|
Born to be wild - day 4Oct 25, 2005
|
|
Kilns at brick making place
Brick extruder (broken down)
Tapioca processing place (always wondered what that stuff was)
Day 4 - Follow the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
Day 4 was much better than day 3, as we spent a lot of the time along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It also helped that the day started out really hot and sunny, which has been a rarity in Vietnam since I've been here. We rode for a while and stopped at various places. We also saw a lot of the places that had been affected by napalm and Agent Orange, as we went past one of the first places where they were used. the mountains are still completely bare of trees where they were dropped, and nothing can grow there any more.
After a while we got to a point near the frontier of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which was where the Ho Chi Minh trail started (or I suppose finished if they had been coming South). it's now a pretty big new road, which only opened a couple of years ago, although there a still a few bits along the way where the road din't follow the exact route of the trail.
The Scenery along the Ho Chi Minh trail was absolutely beautiful. It was all unspoilt jungle - completely covered in creepers and trees. I've never seen anywhere like it.
Unfortunately there are two mountains, and when it's sunny on one side, it's rainy on the sother side, and we started out on the sunny one. We were driving through cloud for a lot of the way and it was pretty wet. I had puddles in my shoes by the time we reached our destination (Gore-tex turns out to be pretty effective at keeping water in too!).
I'm not sure where our destination was, to be honest, and i saw very little of it. the rain didn't stop the whole time we were there, and we got take-away food (wild boar and deer!) at the hotel in the evening. I didn't have the best night's sleep either, as to start with when I went to bed there was a spider that must have been 15cm across on my wall. There was nothing big enough to catch it in, and it had run behind one of the beds before I could do anything about it! I obviously slept in the other bed, and tucked the mosquito net in tight around me. But then I woke up at around 3 in the morning to find that I was getting dripped on from the ceiling, as the rain had still not stopped, and the roof was leaking. My bed was absolutely soaked, so I had to change back to the other bed, not knowing where the spider might be, and with no lights (the electricity had cut out at some point!). Oh well, I didn't ever see the spider again, so hopefully I didn't bring it along with me!
