Tam Chuc to Hanoi

We cycled away from the Tam Chuc complex to the cacophony of cicadas on a hot morning. We took a wide empty highway between the green hills, crossing through rural landscapes until we reached the small town of Huong Son. Passing over a bridge which crossed a river and quayside with a multitude of bright blue boats used to ferry people into a sacred area, containing the famed Perfume Pagoda, within a religious complex populated by Buddhist temples, pagodas, and shrines built directly into limestone karst mountains. Unfortunately, we had no time to linger and explore and only paused to look at all the boats, as we wanted to arrive in Hanoi before rush hour and in daylight.

We passed along the main street decorated in the usual Vietnamese flags on a sleepy morning. Proprietors of the shops alert to possible business tried to entice us over. We ambled along to the odd shout of “hello” which broke out from the shaded shop fronts. We raised a hand in acknowledgment, not really knowing where the disembodied voices came from.

Our route meandered along quiet roads and onto tracks through the green fields of rice, their stalks laden with visible grains, drooping and awaiting harvest. The tracks criss crossed the lattice of fields and we bumped along merrily, losing our thoughts. Small piles of snail shells appeared frequently and we surmised they had been gathered from the fields and eaten. A motherlode of escargot that would demand a high price in a French Restaurant.

We planned a short stop at Quảng Phú Cầu village which was on our route. Known for being an ‘incense village’, where incense sticks are manufactured (on a large scale). The artisan craft is underpinned by a laborious operation involving splitting the bamboo down to thinner sticks in stages - drying, splitting again, to the point they are ready to be coated in a vibrant mix of aromatic herbs coloured with pigment.
Riding into the village we passed lines of incense sticks drying on the roadside, along with bundles of brightly colourful sticks, appearing to look like a meeting of large psychedelic men’s traditional badger shaving brushes.
They were everywhere.
We stopped at one of the tourist outlets, which was an area covered in bundles of sticks in many different colours. They had been arranged to allow you to walk amongst them, provided you paid a small fee. A popular attraction: many people availed themselves of the curated photo opportunities, using the raised walkway to capture the display from above, or a step ladder to help curate their perfect social media portrait.
We wandered about for a bit and then explored the village backstreets where other factories and family business were tucked away, betrayed by drying incense bundles, or an open door revealing part of the painting process and machinery, covered in bright pink or red pigment. Heading out of town more factories backed onto the street. Dark places, enclosed and windowless, with figures hunched over, passing bamboo in one end of a machine as it shot out small sticks from the other. Piles of sawdust lay all around and workers were hooded or had hats on, masks covering their faces, barely protecting them from the clouds of wood dust that I could see against the dim light fixtures. This is the reality and in contrast to the Instagram images the crop up online.

We were about 35km from Hanoi and my mind wandered, thinking about the city and how busy it was going to be. The route we planned was mostly along minor roads to try and get as close to the city centre as possible - a slow approach but one that is usually more interesting and also less stressful to ride.
The places we went through started to feel more ‘industrial’ and it was as if each place had its own speciality.
One place was ‘waste town’
and we spotted mounds of plastic, bundled up and packaged in some sort of recycling operation. Workers deconstructed items, such as fridges and other discarded goods, breaking them up to cannibalise any material and parts of value.
Another place was ‘metal town’ - full of machine shops, blacksmiths and manufacturing. Open loading bays provided glimpses of large machines, noisy and percussive, making sparks and scattering the floor with swarf and ejected slivers of offcut. Wire rods poked out of half open roller shutters passing across the road and we had to cycle across them, hoping not to get a puncture. I wasn’t sure if the wire was being fed into the belly of a mechanical beast, or if the wire was the product and had just been ‘birthed’ into the daylight by its creator.
We passed into ‘plastic town’ - one where there was a multitude of small workshops making various bits of plastic in all shapes and colours. Some were being punched out of large sheets and others resembled the Airfix model kits that I had when I was a kid. Workers squatted at their tasks with intent, busy toiling away and stacking lots of some moulded part that was going to be used for ‘something’.
Now closer to the city, we cycled along a polluted looking river channel, the local industrial processes seemingly taking its toll.
The minor roads and paths often presented us with challenges. It was slow going, with many turns, and compounded by sections that were being ripped up to be replaced. We had to pick our way over uneven ground, past road machinery and large debris piled and strewn along the route. The narrow byways started to become busier and we had to stop to cross other roads and negotiate busy intersections. Due to our slow progress we realised that we’re going to hit the city centre at commuting time and have to navigate to our Homestay in the Huu Tiep neighbourhood at the worst time.
Entering the city, I have never seen so many mopeds in one place! Everyone was going home from work it seemed!Long constant flows of cars and bikes moving as one big animal. We were on big roads and they were crammed. The traffic built up and became more congested. We had to keep our wits about us, our eyes on the traffic, on each other, the signs, traffic lights, and the route on our bike GPS. Our minds focused. Fear, excitement, anger, and exasperation were juts a few of the feelings that I was experiencing. We had cycled in Denpasar, Bali and that was a baptism of fire but this was on another level. The driving mentality here was more aggressive and erratic. We reached a major intersection and one that we couldn’t traverse easily or safely. An overpass for cars on the main highway rose above a large roundabout with 5 or 6 exits, all busy. Fortunately there was a subway underpass, complete with bike lane! Easy!! We thought. We can get to our exit using that. The reality was not as straightforward. Despite taking a bearing for our exit road before we descended to the subterranean loop, working out how may turn offs we needed to miss out to reach our exit we messed it up and managed to become disoriented and ended up going 360 degrees around the subway loop at least twice. Amanda and I took turns as we stopped at each pedestrian and bike exit, running up to the surface to check where we were on the loop to make sure we were headed in the right direction. We spent more time than we would have liked in the underground roundabout, as the rush hour got busier and the afternoon light faded. Euphoric when we finally picked the correct exit, the underpass spewed us out on a very busy road for a couple of kilometres before we reached an old neighbourhood of narrow alleyways between buildings, down which we were directed. These dim tunnels acted as both pedestrian pathway and motorcycle route, complete with shops selling goods, food and homewares and they were incredibly interesting. You never knew what was around the next blind turn. Just when you thought it was too narrow for a motorcycle to pass, two would arrive from opposite directions, zipping past pedestrians and display stalls of food.

We arrived at our Homestay, a tall thin narrow building on a small alleyway and buzzed the bell. We were greeted by a lovely friendly lady by the name of Nhung. She was the owner of this family run hotel and made us feel welcome immediately. Tired and feeling a little sad that we had reached our cycling destination, we looked forward to exploring the city over the coming days.
In reflection, riding through the madness is something we wouldn’t have been comfortable doing way back at the start of our adventure. Now, as slightly seasoned ‘saddletramps’ our built experience up to this point helped us and unfazed by the chaos, we coped with the craziness of the Hanoi rush hour - enjoying it even…in a Type 2 fun way! 😄Read more