2014/15 Biking Southeast Asia Daily Snippet

30 December, Cat Ba Town to Thai Binh, by ferry to Haiphong + 71km
Hotel An Thai 270,000VND

We were up at 04:30 to catch the slow (for “slow” read “cheap”) 05:30 ferry from Cat Ba town to Haiphong on the mainland. Three hours later we were back on the bikes headed south. Finding our way through Haiphong, a city of nearly two million, proved relatively easy. It is almost impossible though to paint a word picture of what the traffic can be like in a large Vietnamese city. We cycled through a street market bordered on one side by a wide river, on the other by shop-houses. Vendors on both sides of the road offered fish so fresh it was still flapping. Jostling for space on the narrow street were trucks and buses and cars, scooters and bicycles, a slow-moving cart drawn by a single ox. Scooters are piled high and wide with building materials, farm produce, household goods. Three-wheel bikes push or pull trolleys filled with soil, recyclable cardboard and plastic, foodstuffs. One woman on an old bike towed a wide low trailer piled high with empty polystyrene containers she was hawking to the vendors. She was as wide as a car, but as slow as a pedestrian; getting past her required cycling into oncoming traffic. Once out of the city we found ourselves on a faster, busier, noisier road than any encountered thus far in Vietnam, grateful for a shoulder intended to accommodate bicycles, but also used to park cars or mobile vending stands, to pile construction sand, to travel on the wrong side of the road. We found the constant noise, the hoot-hoot-HOOTING, a drain on our physical resources. The scenery was dull, but we passed several churches and several graveyards, military, civilian and Christian. And had two odd incidents. We were “befriended” by a man on a scooter who insisted on riding ahead of us for many kms hooting to clear the traffic in our path (an impossible task); tied to the webbing on his old army helmet with a red rag was a small radio. At a guest house in Thai Binh it took us a long time to understand why I could not get a simple answer to my query about price – the rooms were rented by the hour.