.....annnnnd off to Lai Chau - 

So, leave Sapa around noon-ish and headed to Lai Chau.  PART OF (the first 14Km) this road I had been on two years ago coming back from Sapa to Hai Phong.  I recall it being really shitty and gravel-and-sand-covered with crater-like potholes! So, based on the info I had received from the guy at the hotel, I'd imagined that it's greatly improved.....  

....or not.....

WHAT a total fucking nightmare!  It was ACTUALLY WORSE this time round then when I last went on it two years ago!  It had ALMOST as many dirt/gravel/crater-like-pothole sections as it did paved sections!

Needless to say, the 75Km ride between Sapa and Lai Chau took three and 1/2 hours!  And the Mio Ultimo (my skooter) was having an aneurysm!!  First off, it does not like A) - Off-roading it and B) - Elevation and especially C) - BOTH!  At 5000 feet above sea level it started hiccuping and stuttering.  At 6000 feet, it started really getting pissed off and refused to go faster than 60Km/hour!

Finally after about three hours and fifteen minutes, after sloooowly heading down winding turns into a steep valley into Lai Chau town, life was good......

.....UNTIL I made a hairpin turn and felt my ass-end almost slide out from under me!

"WHAT THE FUCK???"  I thought - it's AUGUST!!  There can't be ice YET.....and NO RAIN WHATSOEVER.....what???????

THEN I looked down.....

THIS was beginning to have "SUCK!" written ALLLLL over it.....

Thanx to VietTel's 3G coverage, I gauged on my GPS that I was around 6Km from the town centre of Lai Chau.  Wellll.....could have been worse, I thought. 

I noticed a bunch of school kids walking my way and I asked them in my beautiful, fluent Tiếng Việt - "Xe May?  Xe May?" - which (I *THINK*) roughly translates to "motobike repair" while gesticulating wildly towards my rear tire and dancing like a clown, all at the same time.

The kind schoolchildren pointed up and around an approaching bend in the road about 500 meters up, and, when I rounded it, saw a settlement on the outskirts of Lai Chau that had about five or six different Xe May places in it.

The kind folks replaced the tube in the tire with a new one and, twenty minutes and 100,000VND / five bucks later, I was back on The Road.  The chick who replaced the tube did a great job, and the guys standing around couldn't have done a better job watching her at work.

The culprit, shortly after being pulled outta my tire.....

Cruised into town at about 3:30PM, and man was it a weird place.....

....BRAND-SPANKING-NEW roads, several new Government buildings, a hospital that appares to have been constructed five minutes ago (IF you've ever been to ANY hospital in Hai Phong before, you may wish to consider taking the 594Km ride to Lai Chau just to use THEIR hospital).....just very clean and it appeared to actually be more of a small city than a large town......

Lai CHau's brand-spankin'-new hospital.....

.....but something was missing.....and I really couldn't figure out what!  SOMETHING....SOMETHING.....jes' couldn't put my finger on it!!

Then, it hit me -

"WHERE THE FUCK are all the people???" I thought to myself in a rather alarmed tone!

It was 3:30PM on a weekday, and the streets were 110% empty!!!  No market, no traffic, nothing!  It was very creepy!  And the snall stream of school kids heading home doesn't count, as there was literally NOBODY else on the streets....

(My wife later explained to me that Lai Chau, being near the Viet Nam/Laos/Chinese border, was basically established simply as a Government/Military/Administrative outpost, and all of the ethnic minority people hung out in the mountains, and, thusly, WHY the town has such brand new roads and Government buildings all over the place and not much else at all).

Creepy.....

Anyways, after crossing the Nightmare Trail ("Highway" 4D between Sapa and Lai Chau) and the entire flat tire thing, I had given up on the idea of returning to Sapa that afternoon and instead just parked my ass in one of Lai Chau's three hotels!  Rode around town a bit more, DID see a few isolated H'Mong and Dao walking down barren sidestreets prodding three or four head of cattle along, but that's really literally about it.  Stayed in my hotel, had several pints and used their computer (left my netbook at home for Tam to use) to publish last night's report on this blog.

DID see some more ethnic minorities on the road in the absolute middle of B.F.E./absa-fucking-lute NOWHERE in their traditional garb......and this is NOT an area that the Tay (Westerners) go to seek out as tourists.....so I got my taste of authenticity....

(There are several different minorities and tribes within each minority - Red Dao, Flower H'Mong, Black H'Mong, and several others - so I ask forgivness if I misidentified any of them [and I'm SURE that I have somewhere in this blog]......you really need a laminated pictorial cheat-sheet when traveling this area to properly identify the tribe/minority that a person belongs to)

Got a free brekker coupon at the hotel, THEN, after waking up at 9:30AM the next morning, read it carefully and realised that the free brekker was from 6AM to 8:30AM ONLY........unreal......

....so, went to one of the two cafes in town, where the owner told me that the menu is entirely in Tiếng Việt (HOW the hell I understood him is beyond me....guess I must sllllooooowwwwwly be picking up Vietnamese), but I really didn't care.....so I picked thee one thing that i COULD read - Pho Ga - Chicken soup with noodles.......

Turned around and headed back to Sapa through a drizzling rain (which put an additional hour in the ride back), got into town, when back to my original hotel there where I was informed that there WAS room for tonight (Friday the 31st), but NO ROOM AT ALL for Saturday Night the 1st of September because of the holiday!  I asked the guy there WHY THE HELL he said that the road to Lai Chau was OK!!   "What the fuck, Dude!  You TOLD me that you'd been to Lai Chau several times....I mean....."

"Ahhhh....yes yes yes.....yes sorry!  Yes sir - last time me go Lai Chau two years ago.....maybe road change?  Not good today?"

I resisted the urge to kill him (murder on vacation is strongly frowned upon in Vietnamese Culture), walked out, grabbed a different hotel, went out for beers, and collapsed in bed, vowing to do NOTHING AT ALL tomorrow except vege, eat, walk around the markets, write a bit and do some light reading!!!

More in a few days (like, Wednesday the 5th)when I get back to Hai Phong.....leaving Sapa tomorrow morning and the two stopover points are not tourist areas AT ALL, so, therefore, they have no computer in the lobby for guest use.

-E-