South-east Asian Curiosities - as seen from the road

Between 27 December and 17 January, Sarah and I completed a 2285km cycle tour between Hanoi, Vietnam, and Bangkok, Thailand.  This is the first of three posts, this one celebrating some of the more curious sights on our travels, themed, rather than sequenced as we saw them.  Next cab of the rank is likely to be a summary of some of the logistical aspects, followed by a more typical story about the trip.  In the meantime, I hope you get a few chuckles out of this lot!  

Food

The coffee culture in Viet Nam, and the coffee itself, was a real highlight.  These are "salt coffees", and Down Under this froth would likely have ended up in a pavlova (egg white).  The coffee is black and treacle-like, delicious, and cheap as chips

Something like NZ's huhu grub were fairly commonly available in markets.  Nearby were often roasted crickets, and once (in Cambodia), I saw snake.  

On the coast of Thailand, we saw horseshoe crab for sale.  Much less meat in this fellow than you might expect...  Caveat emptor!  

On our first morning, we got breakfast at a local market, and were slightly shocked to see one stall selling spit-roasted dog!  This was far from common though, and every other dog we saw was alive and kicking

Working the land

We crossed two borders, and we instantly noticed differences in how the land was being worked.  This remarkable contraption was fairly common in Viet Nam.  

Another model, high and dry

For about a 10km stretch in Cambodia, and nowhere else, many road-side sheds had a whump-whump-whump sound emanating from them, which in turn came from a very-localised engine-driven pounding contraption.

We saw a great many people wearing military-style clothing, and assumed that these were taken home at the end of military service, rather than purchased for casual and/or functional wear

Roading

The vast majority of the road we rode was in excellent condition. Some stretches, like this one, were eerily quiet, leaving us to wonder had we time travelled into an apocalypse, or had we maybe missed a memo somewhere and shouldn't be there.  Surely they're there for a good reason, and sometimes are jammed with vehicles, but in the state we saw them, it was often hard to believe?

Infrastructure on the Vietnamese coast between Hanoi and Hue seemed also to have been built for peak loads which were hard to imagine.  This magnificent 10-lane-plus-shoulder (used by motorcycles - and cyclists - in either direction), was effectively a 14-lane street, and for most of its length, we struggled to see an average of one vehicle per lane before our eyesight failed to cope with the distance!

Bridges like this weren't common, and in hindsight, we should have taken a lap!

More huge road devoid of people.  The hotel in the background may literally have just had us for the night.  We were certainly the only people in the restaurant both for dinner and breakfast in the morning.  We were offered all-you-can-eat a la carte, in place of the buffet!

One element of the Vietnamese highway network that I was glad to see the back of were these rumble strips.  Before every pedestrian crossing, there'd be a pair of them, and even with the fattish tyres, they became really tiresome.  There weren't many single kilometres without a pedestrian crossing...   GRRRRRR....!

Vehicles

In the big smoke(s), you'd occasionally see cars in skirts

Water appears to be abundant in Viet Nam, at least.  These setups were truck-wash facilities, and were fairly common (and often in use)

We generally felt really safe on the road - cars and trucks had plenty of experience with locals on motorcycles and bicycles, and as strangely dressed foreigners, we probably got a wider berth than most.  Every now and then we had to take evasive action, as with this fine fellow.

By the time we got to Cambodia, we were well used to seeing a lot on a single motorcycle - a whole family, furniture being moved, gas bottles, you name it.  The parts of Cambodia we saw were dead flat, and it was pretty common to see small motorcycles towing a decent sized shop

This truck was using old bicycle frames as wall-extensions, presumably so that the truck could be overfilled and the load more safely secured.  Innovative repurposing of something past its use-by date

Tuk-tuks were pretty common, and at times we got the sense they were being used for medium-distance travel - there were very many on the Viet Nam side of the border with Cambodia, and often in the towns.  This e-beauty was in Phnom Penh, which was an impressively modern city, given the relatively recent trauma the country went through

We struggled a bit to find transportation between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, with many bus outfits balking at our bikes.  When we went to load our bikes into the back of this minivan, we were surprised to see a motorcycle already loaded!

Ummm, yeah, about that earlier trailer...  That was one of the punier ones!  This was the grandest I saw, and still boggles my mind 

Buildings

In a relatively short stretch of the Ho Chi Minh Highway, we saw a few dwellings in this style, reminding us very much of some of our pacific island travels

Cambodians have a nice practice of throwing a marquee up on the street, usually blocking one lane, but sometimes closing the whole road

Buildings like this were common in Viet Nam and Cambodia.  Curiously, they all have a speaker mounted in the eaves playing a bird-cheeping soundtrack, which may well have come from the same studio.  I'm guessing they are grain siloes, and that the bird-call is of something that eats rats and mice 

Language

It is what it says on the can.  Most of the public toilets in Cambodia and Thailand had urinals outside on the back of the building.  Not all were so eloquently sign-posted as this one

As we approached our first Cambodian hotel, it was fun to catch a reminder of home, namely the classic Wellington road ride, the Mākara Loop, and the Mākara Peak Mountain Bike Park, which I did a decade's volunteering in, and now get to relish in Khulie using it a few times a week (not least when I'm invited to join her)

Not sure about this as marketing genius.  It sounds like eating it will make you fat.  Or maybe become aroused.  (Maybe the explanation is in the untranslated fine print?!)  Either way, I didn't want it

Miscellaneous

I was impressed to discover some street food served in someone's old maths homework!

From time to time the loo paper couldn't be hung on a traditional dispenser

We passed two windfarms in Viet Nam - one small one on the Ho Chi Minh Highway, and a massive installation near the coast north of Hue, pictured here.  The turbine blades had a very distinct rearwards curvature, which seemed unusual compared to those I recall from NZ and elsewhere

In Viet Nam particularly, you could buy stuff on the roadside almost constantly.  But, along a stretch of road, everyone seemed to be selling the same thing, be it marble garden ornaments, seafood, firewood, incense, or even mortar and pestle sets.  We think this was probably something "medicinal"

Very occasionally we were able to properly launder our clothes.  This hotel room had a nifty clothes line stuck to the window

The were plenty of cool looking water buffaloes and regular cows in Viet Nam.  These long-eared long-legged weirdoes were Cambodian

Speaking of weirdoes, this strange bloke was out and about in socks and jandals!