As I planned our border crossing from Laos to Thailand, I had lofty visions about cycling across one of the bridges over the Mekong, breezes blowing in my hair and the golden spires of Thai temples gleaming in the sun to greet us across the river. It would be the kind of happy cycling camaraderie we saw displayed on the faces of Laverne and Shirley as they ride double down a Milwaukee street in the intro to the early eighties sitcom.

Alas, my lighthearted pedal across the bridge was not to be. We were denied entry with the bikes to cross the bridge; apparently no cyclists or pedestrians are permitted. I pleaded with the immigration official, letting the dejected look in my eyes do most of the talking, but he was having none of it. It looked like we’d be waiting for a bus, the departure time of which was either 1:00, 1:30, or 2:00; the Laotian official told us all three different times in each subsequent conversation.

Okay, it was now what my friend Andy calls a “deal with it” situation, so we settled in to wait either 45 minutes, an hour and fifteen minutes, or an hour and 45 minutes. Having felt extremely nauseous since I woke up this morning, I curled up on the plastic seats and rested my head, trying to wait out the unpleasant rolling sensation in my stomach.

Promptly two hours later, the bus finally arrived, but this wasn’t the end of the difficulty. The woman selling bus tickets wouldn’t sell us a ticket when she saw the bikes. Getting a bit frustrated now, we went back to get the immigration guy who told us we could take the bikes on the bus. After much discussion and the inclusion of another official and both bus drivers, it was decided if the bus wasn’t too full we could take the bikes for an extra $5.

Feeling less than confident the bikes were making it on the bus as well, we boarded the bus as instructed but kept a nervous eye on the bikes through the windows.

When every seat was filled the driver managed to cram the bikes in the front of the bus, and finally, around 2:30PM, we were ready to cross the one kilometer we could have cycled in about two minutes to the Nakon Phanom province of eastern Thailand. I leaned my head back and focused on not vomiting on the bus.

When we seamlessly picked up our free 30-day tourist visas from the Thai side of the bridge, we got on the bikes heading west. We had another adventure in a Seven Eleven, the details of which are simply too excruciatingly monotonous to relay, but be aware that purchasing a normal Sim card in Thailand is serious business, involving literally dozens of photographs taken of our passports and ourselves. After (I kid you not) a full hour in a roadside 711 we just got on our bikes and rode in the general direction we needed to take until it got dark. For obvious reasons our milage was modest today, but due to our mental and emotional exhaustion we were ebullient when we found a small guesthouse (sign only in Thai) with a sweet little cottage that’s actually sparkling clean with solid WiFi, good air conditioning, and even a refrigerator for $8 a night. We are truly off the typical backpacker trail in Thailand—here in the Isaan region one won’t find a banana pancake or a Western breakfast, but we’re realizing that can be a pretty cool thing. The cycling today was pretty standard hot, dry dusty roads, so I don’t have a lot of photos to accompany this post. But here’s a shot of my bike when it finally made it to Thailand, not with the cheerful ease I had imagined, but at least I got my gleaming golden spires.

https://www.gofundme.com/yznqrz-women039s-empowerment-fund

When I was 22 or 23 I wrote a poem containing the following lines:

The miles spaced out behind me

Unkind, they left me empty.

A hole in my lungs expanded

And poured forth my life force into the dust in my wake.

I never looked to define that from which I sought escape.

As I pedaled along the road south through the Phou Hin Poun Biodiversity nature reserve in Laos this morning, a portion of this poem echoed in my head, a poem that hasn’t crossed my mind in over ten years. The “miles spaced out behind me” were still accurate, the undulating hills keeping a constant cycle of exertion and coasting, a repetitive pattern that created a sense of conquering difficult terrain and managing to have a hell of a good time simultaneously. But the tone had changed; each mile left behind on the map left me the furthest thing from empty.

Within minutes of leaving our accommodation in Thalang this morning, the chain broke on Dave’s bike. By some stroke of serendipity, a minibus happened to pass within one minute of the malfunction, and without too much trouble Dave and the driver were able to hoist the bike onto the roof of the bus. With no time to plan I shouted:

“Just get as far as you can, and then message me!”, and resumed riding.

This was my second portion of the trip cycling alone, and it was another section I loved. The road became serpentine both in reference to the mountains and the horizon, so I zipped down hairpin downhill curves and pumped my way to the top of the jungle-clad hills that followed. For miles on end the only living beings that passed me were hundreds of butterflies.

