Getting up before dawn and riding with the first light has become second nature. This morning was no exception. Thankfully the sky was gray-silver and filled with clouds thwarting the sun's best efforts to overheat us. We chugged up a steep incline for the first 20 kilometers past women hauling produce and villagers pushing bicycles while overburdened scooters and trucks smoked past us. Finding our way was again a challenge. Locals have long been accustomed to sending tourists to the \"tourist resort\" of Mai Chau nearby, sort of a human zoo for hill tribe people. Each person we asked had to be told five, ten and sometimes fifteen times that we are not going there.
Andy nearly lost his temper during at least one of these exchanges and was visibly flustered when we ask for directions. Our pace and path allow us to see \"real\" hill tribes going about their daily affairs like cultivating rice and grazing their cattle. They jeered and shouted at us as we passed. After the ascent I looked down at Hoa Binh and was amazed at how far we'd climbed. We dove into a high valley and rolled along in it, awing at the dramatic verdant landscapes. After our strenuous climb we lunched at a crossroads where there was an exceedingly popular market.
So crowded it was hard to pedal down the street. Traditional garb was all the rage \-- pants flared outward at the bottoms and tunic shirts. Salty *pho* satisfied our hunger before we pressed on through what was one of the most beautiful rice filled valleys I'd seen since Indonesia. At one drink stop I fell into a deep sleep on a bench while Andy watched a French version of a Jacques Cousteau video on VTV (Vietnamese Television). The road had deteriorated into little stones mortared together with mud. Bone jarring dips spotted our path and numbed my hands. The already ailing Connie the Compaq Computer can't be liking all this abuse (nor can Siegfried and Roy).
Andy baled water from a well at one stop and we poured the cold water over each other's heads. The road became paved, the scenery more dramatic with sugarloaf mountain-like formations rising from the rice paddy. Soon we turned right onto the Transvietnamese highway with the sea of humanity on all modes of transport flanking us. Scooterbound hotel hawkers tried to convince us to stay at their hotels but we elected to stay at the big, dirty and ugly commie hotel, the Hoa Lu. I met a pair of female French travellers in the lobby, one of whom had spent the bulk of her vacation in hospitals in Danang and Hanoi.
At a guesthouse we ate a meal, meeting a pair of burnt British girls and a pair of Frogs who live in Shanghai. I could barely make it through the meal I was so rattled from our ride. We retreated to our filthy bedbug ridden commie hotel and passed into a coma.