Hoang Son in the distance at the end of a very long open and hot road!

It seems also there are differences in how the women dress outside of Hanoi. Where the girls wore next to nothing in Hanoi, in the country they wear next to nothing but then cover their bare skin with various other clothes. Most of them wear big jackets with crazy designs of them that cover their whole heads (under or over their helmets), or large floppy hats under their helmets, very skinny trousers (sometimes under skirts) and socks in their open toed high heels, gloves, a huge face mask and big sunglasses. I wonder whether they may just be better off wearing the one-item burka, rather than lots of small items that they then take off when they get indoors. At first I thought the face mask was worn so to not breathe in the thick black smog that the trucks pump out. But it is because they don't want to get tanned by the sun. This only struck me when I saw a huge billboard advert in the middle of a paddy field for 'skin-whitening lotion.' Sadly, like in India, the people here think that the fairer skinned you are, the more successful, rich and prettier you will become. This saddens me as I wish they would just realise they are beautiful the colour they are. It also puzzles me how our Western societies want exactly the opposite and we seem to spend thousands on fake tans and beach holidays to 'top up your tan' to get that healthy glow. 

A number of separate groups of women along the way have found great pleasure in my height. I have had women stand next to me to compare their height to mine and they have all pointed and quite forwarded laughed at me for being taller than them. I'm not really sure how to take it. In my society, being 5 foot 7 is average for a woman, over here I tower over 90% of them by a whole head. I would never dare laugh at someone for being different at home or anywhere. It just shows how different our morals are, I guess. 

My patience is wearing thin on the excruciatingly loud horns that continue to be blown right down my cochlea, which makes my brain rattle in my skull. I may as a result be partially deaf in my left ear by the end of this trip and I am seriously considering getting it checked out when I return. Whilst happily cycling along the hard shoulder enjoying a rare occasion when there were no vehicles around, the silence was brutally wrecked by a bus that enjoyed blowing its horn at me consistently, to which I lost it slightly and explicitly stuck my middle finger at the driver. I am not sure what such unpleasant Vietnamese sign language is, and I have no idea if they understand the finger, but either way they stopped beeping and my poor frontal lobes took a while to settle again. 

We have also received approximately 3692 'Hellos' from random people on the side of the roads and drivers. Such a high number you may think, but this may be because the average number of 'hellos' per child is three, but have been as many as 7. At first, it was a wonderful reception, but now (and I do feel mean saying this) it is a chore to have to say hello to 70% of the people you pass. 'Ha-low, hell-o, HA-LOOWWW!' they shout, quite aggressively at times! They seem to be quite attention seeking and sometimes they come from places when I didn't even know anyone was there. 

Now in Hue where we will rest for a couple of days, catch up on personal admin and enjoy being a normal tourist for a bit, but it has felt very satisfying to know I have cycled here and not just stepped off a bus.