In Nakai I met back up with Dave, the chain having been repaired at a local shop. We got back on the bikes and headed southwest toward the mighty Mekong River and the bridge to Thailand, which we plan on crossing tomorrow. It was somewhere around this time that the sun began to beat down so relentlessly I could anxiously visualize skin cancer cells forming on my arms and thighs. I applied sunscreen obsessively and wore a hat and sunglasses, but there was simply no escaping the sun’s fiery, blistering rays. It was 91° (32 Celsius) in the shade, and we didn’t see a goddamned moment of shade for over six hours.

As we rolled closer to the Mekong the temperature only increased, but the road got flat enough that pedaling hardly required any effort. Giant karst formations similar to the ones in northern Vietnam and southern Thailand sprung up along the horizon, and all at once they surrounded us on all sides, like towering limestone temples designed to worship nature itself. But man, was it still hot.

When we hit the Mekong we found a table in a blessed patch of shade and drank reviving coconut juice and beer while gazing across the river at Thailand.

We had planned to continue south along the river, but the sunset and the charming waterfront cafés and guesthouses of Thakhek persuaded us to find a room for the evening and travel on in the morning.

As I settle in for the night in another “luxurious” room (includes both toilet paper and soap!) I think of that poem again, and emptiness, and escaping, and although I’m ready for dinner I also feel about as full as I ever have.

If anyone would like to support my efforts for the Asia Foundation’s Women’s Empowerment Fund, here’s the link:

https://www.gofundme.com/yznqrz-women039s-empowerment-fund

As always, thanks for reading.

 

Despite my level of exhaustion and my best intentions, the bamboo mat defeated me last night in my striving for rest. At points when my hip bone couldn’t take any more I rolled to my back, and when that failed to bring comfort I rolled back, this cycle repeating in futility throughout a nearly sleepless night.
In spite of this and the grueling day that preceded I felt reasonably prepared to face the morning cycle, a relaxed 34km to Lak Sao, Laos.
The border crossing was seamless and took up all of 20 minutes including obtaining exit stamps on the Vietnamese side, cycling to the Laotian side, and paying the associated fees to get the visas for Laos. As always, people were highly entertained by us being on bicycles, and border guards laughingly waved us through to Laos.

Upon eastern Laotian soil the downhill reward for which we had so agonizingly toiled the previous evening came through with a breathtaking breakneck-speed descent into a beautiful valley.

It was the first time we’d seen blue sky, and everything appeared in vibrant technicolor as the world rushed by and the wind cooled the sweat on our bodies. I felt a sense of release so palpable it was as though my bike had spontaneously sprouted a pair of wings.
Of course, elation like this tends to be fleeting in nature, and when the road flattened and the sun’s strength turned fierce we fled for some shade and food once we reached Lak Sao. This turned into a battle of ethics for two vegetarians, as our “rice with vegetables” came with random chunks of unidentified gristley meat. The question was, did we pay and leave, thus causing definite offense to the woman who prepared the food, or pick out what we could and retain kind relations? I ate the egg and cilantro and mind-over-mattered my way through the meal.

After lunch we turned south toward Thalang, a little over 50km from Lak Sao. The beginning was a piece of cake, plenty more downhills spaced out with flat terrain. We hit mountainous territory again an hour or so into the ride, and with Dave suffering from knee pain again he hopped on a bus with his bike to meet me in Thalang.
With all love and respect for my man, the next 30km in solitude were the most joy I have experienced thus far on the ride. There were a few up-down, up-down segments that were challenging, but each time the momentum from the previous hill allowed me at least halfway up the next ascent. As I approached the end of the mountainous pass, freshwater lagoons appeared on either side studded with silvery tree trunks mirrored in the surface of the water along with the blue and white sky.

Around this point a slow-building descent began and essentially never ended until I hit the bridge across the Nam Theun River, the road curving gently past water features and jungle and the odd passing canoe.

I was the only person on the road for lengthy stretches, and the joy and exhilaration that filled my entire body seemed like it spread from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. ‘Twas pretty damn awesome, to say the least.
I met back up with Dave at Sabaidee Guesthouse in Thalang, another $8 room—but this one idyllically situated at the river’s bank, with a clean bathroom and clean sheets sans cigarette burns.

For us it was the lap of luxury; I even shampooed my hair and shaved my underarms in my reveling in civilization. I considered shaving my legs and putting on mascara, but that was taking things a bit far so I compromised by putting on a sundress and a pair of earrings. Today was a rest day at a total of only 87km, but the rest felt fairly well-earned after yesterday’s grueling nine-plus hours. Tonight I shall finally sleep, with a clean body on a soft mattress, and that is luxury indeed.

