Lao Cai.....
Made the easy 80 kilometre ride into Lao Cai. Thought I'd give myself a break and an easy ride and just roam around the town a bit and vege. I took off two days behind my friend Finchy and his friend Glen and I just decided that it'd be best to meet them on the road instead of attempting to catch them. They ended up going to far Northern Vietnam going straight North from Hanoi and then looping West, then South, whilst I headed due Northwest from Hanoi and went off towards Lao Cai. Been texting them, and I guess the game plan is to meet them in Sapa on either Saturday or Sunday.
The tourist village of Sapa is about 35 kilometres South of Lao Cai...but from everything I had heard in Hai Phong, it's NOT a nice 35 kilometres!! I had heard horror stories (created in traditional Vietnamese fashion - that being from second-and-third-person accounts) about big rocks jutting up out of this dirt road and a sheer vertical ascent and aliens and Sasquach and things of that sort.
I could not find ANYTHING about the surface composition of the road itself online, but did some Geographical research, and DID discover that, whilst not exactly sheer vertical, the ascent is 1500 metres over 35 kilometres....or a grade of 4800 feet over 21 miles.
THIS is what I was dreading......
I was trying to think of all of my geographic knowledge of Colorado and the places that I've been there (and I've been ALL OVER Colorado).....yet, thee only place that I could think of that might compare is Pagosa Springs to the summit of Wolf Creek Pass.
Nope.....
Looked it up: Thass only a 3600 foot elevation gain over 21.8 miles.......
Oh - and did I mention that I am attempting this on a 114cc AUTOMATIC skooter carring MY fat ass AND about 12 kilograms of gear on it.
Ohhhh......this has got "SUCK" written all over it....and there literally IS a good chance that my bike won't make it up that hill.....
....SHIT!! My mechanic warned me NOT to try this......
Guess we'll see tomorrow.....I got a fiddy placed on a bet in Vegas for a fried tranny, fried clutch or a blown engine for this farce.
Anyways, the ride today was nice...stunning low-fog-clouds-obscuring-the-mountaintops sort of scenery, and not much traffic. Saw a bunch of women about 40 kilometres outside of Lao Cai (basically in the middle of nowhere) wearing the traditional garb and carrying big-ass baskets strapped to their backs like backpacks.....straight outta National Geographic.....just too fucking weird.
Soooo, when we do hit the tourist village of Sapa, I guess these folks DON'T just dress up for the tourists, but they actually wear these clothes and carry these big-ass baskets and DO this kinda stuff every day!
In a fucked-up kinda way.....it's good to see that modern Western influences have not permeated every corner of the globe yet....
Got to Lao Cai around 2PM....stopped at a Wi-Fi cafe and had a beer and looked at GoogleMaps to find out where I was. Grabbed a rather nice hotel room for 300,000 Dong (sixteen bucks), and walked around the town a lot. Blew a twenty on the video slot machines (that were manufactured in 1997 - no shit! Seriously!) over the course of about an hour at a casino that didn't allow alcohol on the casino floor and paid you out in Chinese currency (RMB), since Lao Cai is right on the Chinese border. In Vietnam, The Government allows anything that they consider to be a four-star hotel or higher to have, like, ten table games and about 75 video slot machines, BUT the only access to the casino is for FOREIGN PASSPORT HOLDERS ONLY.
Fortunately, since I was on the Chinese border, I got to eat Chinese food!! This brought MUCH happiness to me, as I don't really eat Vietnamese food at all, and on this ride, I was getting really tired of Bun and Pho!
I won't go into much detail about my passion for Vietnamese food here....but about 95% of Vietnamese dishes are some sort of soup based products with different names....yet there is very little variance between them at all!! It's a huge-ass bowl of Pho and a side of white steamed rice for brekker, lunch and dinner. I mean, I like rice (preferably fried) and I can dig a good bowl of soup....but I mean - EVERY SO OFTEN!! So, my dietary intake on this ride generally consists of one bowl of Pho (Vietnamese for "soup-like product"), Bun (Vietnamese for "soup-of-a-different-name") or a Hotpot (Vietnamese for "Holy shit!! Yet MORE soup") a day so far......
......Christ - no wonder these folks are twigs when compared to other Asians and are absolute NEEDLES when compared to Americans or Australians.....
So, because this hotel (down the street from where I'm staying at) IS a "four-star" (and I use that term veeeerrrry loosely) hotel, they SHOULD have some Tay food....
....if they don't, then you can find my corpse somewhere betwen Lao Cai and Sapa.
Coupla pics.....
No, I didn't take this pic....but this is basically what I saw 40Km outside of Lao Cai (except these ladies in the picture are Black Hmong....whereas the ladies that I saw had much more colourful attire on....*THINK* they might be called "Flower Hmong"....not sure).
Just felt like snapping this pic looking out from inside a small restaurant whilst eating a bowl of Bun as the lady attends to a makeshift fire pit whilst the men stare vacantly out into the street.....
Main border gate between Lao Cai and the Chinese town of 河口瑤族自治縣. Didn't grab a visa for China (where ya hafta bribe a travel agent in Hanoi and wait three days......) and wish I had prepared better!
ON SECOND THOUGHT.....the railway bridge looks rather unprotected......
....and finally, after a hard day of adventures, I open the fridge in my hotel room and see this. Uhhh....."Corn Tea"?? I really don't know what to say......
More soon,
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