Bridges, bridges and yet more bridges over the mighty Mekong and it’s canal works. Dane does a runner. Chased by a sumo gargoyle on a scooter. Van Trang Garden 2 Hotel to Golden Hotel
After the distress of politely drinking warm lager with the friendly wedding party guys until very late, In the morning it was hide in my room till they’ve all gone to the wedding party. Lest I get dragged there in my cycling finery.
Lovely lotus beds and green fields behind the hotel, a nice change from plastic bags and building works. Nobody on reception so I threw the room card onto reception and set off on the ring road under the gigantic trunkroad bridge structures and stopped at the first banh my stall, ordered two of the very fatty pork belly subs when a total lunatic polled up gabbling on.
After much pantomiming I got the impression that something was amiss at the hotel. Sumo kept so close on the way there I kicked her front wheel several times and told her to back off. I paid the hotel bill and set off again, jettisoning the banh mys en route knowing that a dog or two would relish the same. I’d been to the reception several times as their photograph of my passport had failed and thought I’d paid already. Easy mistake to make.
Thus, every person who stays at a hotel must show id and no doubt the local plods examine all this detail in great depth. A good training ground for the mind police in notsobonny iliberal Scotland with its nasty new Online Hate Crime Law about to lock up every citizen and presumably the plods themselves too up for disagreeing with their neighbour or with the leftwing twaddle being pedalled in the west.
VN might be a commie state but they know what men and women are and perhaps, more importantly, what they are not.
After escaping the city, the traffic was still not pleasant so I upset Ridewithgps once more and went off piste into the lanes. This would slow me down and add to the mileage but the lure of quiet green countryside vs airhorns won me over. OSMAnd once more providing the detailed mapping.
More bridges today than I have probably crossed in my life thus far. Big ones and smaller steeper ones but in all cases, where the road changes direction the road sections’ joints each has a bone jarring junction. My enormous Blackview phone with its 62 days standby coped admirably as did it’s 7 quid phone holder.
I think the water reeds drying by the road are used to make lengths of plaited ropes which in turn are joined to make baskets. Everywhere the folk are making useful objects of the materials to hand and which grow so abundantly on the flood plains.
More grass-mat making using Spinning Jennies was present once again. Dried, split grass/reeds are immensely strong but when green they break easily.
A typical village by a tributary / canal of the Mekong, absolutely buzzing with insects.
The paddy fields here are vast compared to the patchworks of tiny fields in the north. Fruit grows everywhere and there were small mountains of Jackfruits piled up waiting to be collected.
The maps dont indicate the size of the canals, they are navigable by quite large boats, mostly ferrying sand and rice one heading for the huge road building constructions everywhere and the other to the mills to remove the rice husks (used for fuel) to leave the rice white and polished. No bran is bad for you.
A Japanese diving colleague explained that the very finest Rice wine uses only the inside of the rice grains, sometimes as much as 50% of the rice is polished away, the more polishing the more expensive the resultant wine.
The locals live on the river on what appear to be very precarious stilt houses – handy for plumbing and access to the river that employs so many directly and indirectly (irrigation for farming)
As I’ve filmed before there are many Swallows flying about and it was lovely to see how useful solar street lighting has become home to so many.
Vietnam traffic signs have almost no meaning at all as they are simply ignored. God help you if you think a zebra crossing is anything other than an ambush zone. There is almost no provision for pedestrians anywhere.
A busy ferry at the end of another extremely hot day saw me into Long Xuyen for the night.
