Day 15 22nd November My Tho to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) 94Km

Day 15 22nd November My Tho to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) 94Km



So here we are the - last day of cycling on the Bangkok to Saigon Challenge. Looking back it has been a trip with highs and lows, but now is not the time to reflect. As I found on the day I crossed from Cambodia to Vietnam a lot can go wrong very quickly. For one thing we had to decide whether we were going to cycle into the city or not, a city known for its masses of motorbikes swarming around the streets. and of course we still had 94Km/60 miles to cover.



The weather looked good for cycling - slightly overcast, so warm but not scorching, we did not skimp with the sunscreen though. Of course I took a few pictures first thing in the morning. I found getting up at around 5.30am quite easy, for me it provided a relaxing start to the day which was due to kick off with a cycling start of 7am. Here you can see the new bridge, virtually complete, seen from my hotel balcony.

One of the idiosyncrasies of this hotel was that Chris and I were given two breakfast coupons each, we were single occupants of double rooms, whilst Jim and Mary who shared a room got one coupon each. (Breakfast coupons seem to be a feature of hotels in AsiaPac, other hotels just log your breakfast against your room number). Each coupon allowed the selection of one food selection and one drink selection. So for me I had pork and noodle soup plus bread and jam, along with coffee and juice. All washed down with a malaria tablet.

Our plan was to start at 7am and we expected to get into the city before lunchtime, assuming that there were no prolonged stops. We also had to decide whether to cycle the final 10km or not. In fact I had already decided to do it, I have cycled in Phnom Penh and London so imagined it might be a mix of the two. Of course I could always bail out if it looked really bad.

Here are Jim and Mary in front of the hotel. The rental bikes are lined up whilst Jim brings his Titanium MTB out himself. Mary had stopped wearing her helmet for some time, Cycling in this heat the helmets take quite a battering, my helmet padding was starting to disintegrate, not critical to its safety, but potentially uncomfortable. Actually if I was being truthful I quickly forgot I was wearing the helmet and several times when we were viewing the temples I continued wearing it whilst inside them without realising it. Of course I then took it off - wearing headgear is impolite in a religious building.

The plan for today was to follow the van out of the town with Tom in it. We would then switch to smaller tracks and Tom would find a local motorcyclist to carry him and some water where the van could not follow. His goal was to avoid, as much as possible, the main roads into the city.

Yesterday's ride was idyllic, the tracks they found through the villages made for great cycling - not fast but packed with things to see. Today we would be on slightly larger dirt roads, more like farm tracks. The weather was slightly overcast, but all things considered we had been very lucky during this Challenge. We had only one day with a few spots rain when cycling. The only time it had rained in the daylight was during the rest stop at Phnom Penh and then we used Tuk-Tuks to get around so it did not matter. Mind you it was warmer here in general than the previous few days so if the sun did make it through it would be a scorcher, so we did not skimp on the sunscreen.

Fairly soon our road diverged from the main road - we took a ferry and Tom looked for a suitable motorcyclist. One of the advantages of taking a small ferry is that it acts as a natural barrier to the heavier vehicles. We still found ourselves cycling on wide tarmac at this point though.

I am still not sure why we saw so many duck farms, yet were not offered duck during any of our overnight stays? Here the farms looked bigger and more prosperous, they were organised rather than being tacked onto the edges of the lakes.

As we progressed we came across a rice harvest in the fields, Chis was a little cross that we did not stop for longer and cycle down the tracks to get some more "interesting!" photographs of the harvest (perhaps he had seen a young lady he wanted to flirt with :-)). Here my impression was that this was a more industrious operation. They were not unfriendly but did not stop to wave and smile, they had work to do.

To distract Chris I got him to cycle over a nearby bridge. This was not actually the route we took, but it was typical of many wooden bridges we had crossed., as you can see there were no railings. As an old hand at this he did not hesitate on the bridge. It certainly looked a lot more solid than some of the bridges in Cambodia.

We quickly came across another ferry. After a short wait we all moved on, by now we were getting better and turning our bicycles around on the deck when the ferries only had one ramp to be ready for fhe mass exit at the other end. It was quite a wide river with houses on each side. You can see vegetation floating in it - these make for interesting biological studies and can consist of up to 30 species of plant. The main problem for the locals is ensuring that they do not clog up the ferry ways.

Almost as soon as we got off the ferry we stopped to take pictures of rice paper drying by the side of the road. I had to be careful that my sweat did not drop onto the paper. It is used to make wontons and spring rolls apparently.

By now the traffic had reduced significantly, but my "parking" by the road side left something to be desired and scooter riders are very happy to beep at cyclists whom they consider to be an inferior species. Next time I'll bring my HumVee (no I don't have one really). The pace of life here seemed just slightly slower than when we were nearer the town instead of a field full of people, here two work away.

We also saw an angler in one of the small lakes by the side of the road, he was patiently casting his lure out, but did not appear to be catching anything. Although in my limited experience of cycling past anglers in the Fens of England that is the same the world over. In the foreground are more mats of rice paper drying. Perhaps that is what he was waiting for. One thing I did note was that there were far more electricity cables around, I had to work quite hard to avoid them in this photograph.

As we cycled on we came to what would be the last ferry journey of the whole trip. A new bridge was being built by the side so perhaps the days were numbered for the ferry, progress is inexorable. Although the boat did travel between three points so perhaps it would continue to eke out a living.

A family seemed to "live" on the boat. The father steered, the mother collected the money, Granny cooked the food whilst this little lad wandered around looking at the passengers. Today he certainly had a strange bunch of sweaty western cyclists to look at. Mind you we do not get whole groups of "watchers" here in Viet Nam, they are much more sophisticated watchers of the world.

