Farewell Laos, and good morning Vietnam!!!

Some 1000km finds us now on the Vietnamese coast, having left the 4000 islands region in Laos where my last blog finished. This has been 1000km of cycling, although I have to confess to us taking a taxi with bikes from Pakse to Savannhakhet in Laos- the excuse being that we had cycled this road in one direction and neither of us could face up to repeating it in the opposite direction!

This is us leaving the island of Don Khon in south Laos, via the French bridge. So called because the French couldn't find any way of getting past the rapids in the Mekong River, and built a railway line and this bridge to circumvent said rapids. It was a terrific place to get some sunset views in the evening, along with most other tourists it has to be said.

We cycled back north towards Pakse, but this time on the opposite side of the Mekong river, experiencing the worst of Laos roads - 30km of exceptionally bumpy red dirt track.

There is a certain leap of faith when you look at maps and think "there must be a ferry here", as to turn back and find another way would be to put it mildly rather poor for morale. This was a great example of make do and mend. The ferry was actually pulled along a rope by two very wiry, very old and very toothless Laos grannies. The guy driving onto the ferry was also having his own leap of faith, trusting his new car onto this device where you are not quite sure the rotting planks will take the weight of your bicycle.

The Mekong makes for some fantastic views, and I got up early to grab these shots of the sun rising. The bikes I posed, of course.

And then as if by magic, a Laotian fishing boat potters into view to complement the scene.

You can get a bit of an idea why the French failed at getting a boat up the Mekong. Bear in mind that this is the dry season!

From Savannhakhet it was a bit of a tedious ride east towards the border, with a couple of nights in Laos guesthouses. This is our first view of Vietnam, at the border crossing at Lao Bao. Land crossings are usually straightforward with the exception of being cyclists you are neither a car, nor a walking pedestrian.

The problem about this is where do you physically cycle through? Our solution is to get all the visa stuff done and then brazenly cycle through the car area - there is always someone who will check your passport. In the case of Vietnam there were two official, who scrutinised our passports. One was obviously perplexed by my relatively new beardy look - the passport photo being clean shaven. Then into Vietnam, and the land of millions of mopeds!

We have become fairly used to the chaos of the roads in Thailand and Laos: but in Vietnam it is the sheer numbers that mean you have to be constantly alert. The essential rule appears to be give way to anything coming from your left or right. We are constantly amazed that a moped rider joining from a road on the right will not look onto the main road to see what might be in his way! However, it does seem to work- you know how you walk diagonally across a busy Waterloo station concourse and get from A to B without bumping into anyone? That's the same thing here, but maybe just a bit faster and a bit noisier.

One initial problem we had was that we entered Vietnam on the 2nd day of the Tet holiday, which has been described as Christmas, New Year and your birthday all rolled into one. Curiously enough, whilst buying a mobile phone sim was easy, finding food was not so easy. So back to the MSG ridden pot noodles for a couple of days. Whilst Tet officially ends on the third day, the Vietnamese find many ways to extend the fun for a few more days, meaning a fair number of shops closed. Yes, bakery shops, we mean you!

You would not think that 50km over a set of mountains could make much of a difference to the weather. It does however, and our first 3 days into Vietnam were fairly cool and wet. This was our first foray into Vietnamese cafe culture. A place where there are lots of Vietnamese men playing cards, dominoes and chinese checkers, VERY LOUDLY ( it seems to involve slamming cards down on the table) and drinking coffee or red bull. Where are the ladies? In the fields. Go figure....

Back to our trusty ponchos. Getting some form of aerodynamic shape to these is near on impossible, but was to our advantage as we had a good tail wind here.

And talking of coffee - here is what you get. A little filter, and some condensed milk in the bottom. The coffee itself is like nothing else - and I would genuinely say that it tastes more like hot chocolate than it does coffee. It's a potent mix - the sugar kick from the milk, and the caffeine, and I love it! The only problem is that it gives you the thirst from hell.

You cannot, of course, get away from Vietnam's history and there is a lot of it around in the form of museums, relics and sites of battles. Unsurprisingly it is all from the Vietnamese point of view and the jingoistic narrative does become a bit tiresome. What there is is a perspective that the US never stood a chance, given the terrain that was familiar to a very well motivated population, and US troops that had to fight in wet, humid and hot conditions.

