When a border really is a border

Eastward!

 The first day of Brookes twelfth palandromic year dawned with Vietnam calling from the east. After saying goodbye to sticky rice and the lady who had fed us the last two nights, we rolled slowly out of town, searching unsuccessfully for the Soviet surface to air missle marked on our map. A gentle wind cut across our shoulder from the north as the karst towers of the last several days consolidated into limestone cliffs, and dry rice fields turned to dry rice fields pockmarked with forty five year old craters. Here, the Ho Chi Minh trail had spilled over the border into Laos, drawing with it chains of half ton bombs dropped from B-52s in an unsuccessful effort to cut this mercurial path. For most of the day, little changed apart from the density of craters and an occasional yellow starred flag to suggest Vietnam lay over the horizon. Shortly after lunch, this would all change.

Bomb crater in the foreground

Turning left, the wind quickly gained intensity forcing pedestrians and bicycles to struggle to stay upright. The road, nearly Thai quality most of the day, rapidly degenerated into dusty broken pavement. At one point where the road had first turned uphill towards the border pass, a trucker had literally abandoned his container in the middle of the road. Deposited immediately before a rock strewn hairpin, we wondered if it could be a marker stating the road had been closed - until a Vietnamese truck barreled around the uphill corner before locking his brakes while skidding to a near halt, only to pull onto the shoulder and continue his journey in a cloud of dust. Satisfied that the road must go to the border, we climbed onward as the air grew frigid and grey clouds massed in front of us. By the time we reached the border station, temperatures had fallen twenty degrees, hovering in the mid 50s. 

The border crossing, actually very little traffic

Certainly the border guards were dressed for the weather, with thick wool hats and green felt uniforms, simply adorned with a tank insignia and the same bright yellow star as the Vietnamese flag. Like a scene from a James Bond movie, these communist villains played the part, examining our passports as if we had been caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Fortunately all the paperwork was in order, and they hustled us through another layer or two of security before allowing us to return to our bikes, where the passport control officer sat admiring our steeds. Having turned into a cheerful doppelganger of his formerly gruff self, he chatted with us for fifteen minutes about the bikes, taught us a few Vietnamese phrases and sent us on our way.

Ubiquitous communist and Vietnamese flags

The change in climate that we noted coming up the pass accelerated as we descended, with a light rain forcing us to don our raincoats for the first time. Rain appeared to be a regular occurrence on this side of the pass, since a thick coat of vines covered any piece of mountain not already occupied by a tree. Our path leveled out into a beautiful, well paved road rolling along the banks of a clear green river. All of this would have been very promising, but patches of mud throughout our first Vietnamese town indicated that the greenness of the landscape would come at a price. Fortunately, we didn't have to worry about that until tomorrow morning, so we settled into a slightly overpriced hotel room and had a adequate but disappointing bowl of instant noodle soup while sitting on calf high plastic stools. Instead of going back to our rooms, we snuck across the street to supplement the meager dinner by eating our fill of peanut brittle.

Much wetter than Laos this time of year

Unfortunately, the rain picked up overnight, but the year in Seattle had trained us to believe that 60 degree rain is actually warm. After tasty but overpriced egg bahn mi, we continued towards the coast with smiles on our faces despite the imperfect weather.

Don't ask me what she's doing. Several girls stopped us for pictures

The landscape gave us plenty to smile about. The karst towers we thought that we had left yesterday reappeared with even greater magnificence, giving the road a sense of mystery as the peaks hid in the fog. Since deciding to enter Vietnam, a route branch point loomed at Phong Nga, this afternoon's destination. Immediately to our south, disappearing into the fog shrouded mountains, lay the western branch of the Ho Chi Minh highway. Described by motorcyclists as the best highway in southeast Asia, from Laos this had seemed the obvious choice, but we had not anticipated a completely different climate once we crossed the border. With each 500m climb, the temperature would drop ten degrees and the rain would thicken dropping visibility to the point where we couldn't descend without braking. From Vietnam, the Western Ho Chi Minh highway did not look auspicious. 

