March 23, 2016
Chapter 9
Days 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
Problems on the road.
Lilyana’s bike had some issues with the gears. We started early our day and rode 30km to go to the city Thanh Hoa where we were told the address of a good bicycle shop. They fixed the gears and we were in a hurry to go further with our plan. Just as we went out of the city I had a flat tire. Ok, please don’t laugh, but yes, none of us actually knows well (I underline well!) how to take off the rare wheel. We asked google, read some advice and we managed to remove it. We changed the inner tube and as we started pumping it we realised that the pump we brought with us didn’t work. It’s an old pump from Holland, so I trusted it is in good state. But it was damaged and pumping was not possible at all. After a while of vain efforts a van with two guys stopped and offered us help. They took my wheel and tires, went to the village, put some air in and came back. And then for the big problem: we couldn’t fix the wheel back at the bicycle. We tried, the boys tried, more people stopped to help, they tried... and none of us succeeded. We watched youtube videos on the side of the road, followed step by step guides, and though we were doing exactly as shown, there was still a problem. At the end, I left Lilyana waiting there, on the road, while the guys took me back to the bicycle shop in town. There was something stuck and it took a while for the bike mechanics to take it out and put the wheel back.
All these problems took us more than 3 hours from our day. Desperately I was looking at the clock and thinking how little we had cycled. We had the rest of the afternoon and tried to catch up with the program.
It was a difficult noisy bad route, with heavy trucks riding both sides with great speed, houses all along the way. And like that we rode for 50km until the sun started setting down. At the end of the afternoon, we switched to a different road, less busy and noisy. And soon after we reached a beautiful big lake and area with just a few houses. We found a good place to sleep by the side of the lake and our day with problems finished well after all. As I got off the bike I felt like a cowboy getting off his horse after a long day riding in the Wild West. Thick cover of dust lied on my clothes, my face, inside my ears and eyes.
The day after the big odyssey in the mountain I decided that I needed to rethink my plan, carefully study the road ahead and approach the difficulties with a new strategy. It is not over until it’s over. We took the following day off; it was much needed. What I hadn’t seen in the night when I fell into the hole was that the hooks of both my side panniers were broken. I bought some elastic ropes to attach the panniers to the bike in a different way, and I was lucky to find a bicycle shop where they can replace my inner tube and tire with new ones. Thus, the bike was set again.
We started our 17th day and all the other days afterwards getting up at 4 a.m., getting dressed and leaving as quickly as possible. We needed to make the most of our day and kilometers before 9 a.m. Cycling after that was already very arduous and it required many stops to cool off. The 17th day was possibly the most physically demanding of all our rides so far. 110 km steep mountain road, continuous ascent with a total gain of 1150 m elevation. The temperature was reaching 39 degrees Celsius. The humidity from the previous day however has changed and that was something we needed to adapt again. From that day on we cycled in draught. I breathed heavily conquering that mountain, my mouth dried out completely, my lips and skin became crisp as the arid soil everywhere around. The road was not scenic and didn’t offer any distraction or stimulation to my mind. Little did I know that we were entering the most desolated area I have seen in Vietnam.
For 4 days we’ve cycled through a thouroughly deforested area, the vastest territory I have ever seen in my life. Over 400 km of our road presented nothing but bare hills, fires, black trunks of trees remaining as a grim memorial of what it must have been a marvelous tropical forest. My mind couldn’t grasp it. I kept on cycling going up and down the hills and hoping that behind that hill I would see something green. Eventually I did. Devastating rubber plantations...
I am not an expert and I don’t mean to educate through this blog. Allow me, however, to share my insights and I beg you, if you don’t know about it, read and look for more information on the topic.
Rubber is one of the so called ‘cash crops’. For decades already, it’s been a growing problem all around South-East Asia. Government policies in China, Cambodia, Laos, perhaps in Vietnam as well, have not only allowed but in some cases offered incentives and subsidised large scale cultivation of this monoculture. Typically, the regions where this crop is grown are some of the most disadvantaged territories in the countries. Poor farmers, many of them from ethnic minority groups, plant rubber on their homesteads as a way to escape poverty. In the mean time, rubber price has soared to meet the rising global demand and farmers can sometimes earn double, triple of what they would if they grow rice. For some people rubber has become the magic formula of getting rich. The consequences nevertheless are catastrophic. Within years only, vast regions with some of the highest biodiversity in the world have been devastated, the forest completely slashed, the regions’ water systems desiccated, the water contaminated by the fertilizers and pesticides running off into the rivers. I laugh at the idea of seeing ANY living creature there, besides occasional humans. Even the loud tropical cicadas have left this dry dust bowl and have gone on looking for a better home.
I felt hollow as the depressive landscape surrounding me. All the difficulties of cycling and even bearing the heat have become minor issues. Up until that moment, it was my mind that kept motivating my body to go on. Of course I was tired! But that’s the game I was interested in playing. Day after day I was coming up with new ideas how to cope with challenges and hardships. At that moment though, my mind refused to find anything stimulating and worth the efforts. The only thought I had was to get the hell out of there.
Day 18, 19 and 20th, we went out of the mountains and into more populated area again. For three days the road appeared to me as one continuous village, you never know when you go out and in again into the next one. One never-ending succession of houses. One constant flow of garbage.
This is the most polluted and filthy place I have ever been in the world. It is one big territory of landfill. In front of each house, around it, everywhere, there was garbage. Under the sun and high temperatures, everything rotted. An abhorrent view and smell. When the sun went down, much of that trash was set on fire, hundreds of fires and thick black smoke embraced the villages. Meanwhile, I was the idiot cycling those hills and fighting for breath.
In the evening in the hotel, I felt this inexplicable rage I’ve seen in children only: a need to scream and cry at the same time. I wanted to vomit every breath I took and wash away all the impressions from these last 4 days.
(Not many photos as a testimony, because all I wanted was to move on to a better place)