Speaking of Granny here she is busy preparing a meal. One thing I am reminded of as I look at the picture is that this crouching position was very common to see in Viet Nam as people waited by the roadside, men and women alike. It is not a position I would find relaxing, in fact I have just tried to sit like that and find it pulls on my dodgy left knee.

Here is a silhouette of the mother after completing her rounds collecting the fare. She walked around with a wodge of money, neatly organised into various denominations, each time she took a fare she would put the new money into the right place and deftly seek out the change. Generally most of the transactions use paper money, there are some coins though. You can get by with $ in the cities and large towns, since Tom handled the fares I do not know whether $ would have been usable here.

One thing that we did see on our travels were graves in the fields. Rather than see cemeteries there would be small groups of stone sarcophagi in the fields. (Stone coffins, which look rather like monuments.) The Vietnamese seem to have fuse several influences into their Buddhist observances and indeed the the positioning of the memorial is also important (as in Chinese feng shui).

One aspect of out travels that never failed to fascinate me was the availability of "exotic" fruit on the roadside stalls. I know it is obvious that the fruit stalls would sell the indigenous fruits, but it drove home that we were in a different climate. The box to the left contains eggs, although in this case not fertilised ones that were common in both Cambodia and Viet Nam, for some reason none of us got around to trying them.

Although the route did not manage to travel quite the same small concrete village roads as the day before we did find ourselves on some dirt tracks. By now the sun had burnt the cloud cover away and we found ourselves sweating profusely and trying to drink loads of water to ensure we did not have dehydration problems. After a while it becomes quite difficult to drink water - it becomes bland - I guess at this point I would have had around 4 litres over 2 hours. Jim was suffering the most from the heat and would wring out his gloves from time to time. During this stop he tried to buy some Pepsi just to make it easier to take on board more fluids. They would either sell him a case of 24 cans, or a small bottle, after quite a lot of haggling he bought a small bottle and popped it into the cooler on the back of the motor cycle. When he drank it it seemed to last a couple of gulps before it had gone.

One trick we did use was to eat salted peanuts, this helped to replenish some of the salts we were losing in our sweat and also made us feel thirsty and so made it easier to drink yet more water. I also ate bananas to help replenish the lost potassium salts. None of us actually had any dehydration problems although we almost never needed to stop during a ride to "spend a penny" to use an old-fashioned English colloquialism (have a wee - to use another). In this case it would have been spend a dong I suppose. Normal kidney services did not re-start until after we stopped cycling in the sun on most days.

Very soon we reached the main road that heralded the last 10Km into Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) at this point Jim had decided that he was losing too much fluid to be comfortable and decided that discretion was the better part of valour and took to the van. The rest of us carried on cycling, in retrospect I am sure it was longer that 10Km. Tom got back onto a bicycle to lead us the last few kilometres of the way, unfortunately he was unable to cycle very quickly so perhaps it just seemed longer.

As we cycled the density of the traffic got higher and higher, both cars, trucks and motorcycles. It felt like what I imagined being a fish in a school of fish was like. You had to respond to the other fish, sorry other road-users around you. This meant using road-positioning that was never in my copy of the Highway Code (A manual published by the UK government for UK road users.) I also found it hard to adapt to Tom's slow pace, there are times when you need speed to mix it with such busy traffic.

Whenever I asked Tom how much further instead of giving a distance he would quote a time, he was always optimistic though. At one point the traffic was swarming up a bridge. There were two lanes in either direction and a central divide. On our side some slow-moving cycle traffic was effectively blocking one lane. The traffic turned out to be a very heavily laden bicycle that was being walked up the incline of the bridge and also a Cyclo being pushed. Cyclos are a kind of tricycle with a two person seat at the front with the cyclist at the back. It must be a tough way to earn a living especially when they are so heavy that the driver (cyclist) has to push an empty one up even a small hill.

After what seemed like ages we found ourselves cycling along a road with roadworks in the middle. Each time we cleared the roadworks you ran the risk of motorcycles joining from the right running into you. Fortunately nothing untoward happened and we found ourselves in front of our hotel.

Instead of stopping to savour our arrival and take pictures we seemed to go into a frenzied mode of unloading the van and removing all of our own bits and pieces from the bicycles. It was a bit of an anti-climax. It actually took a lot of cajoling to get everyone to stop for the photograph, JIm is hiding because he did not have his B2S Challenge top on, although he was wearing his helmet, perhaps he felt it was safer wearing it for the van ride into the centre.

Just to prove my mascot also made it here is Custard in Saigon. Chris and I enjoyed a celebratory Saigon cold beer.

That was the end of the cycle ride, however I did get the opportunity to meet both the founder of the Saigon Children's Charity and the current director which I will cover in my next entry.

I will also try and summarise what this journey meant for me after some time for reflection.

For those that are interested after Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) I will fly up to spend some time with my brother and his wife in Ha Noi (including a cruise on Halong Bay) - so more pictures will feature in the blog - no thanks to one Taxi driver!!!

For the record though - according to my GPS system, which I think performed well, the statistics are:

Total distance 1127Km
Time in the saddle 56 hours 22 minutes
Calories burnt 38,000 ( an over-estimate I think)
Height climbed 9,000 metres in total (again an over-estimate I think).
Countries 3
Punctures 1 (Chris)
Funds raised £5,000 and counting.

Would I do something like this again - in a heartbeat - but not on a rental bike :-)