Above the clouds and the pulse of life
N 22°21'42.1'' E 103°14'40.1''
Date:
16.07.2016
Day: 385
Country:
Vietnam
Location:
tt. Sin Ho
Latitude N:
22°21’42.1”
Longitude E:
103°14’40.1”
Daily kilometers:
65 km
Total kilometers:
17,582 km
As the crow flies:
23 km
Average speed:
13.0 km/h
Maximum speed:
60.1 km/h
Travel time:
05:50 hrs.
Soil condition:
Gravel / asphalt
Maximum height:
1.750 m
Total altitude meters:
48.088 m
Altitude meters for the day:
1.882 m
Sunrise:
05:31 h
Sunset:
6:54 pm
Temperature day max:
33°C
Temperature day min:
19°C
Departure:
09:45
Arrival time:
18:00
(Photos of the diary entry can be found at the end of the text).
When I want to close the trailer coupling with the twist lock, the locking bolt gets stuck. I shake and shake it, but achieve nothing. “What is it?” asks Tanja. “The drawbar no longer engages,” I explain taciturnly. “Meaning?” “If it doesn’t lock, you’ll lose your trailer while driving.” “Will you be able to fix it?” “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be nervous right now,” I say, wondering if something is broken in the drawbar. I clean the screw cap of dried mud and tar residue and add a few drops of oil, but this is also unsuccessful for the time being. The thought of getting stuck in this remote part of Vietnam because of a broken drawbar makes my forehead sweat. While I’m racking my brains as to how to solve the problem, four small children race around me, screaming and squealing horribly. Again and again they try to startle Ajaci, who lies next to me and calmly watches the wild goings-on. After the children have no success in involving Ajaci in their game, the mother comes running up, stands in front of Ajaci and claps her hands loudly right in front of his snout. “Stay Ajaci,” I order him not to leave his position. “No,” Tanja admonishes the receptionist, who has become aware of her strange behavior and disappears behind the counter again. Their children, however, can continue to charge around us like wild little warriors. Despite the noise, a thought flashes through my hot brain. I remove the drawbar, carry it in front of the simple hotel to have more light, and tap hard against the lock with my pliers. With this action I hope to possibly loosen the locking button. After a few taps, it snaps quietly and lo and behold, the lock works again. “I should have oiled it from time to time over the last few months,” I reproach myself, but I’m glad to be able to continue our journey today.
To get to our destination today, the village of tt. Sin Ho, according to the map we are forced to take a wide turn, so that we would have to cover at least 120 km in the end. “With this massive mountain range, there’s no way I could manage such a distance,” I ponder aloud. “Do we have an alternative?” asks Tanja. “There is a small side road that runs right across the mountain range. If we use that, it’s only 65 km.” “And what else are you thinking?” “You know that we’ve been warned about side roads. They’re supposedly mostly unpaved and if we’re unlucky, we’ll sink into knee-high mud during the rainy season,” I reply. We roll our e-bikes onto the road just as the heavens open and greet us with a downpour. We quickly save ourselves under a small canopy and wait until the worst has passed. When we find the narrow side street, we ask a cab driver, who happens to be waiting for customers, about its condition. “Great road. It’s all tarmac,” he says with a laugh, sticking his thumb up. “Cảm ơn bạn”, (thank you) we say and cycle off.
The sun burns a hole between the storm clouds and makes the ground steam, so that you could be forgiven for thinking we were crossing the bottom of a cooking pot on the fire. “What a dream!”, I exult despite the tropical heat, driving along the brand-new narrow strip of asphalt alongside the lush green rice fields. “So the cab driver was right!” Tanja says happily, also sticking close to my rear tire. As soon as the lively words are spoken into the hot and humid air, the bitumen suddenly stops. “It’s probably only for a few hundred meters,” I say confidently, not knowing what else awaits us that day. Suddenly, a fat cloud turns out the light of the fire-breathing star above us and it starts to rain heavily. Our tires roll over stretches of asphalt, rough gravel, through massive puddles, past boulders that hit the road from a great height not so long ago. Construction machinery of all kinds is parked on cleared scree fields, waiting for their drivers to continue building the mountain road. The higher you go, the more pleasant the temperatures become. Waterfalls cascade left and right down the yellow-brown rock faces covered with moss and other jungle plants. “Let’s take a break and cool down a bit!” calls Tanja. We stop and stick our heads under the refreshing water. Ajaci jumps into a stream and doesn’t want to get out. The landscape around us is characterized by picturesque, beautiful primeval forest. Apart from a few mopeds, we haven’t seen a vehicle for a long time. “Did the cab driver want to make fun of us?” asks Tanja. “Perhaps he has a different view. At least large areas of the surface of the pass road are stabilized with gravel and chippings. A bitumen strip will probably be laid over it in the near future. We’re lucky not to be sinking into the mud,” I say in high spirits despite the effort.
