Over Confidence: Day 3

Me and the guesthouse lady. I'm looking a little nappy at this point. We wore the same clothes everyday!



Tiff changing the spark plug.

This morning I woke up a little grumpy. It was probably because I was not looking forward to riding the bike today. Yesterday was scary and took forever! Today we had about the same distance to cover so I knew it was going to be another long day. I was just praying that we had already seen the worst of the roads?

The day started well and we rode 31/2 hours to our lunch destination. It was an interesting little town. We had no idea what we ordered but they brought us beef and pork and rice. It was pretty good, I’m certainly not picky. I was shown to the “bathroom” which was literally in the back of the restaurant in a grassy pen with the pigs. Nice one!

We left this little town feeling pretty confident because we thought we only had 100km further to reach our destination (Sapa) that day. I think at one point we actually high-fived each other – we are such nerds!

It all went down hill from there… first of all we took a wrong turn right off the bat and about 20 min later Tiff had a feeling we were heading in the wrong direction. I’m on the back and I have no clue. (I would hate to think what would happen to me if I was by myself) We stopped and asked someone. “Sapa?” we asked. They laughed and pointed in the opposite direction we were headed. That’s okay, no biggie? It only set us back 40 minutes.

We were on our way again, 20 minutes out of town in the right direction, when our engine suddenly died. The first thing we did was check gas. We were low but it certainly looked like it would be enough to keep going. We tried the reserve just it case? Nothing. Ok, if it's not gas what else could it be? We pull out the trusty manual and tool kit. At this point we have an audience. Three 13 year old boys.

I start reading. Aha, the spark plug! It says to check the spark plug if the engine suddenly dies. That must be it! Tiff immediately takes out the tools and removes the spark plug. Yeah. That’s it. This spark plug’s all black - it must be burned out. Tiffany said, "I remember Nam saying brown means dead… or something like that." Sweet. We are awesome – we can ride a bike and fix it! Tiff changes out our old one for a shiny new one.

We’re feeling so confident that we solved our problem that we both put our helmets on and hopped on the bike. Tiff kick starts it but nothing happens? What’s wrong? Just then these 2 men come around the corner on bikes and they motion to our gas tank. We wave them off as if to say, no no no, we have gas in our tank. They didn’t understand or weren’t convinced so one guy comes to look. Well… apparently we were out of gas afterall! Who knew? We had to coast 15 km downhill back into town. At one point the downhill ended and we slowly came to a stop. We still had 8 km to town. Now what? We tried the reserve again and this time it worked! Good timing. Now we had been set back almost 2 ½ hours. We knew we weren’t going to make it to our destination of choice that night. Oh well, what do you do? We laughed about it, gased up and were on our way. It sure is a good thing we "fixed" our sparkplug. Haha!

We arrived at this little town call Tam Duong and are staying at what I imagine is the only guesthouse in town. This older woman who runs the place is so friendly. When we got there she immediately led me by the hand to the roof to see the view of the rice fields. She loved me and kept holding my hand, smiling, speaking to me in Vietnamese and patting my butt. Haha.

We ate great pho bo (beef noodle soup) for dinner and walked around the little town. Mmm. This trip is turning out to be great! I really think yesterday was the worst of it!

Oh yeah, we finally named our Minsk. Gaston. We figured we needed a little testosterone on this trip!