Day Four—the final day of our little tour along the Vietnam-Laos border—is a race against the clock.
Our mission is clear. We need to arrive in the town of Mai Chau by twelve o’clock midday in order to catch a bus to Hanoi. This bus must then reach downtown Hanoi in time for us to take a cab to the airport to meet our mystery taxi driver, who will be waiting outside the Arrivals hall, armed with two empty cardboard boxes, at three-thirty precisely. We must then pack our bicycles into the boxes and check-in upstairs in time for our five-fifty-five flight back to Saigon. That’s a lot of deadlines for someone whose idea of ‘punctuality’ is where to place the comma.
Between us and Mai Chau lies one-hundred-and-ten kilometres and one-thousand-five-hundred metres of elevation. Much to the dismay of Monsieur “grasse matinée” Punty, this means having to wake up at three o’clock in the morning and set off at the obscene time of three-thirty.
At three o’clock, I stumble downstairs in my sweet-smelling cycling kit and start filling my face with granola, mindful of the exertions ahead. Hearing the noise, possibly of my chewing, the owner appears, still wearing the same clothes as yesterday. He starts shaking my hand. “Thank you, thank you; goodbye,” he says, clearly desperate to go back to bed. Sadly for him, Monsieur Punty doesn’t surface for another fifteen minutes, looking as fresh as the twelfth day of Christmas. Finally, when the granola has run out, the owner gets his wish and we set off in the dark under a persistent, light rain.
In spite of his unmatched organisational prowess, Monsieur Punty is now ruing the fact that he didn’t bring any lights for his bicycle. But when you’re as masterful as he is at organising things, I guess you never need a contingency plan; until now. At the other end of the spectrum, I am utterly hopeless at organising anything and so generally assume that Plan A will fail and therefore just focus on Plan B. Bicycle lights was Plan B. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!
We start off slowly, still half-asleep, Monsieur Punty riding as close to me as possible, just so he can see where he’s going. With the rain clouds thick overhead, it’s not just dark; it’s pitch black: blacker than a lump of coal in a coffin. All I can think about as we cover the first kilometres of undulating country roads, are fathomless potholes and rabid dogs. If one doesn’t get me, the other will, I mutter under my breath.
After eighteen kilometres of dog-paranoid pedalling, we slam into a five-kilometre vertical ‘wall’ that has me regurgitating the granola and Monsieur Punty heaving like an out-of-shape baggage handler. Such suffering before morning coffee is truly the stuff of savages!
And then comes the rain. And not your average “take an umbrella, just in case” kind of rain but your Old Testament Noah’s Ark kind of rain. Torrential and warm, as you only get in the tropics. The best rain in the whole world!
We scale the hill-from-hell and tip-toe precariously down the other side. The rain eases briefly, as we begin the flat run-in to Mai Chau but then returns with a vengeance, turning the roads into rivers and the rivers into rapids. Undeterred, Monsieur Punty and I press on, heads down, pedalling hard, sharing turns on the front and checking our watches as we approach the outskirts Mai Chau.
Upon arriving in town, we look about for bike shops with cardboard boxes and friendly owners: a niche cycling category if ever there was one. Meanwhile, I see an ATM and decide to top up our cash reserves to fund our next calamity. Unfortunately, my visit coincides with a middle-aged woman withdrawing eight trillion Vietnam Dong, one hundred Dong at a time, using 35 different bank cards. The queue behind her is like the ladies toilet at a Taylor Swift concert.
While I am camped out at the ATM, Monsieur Punty strikes gold when he spots a bike shop just down the road. We head over, praying to God that it contains two cardboard boxes and a friendly owner with lots of sellotape. To our surprise and delight, it has both. With almost uncontainable enthusiasm, the owner fetches two cardboard boxes from the back of his shop and gets to work squeezing our filthy, wet bikes into them. Monsieur Punty and I look on in admiration, elated at this happy turn of events.
We squeeze the packed boxes into the boot of a waiting taxi and head over to a nearby hotel, where we shower, change into clean clothes and purchase two pairs of used flip-flops. Another short taxi hop and we arrive at the bus stop at eleven-forty-five. Better timing than a Japanese bullet train.
As we are sitting at the bus stop, a dilapidated old bus rolls past, coming to a halt some twenty yards further down the road. I shout out to the driver in my best Vietnamese; “Hanoi?” He nods authoritatively. Monsieur Punty and I scramble over to the bus and load our boxes into the passenger compartment, which is already bursting at the seams with boxes of fruit and vegetables and a large electric fan. Indeed, the bus is so packed full of luggage, there is only enough space left for three passengers. We squeeze ourselves in amongst the flora and fauna and the bus sets off; destination Hanoi.
Unbeknown to Monsieur Punty and I, we are actually on the wrong bus. The bus we are supposed to take, a fragrantly air-conditioned vehicle with onboard wifi and a whole lot less fruit, will arrive ten minutes after we have left. But our ‘wrong’ bus was still going to Hanoi, so it was still all good. Or so we thought.
An hour-and-a-half into our journey, the bus abruptly leaves the highway and pulls into a garage. We wait. Ten minutes passes. I look out the window and see the driver idly puffing on a cigarette. After twenty minutes, I decide to check on how many packets he intends to smoke before we can get going again. I fight my way past the fruity foliage and electric fan and descend from the bus only to see the vehicle jacked up on three wheels and two oily mechanics inspecting a very worn-out tyre. One mechanic appears to be filling three holes the size of golf balls with some kind of sealant. He then re-inflates the tyre, only for jets of sealant to squirt high into the air like a water fountain display at a shopping mall.
Another twenty minutes passes. We have fallen way behind schedule. The mystery man in the taxi with the cardboard boxes we no longer need is less concerning to us than the flight we cannot change and cannot miss.
I tell the bus driver a life-and-death shaggy-dog story, inserting the word “hospital” twice for dramatic effect, in the hope it will prompt him to simply pay for a new tyre so we can get moving. Instead, the thrifty bus driver makes a call and minutes later, flags down another bus—an altogether more roadworthy vehicle—heading to Hanoi. He loads our boxes into the boot of the new bus and off we set once more, racing against the clock to catch our flight to Hanoi. On the approach to Hanoi, I message the mystery man in the taxi, informing him that we no longer require his excellent services but that we will pay him anyway. He thanks me like I just bailed him out of jail.
After a quick drop-off on the outskirts of Hanoi and a short taxi transfer, we finally arrive at Hanoi airport. On time, bikes packed, wearing identical pairs of flip-flops and a big smile.
It has been a mad dash but we have made it. We walk through the open doors of the departure terminal and look up at the flight information screen. “Flight delayed,” it informs us, without even a hint of irony.
I smile at Monsieur Punty. I like to think it is God’s way of saying “Well done, you made it. Now go and have a nice bowl of Wagyu noodles and relax”.
And so that’s exactly what we did.
The End