Every few hundred meters we pause, put the bikes on the stands and look down into a wonderful valley that can hardly be described. Mother Earth plays all the cards of beauty in this area of Vietnam. Speechless, we sit down on one of the rough rocks and enjoy the moment, savoring the pulse of life, the fresh air, the black and blue storm clouds floating by as if on a cinema screen, the jungle steaming beneath us and the lush rice terraces that have been wrested from it. The recurring tropical rain has washed the air clean, so that our eyes don’t bump anywhere on this glorious day, our gaze wanders into the distance until it is lost far away, in the green tropical forests of a giant rock perhaps 2,000 meters high.
Hours later, we are still climbing upwards to where the cloud cover hovers above us, soon to break through. The narrow mountain road winds its way through the mountain jungle like a brown snake. It often consists of mud and countless water holes. We glide along and sometimes I take over Tanja’s bike to help her steer it over particularly critical sections. We cross streams and rivulets, which are brought to us by the odd downpour. One of the few friendly moped riders passing by stops and helps me push over one of these barriers.
We have now installed battery number four. We still have two batteries each and the functioning backup batteries, which we could use to charge a power collector in an emergency. Even though we have only covered a distance of just under 50 km today and our GPS now shows 1,600 meters in altitude, we are confident that we will still reach the village of tt. Sin Ho with our energy supply. At an altitude of 1,750 m, the asphalt begins again. From here, we think we have managed all the day’s climbs, but the pass road only leads into a high valley for a short time before winding its way back up again. Our power reserves are exhausted despite the fantastic support of the electric drives. The poor track, the tropical heat and the constant rain take their toll. “We can do it!” Tanja shouts to motivate us. The sun, which continues to fight its way through slits in the clouds in the evening, casts its golden rays onto the wet road. “Just five more kilometers and we’ll be there,” I tell Tanja. Suddenly the road descends steeply. The asphalt has been washed away by the constant rain. A rough gravel track has taken its place. We carefully let our roadtrains roll over fist-sized pebbles. Our trembling, weak thighs make it easy to slip and fall at the end. We pass simple huts. People look at us as if we were ghosts. Then, after they know that we haven’t fallen from the sky, but are just people, they wave to us. Hello! Hello! Hello!”, we hear the friendly greeting we have become accustomed to from every corner. Boys and girls sitting on their water buffaloes wave excitedly at us. A few simple stalls of the local mountain dwellers huddle at the edge of the slope. Women sit in the sparse shade of colorful plastic sheets. A monster worm about 30 centimetres long crawls across the hot road and tries to get to safety in the damp grass at the side of the road. A primitive wooden hut stretches its thatched roof out of the green jungle. We are completely exhausted and stop to catch our breath for a few minutes. Ajaci and I explore the mountain people’s home. “Hello! Hello!”, I call out. No answer. “Probably no one home,” I say to my dog. We end up in the open kitchen. A hole in the floor filled with ash is the fireplace. Five long logs have been pulled out of the extinguished fire and lie in front of it like a fan. Three thin iron bars are stretched over two rough stones, on which a dented old cooking pot is crouching. I kneel down and hold my hand over the ashes. “It’s still warm,” I say to Ajaci. The primitively carved wooden stool stands next to it on the clay floor. The wooden frame, through which its owner has pulled two shoulder straps, has the earliest form of a rucksack. Everything I see here reminds me of the simple life of the Indian tribes in South America, with whom I lived for several weeks many years ago. Hardly anything differs from the primitive early way of life of the first settlers on this earth.
Once we reach another pass, a massive, dark, closed wall of clouds stretches across the mountain peaks like a ceiling. The spectacle is unique and spectacular. Perhaps only 50 meters above us, the world seems to stop. Everything, but absolutely everything, is swallowed up by the threatening layer of fog, while the view below is clear and wide. We cycle on, get slippery wet in the swirling sea of ghosts, pierce it like a spearhead and suddenly look down from an eagle’s-eye view from above onto the drifting Brodem. It’s a bit like taking off in an airplane on a clear day, flying through the cloud layer and looking down on the white-grey sea from a great height for just a few minutes. Not for the first time on this eventful day, we are fascinated by the spectacle of our Mother Earth and would love to give her a standing ovation.
We now glide through a dream world of rounded hills covered in lush green grass and bushes. The last rays of sunlight peek through an even higher layer of cloud. Then it goes to the village of tt. Sin Ho descends steeply for a few hundred meters. We quickly find the guest house. The bikes are allowed to spend the night in a large function room while we move into our overheated room on the second floor. Because the fan doesn’t work, we carry everything up to the second floor again. There we move into another room and fall into a deep sleep of exhaustion at 9 pm, half unconscious from tiredness, but happy about this unforgettable day…
If you would like to find out more about our adventures, you can find our books under this link.
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