Aug
Laugh now. Pay later.
Collywobbles, n. / KALL ee wob ulls / Intestinal distress characterized by cramping and diarrhea.
Jul
British newspaper columnists have gone frothy mad over the Chugger explosion
Over food and drinks yesterday with book agent and mujer fabulosa Madeleine Morel, I learned a new word: Chugger.
Chugger, as Madeleine explained in her droll manner, a sweating glass of Sancerre in her hand, is what you get by compressing “charity mugger” into two syllables.
And, she added, a chugger is one of those people you constantly find on the sidewalks of Manhattan — and maybe also San Fran, Chicago and even L.A., if L.A. had “sides” where people actually “walked” — who stand around with clipboards waiting to mug passers by on behalf of some charitable cause. Thus, the slightly derisive appellation, Chugger.
I don’t find them too annoying, actually. Partly because I don’t find them too often, and because I live in Brooklyn, where fewer Chuggers roam the broken concrete in search of tax-deductible donations.
So thanks to Madeleine Morel at Bookhaven. That was a good one.
Almost as good as Gongoozler. Which the book, “Depraved and Insulting English,” by Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea, defines thusly:
Gongoozler. / gon GOOZ ler / a dimwit who stares at unusual things.
Come to think of it, I may frequently veer into gongoozler territory, myself.
By the way, this post has nothing to do with Roadmonkey, adventure philanthropy, or our upcoming cycling & farm-building expedition to Vietnam in November.
Be kind to Chuggers. They obviously believe in what they’re doing enough to risk scorn, abuse and, worst of all, indifference.
Paul
paul@roadmonkey.net
Jul
Vietnam 2008: Roadmonkey expedition co-leader Brent Wexler & new semi-friend.
When I launched Roadmonkey last year, some people told me to change the name. “I can’t see CNN or ABC News doing a segment about a company called ‘Roadmonkey’,” one person in the PR business told me.
Well, he turned out to be wrong.
But other people asked, and rightfully so, what “adventure philathropy” was supposed to mean. It’s a long, gangly phrase, after all, that combines two words that are well known on their own but not exactly comfortable when enclosed together in quotation marks.
Adventure philanthropy. It also doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Yet I named my company after this idea. Why?
Because, for one, I liked the idea of bringing the idea of old-school philanthropy – with its musty image of wealthy people sitting in parlors with fireplaces deciding how to dispense millions of dollars to charity – back to the common woman and man, where it belongs. As Roadmonkey expeditions to Vietnam and Tanzania have proven, anyone can become an adventure philanthropist, if they have the gumption, fortitude and curiosity to get out into the world and get their hands a little dirty.
Also, for-profit adventure travel companies were more or less invented in the 1960s, when no one knew if people would pay you to take them on ass-kicking adventures in foreign lands where – get this – almost no one speaks English. And by spring 2008, when I launched the Roadmonkey website, it was high time to push the adventure travel paradigm to the next level: Adventure philanthropy. I hope that in 20 years the phrase will be as much of a no-brainer as “adventure travel” is now.
Finally, can you think of a shorter word for philanthropy? If I could have, I would have used it. (Adventure Volunteering is even longer.)
But I’m open to suggestions, comments, criticisms, ridicule, derision, verbal threats, encomia and cheeseburgers.
More from the road, which will include Roadmonkey scouting trips to Nicaragua and Peru in July & August, soon.
- Paul
Jul
Roadmonkey Videos
Vietnam 2008 -- Cycling the northwest
Vietnam 2008 -- Building a playground at an orphanage
Jul
I’ll write more about this over the weekend, but the short answer is, adventure philanthropy is the brand of travel Roadmonkey offers to curious people interested in pushing their personal, physical and cultural boundaries on challenging overseas expeditions.
Adventure philanthropy means opening one’s mind and spirit to a new adventure with a small group of like-minded explorers.
Adventure philanthropy is Roadmonkey way of exploring a country by integrating ourselves into its daily fabric.
Adventure philanthropy means breaking the rules when necessary to thoughtfully help people in need.
Adventure philanthropy means getting your hands dirty to build something useful…and having fun doing it.
More on this over the weekend.