I said I couldn’t write much last night, but tonight I am at a point of physical and mental exhaustion the likes of which I have never known. We began our day at the intersection of the Ho Chi Minh highway and QL7A, 116 kilometers northeast of the Lao border. With the milage we’ve been averaging this seemed like a modest goal, and we planned on making the border around 5PM and either finding accommodation on the Vietnamese side or the Laotian side.
The 67 kilometers down the HCMH to 8A, the road that winds west to Laos, were sometimes tough going. There was constant ascending and descending, none of it very mellow but all of it beautiful—and the downhills were absolute bliss.

There was so little traffic I never once hit the brakes, just veered toward the middle of the road to make the sharp curves because there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. That was the fun part.
When we reached the intersection with the road to Laos we tracked down the requisite egg bahn mi (with some difficulty, the woman actually went and bought eggs to make us a vegetarian one because she only had meat, bless her).

Refueled with the sandwiches and some mango we hit the road once again, me with “no sleep ’til border” stuck in my head to the tune of the Beastie Boys classic.
The first 25km of 8A were easy enough that they lulled us into a sense of security; we watched the lush scenery breeze by on either side in a reverie of pleasantly flat terrain.

Dave mentioned that we’d covered 25k in only an hour, and at that rate we’d be at the border earlier than expected. If we had only known what lay before us…
When the climbing started it did so with a vengeance, as if the mountains themselves were punishing us for our combined bravado and naiveté.

The relentless ascent into the moutains continued until we got off the bikes to push, then got back on, repeating this cycle until the sun set and dark crept in. Another hour past dark we were still slogging up the mountain; focusing on my bike’s headlight helped me stay somewhat focused but I still found myself reeling at times as if intoxicated, but only from inescapable physical exhaustion. When we reached some semblance of civilization just past 7PM, Dave was nearly reeling with dehydration. I walked into a gas station and tried to buy a bottle of water, but they took one look at us and forced us to take two on the house. I asked about nearby accommodation (good ol’ Google translate) and I was almost physically sickened to hear that the closest hotel was 20km away.
My next step (while Dave was collapsed on a concrete bench outside the gas station) was to walk to the next building with lights on and ask if I could rent a room. They didn’t have a bedroom, but they set us up on the floor of a room of some sort  (dining room? conference room?) I’m not actually sure if it’s a business or not, but the man absolutely refused to take any money even though I vehemently insisted. So here I will close, about to go to sleep on a concrete floor on a bamboo mat at the border between Vietnam and Laos.

Hard floor or not, after over nine arduous hours climbing the vertiginous roads of northern Vietnam, I  still plan on sleeping the sleep of the dead. I feel just the slightest touch of badass too, which ties in perfectly with this bike ride supporting women’s empowerment.

Hmmm, guess it turns out I could still write a wee bit.

Man, today was hard. I actually don’t know how much I can write tonight, that’s how hard today was. After all my “lalala, we’re on a pretty road and there are cute kids and water buffalo everywhere” yesterday, today was where the (still lovely) route 512 began climbing. And climbing. And climbing some more. Our first hill gained 775 feet in less than a half mile (a general rule I’ve learned from hiking is anything over 1,000 feet per mile is pretty strenuous, and that’s on foot). After the first hour and twenty minutes we kind of couldn’t believe it had only been an hour and twenty minutes.

When we reached the Ho Chi Minh highway the road mellowed out a bit, still wavy with hills but most of them manageable (for me) by milking my momentum from the previous hill for all its worth, standing up until my legs were screaming, and finally settling into my easiest gear and tortoise-ing my way to the summit.

After an hour or so on the HCMH Dave’s knee started bothering him again, this time significantly, so he stayed behind with the intention of catching a bus. I continued on for the next several hours alone, struggling up each ascent focusing on the glorious payback of coasting down the other side, the landscape and sky rushing by in a blur of green and grey and the pinks of the bougainvillea. Even when it started to rain I didn’t mind due to the joy of the ride.

I stopped for the requisite coconut in a village just north of Tanky, and after finding out Dave had never seen a bus, powered on, and was only about 45 minutes behind, I decided to linger over my coconut and wait for him.

The highlight of our day was the single  best bahn mi I’ve experienced thus far in my life, surrounded by a group of local kids who’d just finished their karate lessons. Dave showed them some martial arts moves, and they were so unbelievably stoked it was pretty touching. They asked for his Facebook information and one little boy told him “You’re my best friend.”

After that the evening was anticlimactic, a bunch more hills to climb until just after dark, another unnamed accommodation with cigarette burns on the sheets. I plan to have a serious session with some Tiger Balm tonight.