This is Khe Sahn - a well documented airbase that the US held onto for some 70 days before being relieved.

There is a lot of wreckage around, this being the tail section of a Huey helicopter

I thought this somewhat ironic given what happened when the US pulled out of the war in 1973.

A favourite display of most war sites. I only included this because of the rather ironic stencil of the explosion on the side. As if people needed reminding....

Next stop was Dong Ha, where we took a side trip with this excellent chap, Mr Wah- who had been brought up during the war, spoke excellent English and was a great source of information. This was a trip to the Vinh Moc tunnels - a most extraordinary site where the entire village had taken to living in a tunnel complex to avoid US bombs.

This was the meeting "hall"

A little montage showing a family "room" - believe you me it was not only dark, hot and humid but very cramped. I spent the entire tour double up - the only point where the tunnels were higher was towards the entrances, this being to allow soldiers with rifles slung on their backs to run.

This is the site of the old DMZ - the border area between N and Sian Vietnam

And the loudspeakers used to broadcast propaganda back and forth.

Lots of Huey helicopters around most sites.

This was the most sombre of the "American" war sites - know to the US as My Lai, and to the Vietnamese as Son My- where 500 villagers were killed by US servicemen in March 20 1968, almost 50 years ago. It's a reconstruction as it was levelled by the US afterwards , but done well. The pictures in the museum were pretty graphic. This is the reconstructed remains of a house, with a plaque showing who had died.

The concrete pathways have the barefoot imprints of the villagers fleeing, and the soles of the GI's. There were some heroes that day - in particular a helicopter pilot who saw what was going on and landed between shooting GI's and villagers. He also flew some of them to safety.

We eventually found the coast, but pretty wet and cool. These coracle fishing boats are everywhere. The story goes that the French taxed fishing boats, but the Vietnamese made these boats but said that they were baskets!

Cows and water buffalo everywhere.

And a reminder of these finds that you only get out in the sticks. We were wandering up and down this village looking for food, and found this lady barbecuing pork coated with sesame seed. She smiled and gesticulated for us to sit down - and we got this enormous helping of noodles and meat. She even showed us what to do with the plate of leafy vegetables that you always get ( we had long been wondering about this) - pour them into the bowl and mix them up with your chopsticks. 80p if I remember.

However, one language difficulty induced culinary disaster was our first and possibly last attempt at a Vietnamese hot pot. We thought we had ordered meat, but it was seafood - squid (OK), Prawns(OK) and fish (hmm, not so OK). So with our bubbling cauldron of stock, we went to cook one of the fish and this happened. Decided that perhaps fish was off the menu after that.

We carried on south, and went over the Hai Van pass - a stretch of road made famous by Top Gear. Whilst the guidebooks say that only enthusiastic cyclists would attempt, it wasn't that severe. The views looking back here were fantastic and

Looking down to our destination Da Nang

Still looking cheerful on the up side.

Sian's ability to crank up serious hills is fantastic now - but she still worries about them!

Which is a somewhat built up ( think Acupulco) beach complete with no sunbathers. The Vietnamese along with many other Asians eschew any sun on their skin - they will go swimming, but only either before the sun has come up, or after sunset and even then fully clothed!

Here we see what I have come to call the female Vietnamese mafia - a very hardworking bunch of ladies, always with a hat, facemask ( to protect from the sun) and fully covered from top to toe for the same reason. You simply would not want to mess with them, and they are pretty hard nosed when it comes to extracting the maximum amount of money from foreigners. To attempt to counteract this, I have adopted the attitude of approaching them with a big goofy grin and speaking a tiny bit of Vietnamese, which seems to help a bit.

This is the very pretty town of Hoi An - apparently saved from the ravages of war by a gentlemans agreement between both sides.

Many of the old shops and houses preserved as they have been for a couple of centuries, and most atmospheric they are.

Even better at night.

A colourful little courtyard

This troubled us - a western family that had hired a moped, and were doing as the Vietnamese do, taking their two small children on it as well. Whilst they did all have helmets, I couldn't imagine a situation where we would have felt comfortable doing the same.

We have had 4 days on the trot cycling now, some of it on the busy coastal highway, but some on some fabulous much less busy roads. This freshly sealed road, travelling through shady trees emitting the most gorgeous and evocative blossom, astounding views, flat as they come was particularly memorable.