Paul
director, Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy
Jul
After climbing Kili for seven days, we took one day in Moshi to recuperate and do as little as possible, to recharge mentally and physically. After an 8-hour bus ride to Dar es Salaam, we began, on June 30, our four-day volunteer project at a small school for about 130 children in Mbagala, a village on the edge of Dar.
The school, known as Bibi Jann, after its co-founder, Jann Mitchell Sandstrom, comprises kindergarten through third grade, and a number of its students, radiant and lively and all from the rather impoverished local village, have been orphaned by AIDS. Bibi is the Swahili word for grandma, and a number of local bibis work at the school and with the children to provide a sense of community, maternity and good ol’ fashioned home cooking.
Roadmonkey team member Jolie Altman, right, with a local bibi, during our volunteer project at a school near Dar es Salaam.
Roadmonkey’s mission at the Bibi Jann school was straightforward: Our 10-member crew had four days to make the school a brighter, better, healthier learning environment for the kids.
Specifically, we would build 25 new school desks…
Work boots not required: Roadmonkeys Jo Ellingson (left) and Stef Levner, with George, Bibi Jann's English teacher, building desks on Day 1 of our volunteer work at the school.
…paint four classrooms…
Paintmonkeys: from left, Julie, Christine and Rollie, working with locally hired men from Mbagala village, painting the school's kindergarden classroom.
…add, at the request of the teachers, instructional murals and English words…
Bibi Jann English teacher George inspecting progress in one classroom.
…install natural gas cook stoves to replace the more expensive and environmentally destructive wood charcoal stoves the school used to cook kids’ lunches…
Two natural-gas stoves -- a waaay more environmentally friendly, and cheaper, way to cook school lunches than burning wood coal -- that Tanzania Roadmonkeys bought by collecting tax-deductible donations from their own social networks.
…and install a virtually maintenance-free purification system to provide the schoolchildren clean drinking water for the first time!
Roadmonkey Susan Patel with the A.J. Antunes UFL 420 system, bought by Roadmonkey through tax-deductible donations gathered by our expedition members.
In all, the 10-member Roadmonkey team raised more than $11,000 in tax-deductible donations to fund our volunteer project at the Bibi Jann school — a wonderful testament to the group members’ dedication, hard work and teamwork.
Women at Work: from left, Rollie, Julie and Susan, of the Roadmonkey crew, after a day of painting classrooms at the Bibi Jann school.
We took breaks, too, to spend time with the children, an energetic, welcoming and thankful group of people whom we were honored to have a chance to meet and work for.
Why we did it, part 1.
Why we did it, part 2.
After our fourth day of work, all of us were exhausted but gratified, knowing we’d given the school, the children, the teachers and Tanzania our best collective effort. What a way to spend your summer vacation…
Roadmonkey at rest: With Bibi Jann school teachers, construction workers, painters, plumbers and bus drivers.
Jun
Perhaps the hardest single physical test any of us have ever endured…and accomplished: At 9:30 am, June 26, 2009, all 10 Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy expedition members reached the top of this extraordinary mountain. At 19,345 feet, or 8,894 meters, we’d made it to “the roof of Africa.”
8 Roadmonkeys, with Tanzanian guides, on Kili's summit, after a 9-hour grueling climb that started at midnight.
Jun
The Roadmonkey team has reached Barafu Camp about 15,000 ft., or 4,600 meters, after 2 days of short but very strenuous hikes up hills and back down into valleys. We came through some light snow and are overlooking a cloud layer below us that has been just stunning to have as a backdrop for our climb to the summit later this evening.
Day 4: A short, spirited hike into the valley of the shadow of...Kilimanjaro's summit.
Backtracking one day, yesterday we reached Karranga Camp, a pleasant, short day hike from the previous camp. Arriving with legs still fresh, we had a lovely breakthrough sing-along of sorts with our guides and porters after they asked us to share their lunch of Ugali, the Tanzanian staple made from maize, and a beef sauce. Despite their huge workloads, the porters arrive at camp each day seemingly impervious to cold or fatigue; they manage to assemble and welcome us with songs as we arrive.
Group sing-along: Porters and Roadmonkeys, harmonizing in Swahili.