I write this from an unnamed guesthouse somewhere on route 513 by the shores of pretty Hồ Yên Mỹ, a lake on the way heading west to the Ho Chi Minh highway. The bathroom is filthy and the sheets are laced with cigarette burns, but it was the only accommodation around for miles and miles, and after eight hours riding today we weren’t looking for Forbes standards. And for $11 total we had a room for the night and a gigantic vegetarian feast, ordered entirely through Google translate. Sold.

We had mainly been following the map the simplest way south until late this afternoon. We left Tam Coc around 9AM and took 1A south, keeping an eye out for a bike shop on the way. Both the bikes that the awesome Grasshopper Adventures donated to our cause are good quality mountain bikes, but the one I’d been riding has hybrid tires. This was making it distinctly easier for me to pedal and making it a lot of work for Dave to match my pace.
After a few fails we managed to locate a bike shop that had the tires we wanted, and after much crowding around Google translate on Dave’s phone, pointing, smiling, and drinking some tea with the owner, we left the shop with both bikes hybrid-tired and ready to make up some time.

Unfortunately I got a flat about an hour later, but we had tools and extra tube so Dave was able to change it for me pretty quickly. A neighborhood guy even brought over two little chairs for us to sit while Dave changed the tube, one of dozens of gestures of awesome hospitality we’ve experienced this time in Vietnam as well as on past trips.
Despite these obstacles we were able to cover a decent amount of milage today; I didn’t feel as strong as yesterday but I rode the bike with the mountain bike tires for the first three hours. Fair is fair, after all, and Dave rode it for six hours yesterday. A little after 3:00 this afternoon I desperately needed a small rest, a pee, and a coconut, not necessarily in that order, so we found a roadside stall with cocos galore.
As I was looking over the map and a couple of cycling blogs on my phone, I realized if we continued the way we had planned we wouldn’t spend any time on the Ho Chi Minh highway, the road that many cyclists said was one of the highlights of cycling Southeast Asia. It was a bit of a last minute detour, but we decided to cut west on route 512 to connect with the HCMH and continue south on that road before crossing to Laos. It would add a little distance to the total  (and a lot more hills), but moments after departing the blaring horns and exhaust fumes of 1A we felt we had made the right decision.

Shimmering rice paddies stretched out on both sides as far as the eye could see, water buffalo grazed in the shallow turrets, and cows wandered in the middle of the road casting apathetic gazes at passing scooters. Every kid that passed yelled “hello!” at the top of his or her lungs, and some slowed to just ride their scooters next to us for a bit with beaming grins in our direction.

Dave’s knee was beginning to act up (hundreds of accumulated skateboarding injuries), so we began to keep an eye out for accommodation a little earlier than planned, but due to our remote location we were still pedaling until the sun was setting. Fortunately we’d memorized that “nhà nghỉ” meant rooms for rent, so we spotted the aforementioned guesthouse by the lake shortly before dark. Total km for the day a still-modest 125, but I’m hoping to work up to 150 or so in the next few weeks. Side note: I realized the distances for which I’ve been aiming have been based mainly on stats posted on Vietnam blogs for ROAD BIKES. The mountain bikes aren’t quite as easy to pump up the central Vietnam hills. Thus, I’m overall nearly satisfied with our progress.

 

As I pedal south in the pedestrian area by Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake I weave in and out of the miniature traffic formed by battery-powered toy vehicles whizzing about carrying small children. It’s Sunday morning in Vietnam, a time reserved for relaxing, spending time with loved ones, and lingering over coffee in one of the thousands of ubiquitous stalls that clutter the streets with tiny plastic chairs. For us though, it’s day one of our long journey southwest and the time to linger has come and gone.

After a huge breakfast of scrambled eggs with mushrooms, baguettes, pineapple, yogurt, coffee and fresh watermelon juice, we wrangled the bicycles (one by one) into the elevator around 9 this morning out of our Old Quarter hotel. After a few brief stops to get more air in the tires and buy bungee cords on Ha Triệu Street we pedal southward.
I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoy the city riding—it becomes an adrenaline-stimulating game where I keep my head down and my peripheral vision on high alert and just flow with the commuting masses. The constant barrage of blaring horns and the exhaust fumes do eventually become irksome though, and I’m relieved when the traffic thins and the ride quiets down discernibly. The terrain is flat, the sky is overcast enough to keep the temperature tolerable, and the miles fly by more effortlessly than I would have expected. I had griped a bit yesterday about the price of the high end bike shorts we purchased in Hanoi  (1.5 million dong a pair, or about the price of six nights accommodation), but today I realize the absolute necessity of the amply-padded seat. My posterior silently thanks me again and again.
We skip lunch with appetites sated by the prodigious breakfast and the heat of the afternoon and just pause for a stretch and a water break after the first 50km. The ride is a bit dull at this point and I remind myself to dig out my headphones for the ride tomorrow to fill the monotonous stretches with music. We make it to Ninh Binh much earlier than expected, and I actually feel like I still have hours left in my legs. It’s best not to push it too hard on the first day though, so we stick with our original plan of spending the night in Tam Coc, a small village by the river.

