2Wheels2Laos: SaPa Day Two

Surreal day of biking today – we traveled down (and I mean down) to Ban Ho this morning – a Red Thai village at the bottom of the SaPa Valley. Much of the trip down was on dirt roads – full of miscellaneous boulders and occasional streams. When we first turned off the tarmac the hill was so steep that I had to lean back on my seat; I worried I would flip the bike.

The scenery is grand – in a way that my photos simply can’t convey. (Part of the problem is the haze from the everpresent cooking and agricultural fires, part of it is my lack of photographic skills). Most of the ride there was a steep cliff on our side, and we could look down hundreds of feet on acres of terraced fields and the river and the town below. The roads are all switchbacks, weaving their way up the mountain. The government is cutting some new roads into the mountains, and the amount of destruction caused by road construction is hard to describe. The roads are like a naked gash, and are accompanied by 20 stories of avalanche and debris traveling down from the road cut. The valley is also due to get a hydroelectric dam (although Bingh tells us this valley will not be flooded. ) There are already giant pylons for the high tension wires, and the area hopes to shed its dependence on electricity from China.

Lunch was nice – fried tofu with tomatoes, spiced fish, mustard and another green, rice, spring rolls and pork for the carnivores. Our guide continues to be solicitous about my pseudovegetarianism, and there’s always plenty to eat. There were also oreo cookies –with strawberry filling and peanut butter cream filling. Not as nutritionally proper as the fresh pineapple –but boy they tasted good.

The ride back up to the hotel was surreal. It’s about 15 kilometers, about half of it at a 10% grade. Happily, Bingh did not take us back up the dirt road but chose a paved road instead. When we got around 5km from the hotel, a dense fog (not the usual haze) overtook us. At one point, visibility was less than 20 feet. Somewhere in the mountains it poured, since some of the morning’s small streams that crossed the road had become raging rapids – at one of these, I dismounted and walked my bike (hopefully, the bike shoes will be pretty dry by morning). With the fog, we could hear children’s voices and not see them until we were within feet of them, and we could tell that motorbikes were coming mainly be the flapping of plastic from the ponchos that many of the drivers and passengers were wearing. Luckily , there were few cars and trucks – although again, the sound preceded the vehicle by a few minutes even though the vehicles were crawling along. I would not have wanted to drive a lorry next to a cliff in that soup. I was hugely relieved to see the 4-story buildings of SaPa, and really enjoyed the Jacuzzi and a massage this afternoon.

Off to dinner now. Tomorrow we cross the mountain pass at Tram Ton – the highest road in Vietnam at 2000m. We stay in Tam Duong tomorrow, and from there go to Lai Chau. This town is to be inundated by a dam recently completed, so our guide has warned us that the hotel is more rustic, and they are not concentrating on even maintenance at this point. The government is building a replacement town a number of miles away – this will be the last season that these bike tours will be going to Lai Chau.