So on this day, after the communal meal, the porters and guides began singing, and we all climbed onto the largest rock we could find, and sang along with them…in Swahili. Whatever. It was a genuinely gratifying bonding experience.
from left: Susan, Jolie, Rollie, Gerald (one of our mountain guides), Stef & Christine, after dancing in an impromptu conga line.
Okay, back to the present: Today, June 25, we reached our camp at about 2pm. We just had lunch and are resting now for an early dinner at 5pm. Then, we will sleep or try to sleep, until 11pm, whereupon we will wake and gather our gear to begin climbing at around midnight, for around 8 or 9 hours, until we reach Uhuru Peak. Uhuru (“independence,” in Swahili) is the highest point in Africa, at 19,345 ft., or 5,896 meters.
And so we begin our toughest day at midnight.
Illinois in the house: Jolie "Mother" Altman, originally from Highland Park, and Paul "Roadmonkey" von Zielbauer, born & raised in Aurora, chillin' at 15,000 feet. (photo: Christine Burke)
Many of us are feeling very fatigued because we have not gotten much sleep, and despite our excellent guide from Tanzania Journeys (our guiding company), and our porters who have all been magnificent, generous and gracious hosts and assistants and helpers, many of us are feeling the effect of 5 days of hiking and lack of sleep and generally putting our bodies to a mental and physical test that i daresay most of us haven’t ever quite experienced. But we remain in anticipatory high spirits.
As they say in Swahili, Hakuna matata. “No problem.”
Our excellent lead Kilimanjaro guide, Goodluck Charles -- yes, that's his real name -- and Roadmonkey expedition co-leader Stef Levner. (photo: Christine Burke)
Look for another post from the peak of Kilimanjaro in about 12 hours.
Goodnight and best wishes,
Paul
Jun
Today, our group is hiking for another 8 hours, ascending about 600 meters (or about 1,000 feet) only to go back down 500m to set up camp, as the rules of climbing at this height require that we sleep lower than our peak daily altitude, to avoid illness…and to camp where there is a source of water, to avoid not having any.
Breakout the sunscreen: As we climbed above the cloud layer, the rays became intense.
Our group is well fed, our porters are excellent, our guides are knowledgeable and we are in high spirits as we head into Day 3, with Mt. Kilimanjaro’s peak and the glacier directly in front of us.
We walked about 8 miles spanning the length of about 8 hours, moving from sort of a high desert region with small shrubs and the stubbly, hardy, rock-clinging flowers, into an area called, somewhat cinematically, the “Lava Tower.”
Lava Tower is a very tall, very vertical frozen spray of rock underneath the glacier that tops Mt. Kilimanjaro; we had a very satisfying lunch of hearty vegetable soup (we were so impressed with the daily soups that Tanzania Journey porters made that our group asked the cook for his recipes, to create a “Kilimanjaro cookbook the guides can sell themselves). In fact, Mt Kilimanjaro is a volcanic mountain – the tallest peak in Africa, formed by a volcano.
Think your job's tough? Kilimanjaro porters have our eternal respect, carrying unbelievably heavy loads, up insanely steep inclines, at ridiculously high altitudes.
After lunch we passed through a narrow chute in the ridge line leading up to the peak. We then descended, because part of the strategy of climbing Kilimanjaro is to climb higher each day than the elevation at which we sleep to avoid altitude sickness. We walked downhill for about 2-3 hours, a fairly steep downhill trudge through rocks and a new kind of desert landscape with giant, cactus-like trees, although they really are not cacti at all but enormous flowering desert plants unique to this area.
Descending after ascending, past Mr. Cloud, toward Barranca Camp.
Walking downhill, as our group found out, is actually more difficult than walking uphill because you’re using different muscles in your legs to constantly arrest your fall. Climbing downhill is also much harder on the knees than going uphill. It was another endurance test but our group remained in very good spirits, as we each were mentally comparing the gut-it-out nature of our Day hike to this one.
We camped at a camp called Camp Barranca, at about 10,000 ft, overlooking the lights of Moshi, the market town where we began our trek, far down in the distance. Behind was the peak of Kilimanjaro.
Straight outta Star Trek: descending back down into a cloud, past Kili flora that grew increasingly exotic.
