Day 18 - I Want to Ride My Bicycle (Not Really)

We got up pretty early the next morning to go down for the bicycle tour. We got down to the bar where Steve, our British tour guide, got his Vietnamese wife to make us some breakfast. She was a really good cook, and even though it just was essentially toast with jam it was fantastic. Most of the ex-pats who hung around the bar seemed to have Vietnamese wives, though it felt a little weird to press about this. We were joined by an Irish guy also named Steve. Ken made quite a row by commenting that since he was from Belfast he wasn't really Irish, though Irish Steve was very funny and good matured about it. They day didn't exactly start auspiciously as when we left the bar I got my jeans stuck in the gears of my bike and ripped a six or seven inch tear along one end from near the bottom to about my knee. For the rest of the day I had to stuff what was left of my jeans into my socks so it wouldn't catch again. I was mostly annoyed because it's hard for me to find cloths in Asia since I'm so much bigger than all the locals. We biked to the center of town than got on a ferry to another island.

The ferry was a little boat with two levels created by essentially putting a tarp over part of the boat. These little ferrys seemed to be everywhere and they could fit an amazing amount of stuff unto them. Our boat had quite a few motos on it, which also meant it had a number of people wearing moto helmets. People in Vietnam never seem to take off their helmets even if they don't plan on going back to their bike for hours. British Steven pointed out one guy on the boat with a Ho Chi Minh style haircut, " And you thought he was dead," Steve added. We got off the boat and continued bicycling until we came to this place where they made wood carvings. British Steve told us how there were often gaps at the bottom of doors so that when it flooded the water could just wash in and out without getting stuck inside. After that we really started biking. It wasn't that it was uphill that made it hard, the whole thing was pretty flat, but it wasn't exactly on paved roads either which made the going more difficult. In the end it was just too tough for me. I could only barley do it by giving everything I had. If people waved at me I didn't have the strength to wave back at them. I was just miserable most of the time since I was just dead tired the whole way. Ken and Dave liked it a lot more, and I may have too had it been a little easier.

We came pretty soon to a bunch of rice fields with dirt paths between them. The trick was that a lot of the paths were muddy, and if you hit a deep patch of mud you'd come to a sudden stop. I navigated the first few OK, but then on one I hit a patch of deep mud and went down right into the mud so that I was pretty good and covered. For the next few hours until it dried and some came off every person we passed pointed and laughed at me and people passing us would slow down to take a good look at my mud covered backside. After some more ridding we came to a restaurant where we had some more food along with some beer and rice wine. I think if I could do it over I'd have skipped the drinking since it was tough enough already without drinking all this stuff. Irish Steve was right in his element telling long stories that ran off into no where and jokes that weren't all that funny. Irish Steve somehow managed to lose a cup over the edge of this restaurant into the river. And Ken for some reason decided to go in after it. He striped down to his bathing suit and climbed over the side of the restaurant trying to reach the cup without going in. Eventually he fell completely over into the water, managing to retrieve the cup but he had to swim all the way around to get back out of the river.

After that we biked for quite a way somehow managing to lose Irish Steve who had a habit of biking off ahead of everyone. We passed a Buddhist cemetery, but didn't really stop, and some water buffalo wallowing in the mud. They looked like they were having a good time, but the mud was impassible as Ken discovered almost getting stuck in it trying to take a picture. After that I had to navigate my bike over a narrow bamboo bridge. This was tricky enough than people started coming up in the other direction. I bumped into someone and would definitly have gone in the water if it wasn't for some railing type supports on the side. We rode for a while longer after the bridge until we came to a bar where Irish Steve had been hanging out. He had absolutely no money on him, but some of the locals had bought him some beer and he was just hanging out shooting the shit with some of them. He had also decided that the bike tour was a little much and was going to make his own way back despite not having any money for the ferry. We heard later that he had made his way back by chartering his own boat at about 15 times the coast of the ferry and having the guy who drove the boat accompany him to the bank.

We stopped there for a while while I tried to rest. I was so quite there that one of the Vietnamese people asked Dave if I spoke English. After that we rode for a while longer until some Vietnamese guys who were having a big late lunch invited us over for a drink. I was against too tired to say much but we learned that they might be in some sort of gang. One guy had three big cuts across his arm which he said were from a machete. The cuts were also remarkable in that all nine or so total inches seemed to be held together by about six stitches. We biked on for a while more and turned down toward a beech. At the beech I was so tired that I couldn't stand the idea of biking any more and walked my bike back a good distance toward the boat. Eventually everyone else caught up and I biked the rest of the distance to the boat. Back at the bar I was so tired I could barely move out of my chair. British Steve's wife made some really good barbecue, including potato salad, which I haven't had since I was back in the US. I think my favorite part of the day was back in the room where I took what must have been close to a two hour bath. My but was so soar that I could barley sit down for the next couple of days.