Some people find it quite disorienting to wake up in different hotel rooms each day. Personally, I don’t really mind, it doesn’t seem to bother me. That’s assuming I’m just waking up at my normal time. When the doorbell keeps ringing at 2:00am, it’s a different story. It takes me a while to even work out what the noise is – it’s not like it’s the doorbell from home.
OK, I’ve come to enough to work out it’s the doorbell. Prostitutes maybe? It is a border town after all. Hmm, usually they only knock once, then leave me alone. Why is it still ringing? Time to get up and look through the peephole. Oh. Two hotel staff, and three uniformed policemen. Perhaps I’ll put the clothes on then.
I knew straight away what was going on. The hotel staff had not filled in the proper registration forms when we arrived, and had not kept our passports. It just so happened that the police decided to do a raid, and they found that things were not in order. So I got my clothes, grabbed the passport, and went out to see them. Sure enough, they needed my passport, and they wanted me to go downstairs. Hmm. This could go badly.
But funnily enough, I wasn’t worried, because when I told them Anna was also in the room, but was asleep, the policeman put his finger to his lips, and was concerned about waking her. That put me at ease, and I gladly grabbed both our passports and headed down to the lobby, where the staff could fill in the required forms while the police watched. Bleary-eyed, I stood there waiting, watching an enormous rat make its way across the marble lobby, working its way around to us, before suddenly seeing us and turning tail, fleeing across the shiny floor, and out the enormous hole to the construction site next door. It’s that kind of place.
Eventually they finish with the passports, and I’m sent back to bed. Takes a while to get back to sleep after that though, too many bright lights in the lobby. Just another day on the road for me, poor old Anna was starting to worry about what was going on though.
We’re in Vietnam now, in Long Xuyen. Vietnam is a lot busier than Cambodia, and it makes things a bit more “interesting.” Luckily we got on a quiet road for our ride from Ha Tien to Chau Doc. It wasn’t on my map, but about 4km out of Ha Tien, we turned left onto a road that followed one of the huge canals here, mostly very close to the border with Cambodia.
It’s the Mekong Delta now for us. Huge canals marching off like grid lines across a flat, flat land. Water is everything here, with most of the land at least semi-submerged. Often the road is the only raised point. Houses crowd on both sides of the road, but they’re built on stilts above the water. Rice paddies stretch out for miles, but unfortunately we’re struggling to find rice meals, it’s all rice noodles here instead. Quite a good meal, but once you’ve had it for four meals in a row (including breakfast) you start looking for variety. That’s why we were quite happy to find the supermarket in this town, which had a reasonably good selection, and we brought a lot of stuff. All manner of crackers, cheese, chocolate, snacks, cereal and lollies. Good stuff too, was like a little party in our room.
It’s very busy around here, and it’s going to get even busier over the next few days, as we get closer to Saigon. I think we’ll take it easy, do the ~200km over 3 days rather than two. This gives us more time to negotiate the busy roads, and doesn’t wear you down so much. Couple of days there, then it will be time to turn back to Cambodia.
One more thing I must report on before closing out: What it’s like to travel with my wife, rather than my previous solitary man style. Well, the main place you’ll see a difference is in the state of the hotel room. As every other touring cyclist knows, your panniers are under a certain amount of bursting pressure, and it only takes about 3 minutes after arrival in a room for your gear to explode everywhere. If I was sharing a room with another cyclist, it wouldn’t just double the mess, it would quadruple it.
This goes against Anna’s nature, and so now you’ll find everything neatly arranged on her side of the room, while my gear is at least contained, if not orderly. Just doesn’t seem right, does it?
It’s good travelling with Anna though. Means I don’t have to do all the talking, organising, etc. Someone else to share the load, someone else to keep an eye on me, make sure I’m fed, watered and happy. A very nice change.