We woke up this morning and had our usual breakfast of porridge and eggs. Now we will begin another climb uphill, although all of our climbs are up-and-down; no climb is all uphill or all downhill. We will go further up the mountain than we have been at any other point and then descend a little bit further, to almost the same level we are today to prepare for our final approach to the summit in a few days’ time.
from left: Stef, Julie, Susan & Jo, all current NYC residents, sharing a light moment over breakfast.
For the most part, our group is in very good spirits. Our knees and legs and heads are holding up and no one has had any serious maladies at all – a few cuts and scrapes and bruises from falling down in the mud on Day 1 and Day 2. Absolutely nothing serious, and we in fact had a nice round table discussion with our guide and the 30 porters we have who are carrying all of our gear, our food, our tents except a small pack that each of us carry with our water and clothing and hats and sunscreen, etc.
Getting to know you: Before dinner, our guide, Goodluck Charles, in dark cap at left gesturing, translated questions and answers between Roadmonkey expedition members and some porters.
So we were able , through our guide, to have a translated discussion, and they were asking us about where we come from and what we do back home. We in turn, were asking them about why they chose to become porters, and the elements of their job, which are by accounts all very tough. We’ve all been commenting how difficult their jobs are and how hard they work to carry a lot of weight up to 19,345 ft.
After this enlightening discussion, we had a nice meal and of course we were, as usual, asleep by 9pm, knackered by not only the accumulation of fatigue but also the increasing cold and thinning air.
Good night for now,
Paul
Jun
We woke at 6:30 am, took quick note of our hilltop campsite in the new daylight, and after a breakfast of maize porridge, coffee and tea, eggs and sausages, began our Day 2 hike at 8:45 am.
Christine Burke, stretching, was the first Roadmonkey out of her tent.
We would spend most of the next 9 hours walking through spectacular upland rain forest backlit by a brilliant morning sun; then over more desert-like moorland, filled with rocks and shorter flora of a heartier, darker-green variety; and finally around a mountainous ridge, along a trail on which each step produced a small, dessicated puff of earthdust.
Walking from out of the rain forest and through a spectacular scene with the sun shining through the trees and the moss, and a constant hum of insects around us made us feel as if we were in the exotic land that indeed we had come to experience.
.
Our walk lasted about an hour until we took a break at the top of another hill and then we began a descent, then a climb into a high desert plateau full of volcanic rock and large green shrubs sized as tall as a man, and pockets of small white arctic-like flowers. Enormous vistas went on for miles on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.
Rain forest gives way to more desert-like moorland.
We had lunch along the trail. We have about 33 porters for the 10 of us, and after eating a lunch of baked chicken, fruits and vegetables, we began what would probably be our longest day – an exhausting 14km climb up to about 10,000 feet. A couple in our Roadmonkey group ran out of water at about 3 o’clock , and had to walk the last two hours up and down some steep slopes to reach our camp site and rehydrate.
Comin' round the bend, Kili's peak comes into view...sort of.
The camp site is called Shira-2, a high-desert perch that provides at once a downward view of the pillowy cloud line shrouding the world below us and an upward look at the (increasingly & disturbingly meager) glacier receding like a midlife hairline around Kilimanjaro’s summit. The summit, impossibly far above, gives us a visual of where we need to go, lifting our collective spirit after an exhausting, very physically and mentally challenging Day 2 climb that seemed it would never end.
Do a little dance: Roadmonkeys (from left) Susan, Christine, Jolie and Julie celebrate reaching our camp, after 9 hours hiking, with our team's effervescent porters.
But end it did, with a spectacular sunset at cloud level that we, from our tents, were looking down upon, watching orange bruise of the sun turn clouds below us first into pink gauze, then purple before giving way to night, with Mt. Meru (the second highest peak in Tanzania) in the distance.
Sunset above the cloud line: A long day rewarded in breathtaking fashion.
More soon from this increasingly wild, tough and challenging six-day climb up one of Mt. Kilimanjaro’s toughest routes.
Paul
Jun
Before beginning the hour-long drive to point where we’d begin climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro’s Lemosho route, the 10 Roadmonkey expedition members asked our guides, from Tanzania Journeys, to stop at a convenience store in Moshi for water and snacks.