It’s my third time in Vietnam in three years, so obviously it’s a special place for me, and Ninh Binh is one of my favorite places in the country. The jagged shapes of blue-green karst formations jut from the landscape, forming a dramatic backdrop to the emerald rice paddies and the murky green river. Brightly colored boats drift by as we pedal toward Tam Coc, and we pass no fewer than four Vietnamese weddings, brides and grooms gazing soulfully into one another’s eyes as photographers click away in the stunning surroundings.

 

Of a less picturesque nature are the whole-roasted goats posed in roadside stalls, appearing at the ready to leap off the tables but having already met their unfortunate end.
After securing a $9 room and a $1.25 glass of wine in the cluster of touristy restaurants and accommodation at the edge of the lake, I sit down and marvel at how easy the first day felt, especially since the longest I’ve ridden a bike before today is probably around fifteen miles. I give plenty of credit to the spinning classes I faithfully attended all summer, after which any type of normal cycling feels all but effortless. As we brush the road grit from our bodies and stretch our legs over a drink we peer at Google maps, a common past time these last few weeks. Our total milage is just under 60 miles, or 111 kilometers. Dave comments that we coincidentally cycled 111 kilometers on the first day, the date of which happens to be 11/11. I’m not one for signs, but it seems an auspicious beginning.

Tomorrow my boyfriend Dave and I begin cycling approximately 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from Northern Vietnam to Singapore to raise money for the Asia Foundation’s Women’s Empowerment Fund. My original plan was to begin in Sapa (around 150 miles north of Hanoi), but the logistics of getting the bikes to Sapa (as well as time constraints due to new jobs we begin late December) have altered our departure point to Hanoi.

In November, 2017 while trekking in Nepal Dave and I hiked independently, but we spoke at length with guides and porters in the teahouses about the conditions they endure and the tiny amount of time they have with family. We were starkly aware of our incredibly privileged circumstances and weeks later, back closer to sea level, the poverty we witnessed on the streets of Kathmandu was truly heartwrenching.

The following April while trekking in Sapa with a friend, we hired young female guides we came to learn had no formal education and thus were completely illiterate in their early twenties. I couldn’t stop thinking about this and the poverty in Nepal when I got back to the United States; thus was the initial impetus to find a way to contribute to education, and women’s education in particular, in impoverished communities in Asia.

As I write this, our bikes have just been delivered to our hotel in Hanoi by the infinitely helpful and wonderfully generous bike touring company Grasshopper Adventures. Through their philanthropic contribution to our cause we now have two high-quality used Merida hybrids instead of the cheap knockoffs to which our budget would have limited us had we been left to our own devices purchasing bikes in Vietnam.

The butterflies building in my stomach seem to have fluttered all the way up into somewhere in my chest cavity as I watch Dave assemble the bikes in our little hotel room in the Old Quarter.

I’ve been anticipating this moment for months, since last spring when I conceptualized first the vague idea of fundraising for women in impoverished communities in Asia followed by the bike ride to draw attention to the cause. Through research I found a philanthropic foundation that encompassed the ideals and goals I wanted to further, so I created a Gofundme page linked to Asia Foundation’s  Women’s Empowerment Fund. Momentarily we’ll be heading to Bà Triệu Street in Hanoi where a number of shops sell bicycles and cycling accessories. We’ve compiled a long list of necessities for the ride, and we’ll be stuffing the saddle bags this evening. We’re beginning this adventure after spending the last month traveling in Iceland, Finland, Greece and Sicily; after leaving our winter coats with friends in Finland Dave and I are left with 6 and 6.5 kilos of luggage respectively.

I close this post in an emotional jumble of exhilaration, nervousness, excitement and a difficult-to-name anticipatory angst. Traveling light of luggage and largely light of heart, tomorrow morning the long pedal commences. I’ll also close this post with a picture of the omelet our hotel served me this morning, because its positive message and craftily-executed sea creature depiction  (Dave’s was a fish) were enough to get anyone started on the right foot.

Biking Toward Empowerment Gofundme

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton