THUD!
Unh?
THUD!
Virle: What the goodness gracious was that? (I paraphrase.)
THUD!
RATATATATATAT!
THUD!
I grope for my phone. It’s 7am and we appear to have come under mortar attack. The noise seems to be coming from upstairs. I pull on some pants and go up to investigate. Nope. Nothing going on up there. I come back down. The cacophony remains in full swing. I go out on the balcony to see if that can throw any light on matters. A few moments later, I return to the bedroom: Now this you have to see. Virle enrobes enough for a balcony pop. And returns shaking her head.
Yes indeed, it’s a woman in authentic ethnic garb taking a sledgehammer to the wall next door. The RATATATAT being presumably a colleague wielding a pneumatic drill somewhere downstairs.
And there was us planning a lie-in this morning to hopefully give the millenial easy riders a chance to be off and away and out of our hair. Oh well, the best laid plans and all that. So instead we made an early start of it, hit some fine banana pancakes, and then the road.
And pretty damn fine it was too. The overcast seems pretty much set in for the duration, which is a bit of a shame, but does lend the scenery an undeniable misty grandeur.
Before long, we arrived at an impressive monument, at a pass, looking down the valley. This turned out to be The Youth Monument, erected by the Ha Giang region in 2017 to honour the young volunteers who, between 1959 and 1965, built the 185 km ‘Happiness Road’ from Ha Giang City to Meo Vac town.
The road was built by 1,200 local people and over 1,000 youth volunteers from 16 ethnic groups from the northern provinces, including Cao Bang, Bac Kan, Lang Son, Thai Nguyen, Tuyen Quang, Ha Giang, Nam Dinh and Hai Duong. 14 lost their lives during the five years construction, which involved shifting over three million cubic metres of rock. Looking around at the landscape they started out with, you have to marvel at the scale of their achievement.
Moving on, today’s youth were out in force, but not quite as inyerface as yesterday, which was a relief. And apart from a five mile stretch where they were rebuilding the road as we went, with trenches, potholes and mounds, and loose gravel, sand and aggregate and rocks the size of your fist all over the loose dirt track, the roads weren’t bad, and we swooped cheerfully round one corner after another, wowing at each tremendous new valley. We even stopped now and then to take photos.
And it was climbing back on the bike after such a photo that the front end went all wobbly, shortly followed by me. “I don’t believe it!” I wailed. We’ve got another flat!”
After I stopped crying, we established that the next village was somewhere down (how lucky was that?) there, so all I had to do was push the damn bike for what seemed likely to be half an hour or so, to get to the nearest bike garage. I lasted about ten minutes before deciding that the road was starting to go a bit uphill and how much harm could it really do and sod it and turned on the ignition and rode the thing, flat and all, to the workshop, where a very nice man did the necessary in about ten minutes flat, charging me 70,000 dong. That’s barely more than two quid, and that was including a brand new tube. Fortunately Virle turned up just in time to pay. And then we were on our way.
To a pleasant enough little ville called Du Gia, where Virle brutally bargained the price of our nice room (with bathroom) down from 400k to 350, before caving in to extortionate demands for 120k and 50k for dinner and breakfast. We having gone out for dinner last night and ended up with decidedly mediocre food for 200k a head – way above our usual budget.
So now we’re just chilling before dinner, V scrolling and me blathering on, and all is well with the world.
PS Dinner was delicious! Hoorah! Then Virle beat me at rummy – boo.