Jolie, Rollie, Susan, Christine & Stef: Before we started pooping into wood boxes for six days
Then Team Roadmonkey left from our ranger station and hiked about 3 hours through some very green rainforest at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.
We passed very fresh signs of elephants – namely, large piles of dung along a narrow trail made very slick from recent rains. The beginning of the trail was very difficult and very steep, and many of our group members were quite exhausted by the end of the first hour.
We thought, at the time, that this was rigorous. We knew nothing.
But then the trail leveled off, and after a bag lunch under a canopy of trees in a meadow, we arrived at our hill top camping ground where we found about 20 other Kili climbers and their porters and guide.
Day 1 trail break: When we were still clean and untested
By about 8:30, all of the Road Monkey group was in their tents and asleep, exhausted from jet lag and a full day’s climb.
Paul
Jun
Hi everyone,
Today, most of Roadmonkey’s Tanzania expedition team members – from New York, San Francisco and Colorado – begin their journeys to JRO, Kilimanjaro’s airport, in northeast Tanz.
Here in New York, the weather is soggy and slightly chilled. Not a good sign as one heads into the airports here with three huge bags of gear. This could be flight-delay hell.
When I’m away from a computer, I will be updating our group’s progress, or lack thereof, on Twitter, @Roadmonkey_inc. So keep up with what we’re doing there.
More soon…
Paul
Paul von Zielbauer, director
Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy
Nov
Nov. 17: Between taking care of the Roadmonkey group here and finding time to eat and sleep, there is very little time for me to sit down, choose the words and photos worthy of the experience here and post them in a pleasing format. But here we go, starting in chronological order from where I last left off…
Nov. 8: Dien Bien Phu to Muong Lai: Having failed to, I think, properly convey the mud and rain saturation that northwest Vietnam can dispense on the visitor, I offer you this close up of my Oakley trail shoes. They served me well, for 10 days, before Mud Slide No. 7 finally submitted them. Bummer. Them were good Vietnam shoes. Maybe I can shred them for garden mulch….
-
lotus pond, Mai Chau, southwest of Hanoi.
Nov. 8, evening: We received, and eagerly accepted, an invitation for dinner at the suburban Son La home of a close family friend of Roadmonkey’s Vietnamese expedition guide, Quyet Tran. We arrived after dark, buying flowers and beer at the corner shop before sitting down on floor mats and eating spring rolls, boiled chicken and vegetable and beef hot pot, family style. As the honored guests, we were plied, again and again and again, and yet again, with homemade rice wine, the flavor of which varies in Vietnam between prison hootch and fragrant cherry-blossom grappa.
On this night, the firewater went down rather easily, if far too often. As you can see in this photo, one of the Vietnamese guys, an employee of the family patriarch, poured himself several too many thimble-sized glasses of liquor, producing in him a recitation of what clearly was his only remembered English phrases, rather shouted to all and sundry: “Tenkyu-verymuch!” and “Gude Afta-noon!”
After a dozen rounds of this, he was escorted by his associates to a back room, for a restorative nap.
Eating & drinking with passion: "Tenkyu-verymuch!"
Nov. 9: We spent two nights in Son La, to ride through the spectacular valley, which to my eyes seemed similar to the high-desert Chilean landscape in size, scope and refulgent afternoon light. We peddled past Ox-pulled carts driven by mere children, and I thought this is about as close you get in modern Vietnam to stepping back in time.
A river runs through it: Son La regional beauty.
Later Nov. 9: We spend the night in Mai Chau, a White Thai village area about 7km off the main highway to Hanoi. Below, a shot of our exit from Mai Chau, through a back “road” that winnowed into a footpath straddling rice fields.
Happily sunned and diesel exhausted: (from left) Conrad, Kim, Linh, Lauri and Paul.
The way the lodging works in Mai Chau is this: you arrive and set about picking one of the rentable “guest houses” – ie, a wooden house on stilts with a large communal room featuring stuffed fabric matresses, pillows, blankets and bamboo floors – and begin bargaining with the owner, who lives in the room below or beside the communal room, for a per-person price. We stayed at Guest House No. 19, run by Mr. Hùng and Ms. Mếch, a jovial husband 7 wife team that cooked up a tasty dinner of green veggies, vietnamese spring roll, chicken and beef dishes and, upon our request, several plates of khoai tây chiến (french – or do you say freedom? – fries). Drained by the day’s ride, followed by hot showers, food and cold Tiger beer, we hit the sack early and hard, each body entombed in diaphanous mosquito netting.