Karst and rain, the story of our first day in Vietnam

The alternate two routes consisted of the eastern branch of the Ho Chi Minh highway which we had neglected to research in our enthusiasm for its western counterpart, and highway 1, whose negative cycling reviews had played a part in our initial decision to bypass Vietnam.

This is an old American airstrip converted into highway

Cows don't care if it's a runway or a highway

Our route remained undetermined the next morning as we watched Vietnamese coffee ooze through tiny personal filters while drizzle misted above the river outside our guesthouse. In fact, our route played on our minds for such a long time that breakfast became lunch, and we started to wonder if we had squandered the whole day. Eventually the rain receded sufficiently to show us that the rain in the mountains above us would be unlikely to recede for at least a week, so we struck a compromise of riding to a nearby cave before taking the Ho Chi Minh east.

Still raining immediately above us

Although we've been in a cave dense region for the last week, the area around Phong Na is world renowned for its spectacular caves. Within the last twenty years spelunkers discovered the world's largest cave nearby, and exclusive tours can be booked for several thousand dollars a person to explore the cave over a few days. Our ambitions were not that high, but we did set our sights on Paradise Cave about twenty kilometers away from town. The road hooked out of the valley directly into the pillars that we had ridden adjacent to yesterday before popping out on the western Ho Chi Minh highway. 

On the road to the cave

Although the ride to the cave was amazing, it could not compete with the cave itself. Entering the cave, you look down into a gargantuan entrance cavern - larger than most football stadiums - with well placed lights that illuminated while preserving the mystery of the dark recesses. Amazingly, we had the room almost to ourselves, having passed a group of twenty on the hike up. Incredible flowstones dripped down the walls, sharing space with stalactites as wide as sequoias. The entrance room narrowed to a small pass before stretching out before us in a curving hall that must have been three hundred yards long. We stopped several times to listen to water drip from the ceiling, and while we were never alone, there was enough silence to feel the potential for solitude -a rarity in commercial caves. The cave left such an impression that we checked to see if any overnight tours were available, but they were booked for the foreseeable future.

One of the larger passages

Giant columns

Looking from the floor of the first room, entrance is in the upper left

Flowstone and reflecting pool

The rain that had kindly stayed away on the ride to the cave decided to make it's presence felt, so by the time we returned to our temporary abode at the Sông Quê homestay we were drenched and our bikes were filthy. Not only that, we had spent so much extra time in the cave that we basically had no time to make progress towards the coast. As a result we happily booked another night with the wonderful family running the guesthouse. Before walking down the street for dinner, we shared freshly toasted squid jerky and barbequed banana with the our hosts, using Google translate to partially bridge the language gap.

Rain picking up

View from our guesthouse breakfast table

Location of Phong Na, we came almost straight east from Laos

The rain continued the following morning, but waiting for Vietnamese coffee probably cost us more time than waiting for a break in the clouds. Coffee in Vietnam is certainly a phenomenon, with per capita coffee shops exceeding Thailand. Every morning small groups of Vietnamese man gather at these small shops, sit on tiny plastic chairs around a tiny plastic table, talk and watch their coffee brew. The brewing itself is fairly unique, a combination of pour over and espresso. A metal teacup with small holes in the bottom is partially filled with ground beans, before being placed on top of a cup (usually glass), filled with hot water and gently pressed with a tiny metallic lid. People perform the ritual with varying degrees of seriousness, but the end result is always a inky black liquid, usually mixed with ample sugar or condensed milk. I liken it to turpentine, but I can see the appeal of the ritual. 

All the components of the Vietnamese coffee. This one had condensed milk on the bottom.

The whole process takes twenty minutes at least and can't be hurried. Even after hot green tea to wash it down, we were managed to get on the mud drenched road by nine with several bahn mi squirreled away in our bags for lunch. 

Turpentine