Drizzle. It does wonders for keeping a bikebrat cool in this climate, but certainly doesn't keep him clean. By the end of our ride today our bikes and we were filthier than I can ever remember us being. It was exciting to look out our window at five this morning and seeing the stuff falling, though. Has the rainy season arrived here, spelling a (temporary) end to the blistering heat? We woke Wendy to bid her adieu, and she waved us off as we rode into the mist. As always, it was great to witness an Asian town waking up. *Cyclos* carted coal used for cooking; women bearing twin baskets of vegetables trotted along with their yokes and cone-shaped hats; kids played soccer and badminton in the middle of busy streets, undeterred by the traffic.
I was going to miss Hanoi --its unique energy and charm, our fantastically homey room in the colonial-era Hoa Binh hotel, and having spunky Wendy as our traveling companion. Getting out of town was painless. The busy boulevard feeding into highway 6 featured a special parallel street for bicycles and oxcarts, offering some refuge from the constant honking of motorbikes and trucks. It was difficult, though, to go any faster than the slow-moving current of bicycles that we were a part of. I was delighted to see bikes bearing pigs --both live and butchered---and noticed that Fred's back was a mud-splattered mess.
As we penetrated the infinite expanse of rice fields, he told me I looked no better. We vowed to seek out fenders later in the day. Rising out of the paddies about twenty kilometers out of town was an unusual sight: a huge French-style cathedral without so much as a hamlet around it. We did some hit-and-miss riding along irrigation canals in order to reach the place, and were beckoned to the rear of the massive church to the monastery. A man (perhaps a plainclothes priest) unlocked the door for me, and I was surprised to see that the place was still in use.
Who came here to pray? What was this huge place of worship doing in the middle of nowhere? These are questions that do not figure in our phrasebook, so I never learned their answers. I did find \"how old is it?\" which our friend answered by dipping his finger in a glass of tea he'd served us and writing \"100\" on the long wooden table which lay between us. Other gawkers came and filled the doorway to the refectory, but little communication occurred. When we left after three or four cups of excellent tea, the drizzle had turned to light rain.
The traffic thinned out as we headed west through increasingly dramatic scenery. Somehow the road managed to take us gradually up into the lumpy mountainscape, and before long we were enjoying a gentle descent through a valley of dreamlike beauty. We reached Hoa Binh (which means \"peace\") well before noon, but it took us a while to decide on a place to stay. After a bizarre episode in a cheaper place we had pedaled back to, we settled on the most expensive hotel in town, primarily for its peaceful rural location far from the honking horns of highway 6 and the droning propaganda speakers which pollute the air of the town center.
After a good long scrub, we ate lunch with a pair of French women we met while scoping out a restaurant. They had been touring the region for a few days in a private car and this was the spot that their driver recommended. We were shocked to find the menu translated into English, and the friendly Thai owner kept sitting down at our table and forcing us to use the nine words we know in her native language. The food was delicious and we promised we'd be back for dinner. Next on our agenda was finding fenders. We pulled into the first bike shop we found (they're literally everywhere in this most bike-friendly of countries) and within instants several shirtless guys were jury-rigging plastic fenders onto my front and rear wheels.
Fred decided to wait for something more specifically suited to our bikes, but with the misshapen things already attached to mine, I was hardly in a position to refuse. We pedaled along a dike holding back the mighty Da River (the biggest of the Red River's tributaries) out to the dam we had read about, the largest in Vietnam. Nothing in the guidebook had prepared me for the actual sight of the thing. Built on a gargantuan scale, it's one of the few objects I've ever witnessed that has put me in utter awe of what our species is capable of accomplishing.
An enormous spillway, through which a frighteningly powerful torrent of water gushes downwards and outwards, dominates one side of it. Fred and I spent the better part of an hour staring in gape-jawed wonder at this, and then set off to circumnavigate the dam. First, of course, we had to climb the thing. The view from the top was dramatic enough to make us wish we'd brought our camera. We continued on past various megabuildings associated with the project before swooping back down to river level, where we found a large and tasteful (surprising in tack-loving Vietnam) monument to the people killed by the behemoth.
We bought incense sticks from an enterprising young woman and placed one in each porcelain jar associated with a memorial stone. This took a long time, for there were nearly two hundred of them, lots of Ng's and Nguyen's, plus exactly eleven Russians. We pedaled through a special bicycle tunnel under the spillway itself to get back to our room and a nap. When we woke a couple of hours later, neither of us could find the wherewithal to bike back into town for dinner, so we dined on power bars before turning in at 10 p.m. We'll possibly never know what Hoa Binh offers in the way of entertainment on a Saturday night.