Sleeping like the dead, in a Mai Chau wood-stilt guest house.
Getting to know the children at Ba Vi orphanage.
Roadmonkeys assemble playground components at Ba Vi.
Nov. 12: The Ba Vi facility director, Ms. Phương, has the power to get things done fast, and she wielded it with efficient strokes in the days leading up to our arrival. She had, for instance, the concrete platform poured and finished in three days, after waiting more than a week for the torrential rains to end. As you can see below, the concrete was barely dry as the Roadmonkey crew began building the playground, purchased from a company in Hanoi with money we’d raised, $50 at a time, through three summer fundraisers, in New York and Washington.
Roadmonkey begins building the Ba Vi playground, for orphans and local school children.
Nov. 12 twilight: We made rapid progress on the playground construction, taking lunch breaks to eat together with the Ba Vi staff and visit with the orphans.
Workin' it: The Roadmonkey playground for the children of Ba Vi takes form.
Nov. 13: With no time to shilly-shally, our group organized ourselves in to a pretty impressive construction crew. Thank god we found some conical hats (sported nicely by Roadmonkey co-leader Brent Wexler, in between the slides in the photo below), as the sun-baked afternoons kept us running to the water jug.
After a ceremony and playground dedication, we cut the red ribbon, officially opening the Ba Vi playground, the biggest, coolest, and certainly most colorful playground any of saw during our 500-mile journey through northwest Vietnam. And how cool is that?
Why we came to Ba Vi, part 2.
Nov
Xin chào, các bạn và quí vị,
We’ve arrived in Ba Vi, Vietnam, in the cooler elevated region west of Hanoi, after another four days or so of mountain biking and living fully each day in northwest Vietnam. Once again, we’ve been out of email range for an extended period, so this post will attempt to catch you up, visually and otherwise, on where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to. Thanks to whomever turned off the daily rain deluge; we haven’t seen rain since Nov. 8, and we are mos def not complaining.
Nov. 7: We departed our rustic lodge in Muong Lai, where sweaty shirtless Vietnamese guys in matching sneakers played furious badminton matches in the rain-kissed courtyard. The open-air hotel lobby, filled with teak tables and chairs and which doubles as a drinking area, held an impressive array of jars filled with rice wines flavored with scorpions, worms, cobras and our favorite: giant lizard (see photo). By that point, one of us was sporting a shiner and bruised ribs after flying over the handle bars during a rapid downhill descent two days earlier, another of us had come down with a chronic migraine and a stomach virus and a third and fourth were also on the road to Chunkytown, if you know what I mean. The expedition was going native, right quick.
Lounge lizard, Vietnamese style
Nov. 8: Our longest day – 11.5 hours – on the road, from Muong Lai down to Dien Bien Phu, the site near the Lao border of the decisive Vietnamese military victory over the French in 1954, and then all the way back up to Tuần Giáo and then down Highway 6 to Sơn La, the pleasant if kitchy provincial capital seated in a gorgeous valley surrounded by jagged stegasaurus-like mountain peaks.
The way this Roadmonkey expedition was planned, when were weren’t pedaling, we had one 12-seat van transporting people, one “Joe the plumber” type van filled with our mountain bikes, and either me or my co-leader, Brent Wexler, riding the Honda 125cc motorbike. So to get from Muong Lai (see map here) to Sơn La, we got to know each other quite well in between breaks for bathroom and food and panoramic vista photo opps.
the road to Sơn La: let the sun shine in.
But in Vietnam, particularly outside the major cities and towns, “road” is a euphamism for a path precariously carved from a deforested hill or mountainside. And when that path gets rained on for days, it morphs into an orangey sludge-filled Slip-N-Slide that is not fun to drive on a motorbike. And yet, the Vietnamese can get pretty much anywhere they want on a motorbike, regardless of weather, conditions or the formal existence of petty items like pavement. I was on the bike on this particular day, and didn’t fare as well.
