Good morning SE Asia!: 07/12/13

Saigon, capital city of Vietnam - tick! We had a good time, we are glad we've seen it and we are glad to move on. Today we will be heading towards Sadec, to us now famously known as the birth town of our Saigon taxi driver (see last blog entry), for most others known as just another random town in Vietnam. No, hold on apparently it is also agricultural and industrial trading centre says wikipedia.

We expected the escape from the big city to be a tough one. On arrival it seemed almost impossible to get into the city, so we expected it to be similar on the way out and left early. Also, it was going to be another 140km cycle. I am starting to see a trend here.

Surprisingly getting out of Saigon seemed fairly easy. To be fair it was a Saturday morning, but the roads seemed far less busy and after only about 30mins we seemed to have escaped the worst.

However, only after about 2km I noticed that my gears were badly adjusted. I didn't check it probably after collecting the bike from the bike shop. I was too excited and just expected it to work. Also the extra weight from my luggage and me now having to push more up the hills didn't help. I ended up having only two usable gears. Very disappointing!

Today we were going through the Mekong Delta crossing countless bridges leading over estuaries of the river which were busy with cargo and fishing boats of all sizes. People were shouting "hello" again from everywhere which was nice as we hadn't heard it for a while cycling on the AH1 and spending time in big cities. And the first prize for best ever "hello" ever goes to ....a guy floating along holding onto a fallen tree down one of the main arms of the Mekong delta. The poor bugger nearly drowned when he spotted us crossing the bridge above him and gave all his might to get our attention. Funny the difference in perspectives as to what is considered unusual across the world!

We were cycling mainly alongside a main road, less busy with trucks than motorcycles, and mainly flat which was good for me and my broken gears.
Well, actually there was one little climb at the end which was a bridge. It was only 50m but fairly steep and I had to creep up very slowly in a high gear. I saw Greg disappearing in the Horizon, when all of a sudden a motorbike pulled up behind me very slowly. I didn't really know what was happening until the guy stuck his leg out against my panniers and wanted to push me up the hill like they like to do it in Vietnam to each other. Nice thought, but I got a massive fright and after all didn't need any help. I shouted "No, no, NOOO!" and the guy buggered off. I felt bad afterwards, as he obviously only wanted to help.

We stopped in a little road side café shortly after that and treated ourselves to a big measuring jug of sugar cane juice with ice. They have started selling this everywhere in the South and it is absolutely delicious. A real kick for tired legs! They are using this special sugar cane press machine which squeezes the juice out of the cane, and presumably anything else you might stick in there - careful with those fingers!They have a good technique of pressing, then folding, and folding the cane again to get the most juice out. It is super sweet and healthy.

Sadec was quite nice. Nothing special, just a nice little crossroads town. We had a drink in a little café across the road from our hotel before we checked in. Took us a little while to find it but it was a very nice older style hotel and we had a balcony with a view of the bust crossroads below. Went for an early dinner in a very busy restaurant just down the road as we had no lunch. We had enormous amounts of delicious food and a few beers which was served by a little camp waiter who spoke quite good English and was quite the entertainer. He made us eat sour apple with chilli salt, and politely pretended he couldn't understand us anymore when we told him we didn't like it! It's part of the culture not to be rude about food, or ever say 'no' really, but he did ask directly, so how do you lie?

We were looking forward now to our upcoming little island retreat in Phu Quoc!

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