The Vietnamization of Oakley trail shoes and (warm!) marino Ibex shirt
Oakley trail shoes: they survived northwest Vietnam, after a washing.
Mudslides are common in the northwest of Vietnam, given the climate, precipitaiton, steep hillsides and incredible human need for wood, which devastates the trees that othewise would anchor the soil that tends to vomit itself by the kilo-ton onto the roads here so frequently.
Traffic back up: We got stuck behind this mud-swallowed lorry, on a not-so-impressive segment of Highway 6, 40km west of Sơn La
Not impressed: Villagers responded to us usually, but not always, wreathed in smiles and choruses of "Hey-lo!"
Driving with class: our van driver - his name actually is Van - taking a GQ break on the road
Nov
Greetings, mon petite Roadmonkeys. The expedition finally made its way to Muong Lai, about 130 miles southwest of Sapa, where we began cycling around Vietnam’s northwest.
Photographs by Pablo Casares, the expedition photographer.
Trainmonkeys: sharing a laugh, after a few sips from Roadmonkey's wine stash, on the train from Hanoi to Lao Cai.
Nov. 2: From Hanoi, we boarded the night train to Lao Cai, a 9-hour overnight journey that our group promptly christened by chugging through seven bottles of red wine (about half the expedition’s supply) before some needed rest. We arrived in Lao Cai at 5 a.m., greeted by darkness and a steady rain. Vietnam, of course, means Viet Rain, so we were prepared.
Nov. 4: From the eco-lodge, we biked back up to Sapa, a region populated with several ethnic minorities, including (Black, Flower and other) Hmong, Black Thai and Dzao. In Sapa, we refreshed ourselves with Vietnamese coffees and pastries and drove in the vans up the Tram Ton Pass, past waterfalls to the peak of the pass. Then it was time to mount the iron horses (aka mountain bikes) and dive-bomb the downslope toward Lai Chau, the relatively new provincial capital to the west.
the road from Sapa: bargaining hard, with hmong school girls
Nov. 5: In the bar of our hotel in Lai Chau, several expedition members drank several “Hanoi” beers with a young Vietnamese woman and her dude, who were quite obviously blitzed. But they offered us some tasty jerky, purportedly made from beef. (We asked, because this region is well known for a special meat delicacy: dog).
Later, we walked around the boulevard of not-yet-broken dreams, newly built by the Party in Lai Chau to highlight its transformation from rural backwater to provincial capital. If our group had any doubt about the capacity for Communist self-visualization, the were disabused of it via billboards like the one below.
awed by Communism
Nov. 5 (still): After motoring west out of Lai Chau, over another mountain pass, we mounted the bikes again (in the front yard of this surprised but graciously accommodating villager) and blew down the curving road, full of switchbacks. One of the expedition members flew over the handlebars, crashing on the road near one particular tight corner. All was well, just a cut and scrape or two.
From left: David, Conrad, Philip, Mike & Paul, ready to roll to Muong Lai
Nov. 5 (still!): On the road from Lai Chau to Muong Lai, we found an old iron bridge with wood slats and decided to roll over it and the churning & chocolately Na River, putting us within a few miles of the Lao border.
the road to Muong Lai: a couple miles from the border with Laos.
Nov. 6: Muong Lai sits at the floor of a valley that will be flooded in 2010 or so, for a massive government hydro-electric project. This town and several others, inhabited mostly by ethnic minority villagers, will be underwater. The villagers will hopefully get advance warning, and move to higher ground. The government is resettling many tribal villages now.
Muong Lai: mellow moment in the Lan Anh Hotel courtyard
building bridges: tossing rocks into bamboo baskets for a new motorbike crossing over this river a few kilometers from the Lao border.
Nov. 6: A day off the bicycles. We instead hiked around Muong Lai and discovered an abandoned Vietnamese Army outpost built in 1960, six years after the decisive victory over the colonial French Army at Dien Bien Phu, about 80 miles southwest of here.
The army outpost has now been commandeered by a vicious band of cows.
After fending off the vicious band of cows, we sat down to eat them. (Not really). At our hotel, after a long day of hiking through nearby villages, we were famished, and ate very well.
Muong Lai: eating like emperors
Check back here soon! We’ll have more from the road.
