Bài đọc 2
Last year, after finishing university, my friend Tuan and I spent seven weeks cycling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. We covered just over 2,000 kilometres, most of it along the coast, and it was the hardest and happiest thing I have ever done.
We were not experienced cyclists. Before the trip, the longest ride either of us had done was about sixty kilometres. We spent three months training at weekends and bought second-hand touring bikes, which we fitted with racks to carry our bags. We decided to travel light: two changes of clothes each, a small tool kit, spare tyres and rain jackets. Everything else, we told ourselves, we could buy on the way.
The first week nearly ended the trip. It rained almost every day, Tuan's back wheel broke twice, and I was so sore in the evenings that I could barely walk. On the fifth day, sitting in a roadside café, we seriously discussed taking a train south instead. What stopped us was the owner of the café, an old man who had cycled the same route in the 1970s. He laughed at our complaints and told us that the first week was always the worst. He was right.
By the second week, our bodies had adapted. We settled into a routine, starting at six in the morning to avoid the midday heat, cycling about sixty kilometres a day, and stopping wherever we found a cheap guesthouse. The kindness of strangers surprised us constantly. Farmers waved us over to share fruit, a mechanic in Quang Ngai fixed my gears and refused to accept any money, and in one village a family invited us to stay for a wedding.
The most spectacular part of the journey was the Hai Van Pass, a steep road over the mountains between Hue and Da Nang. It took us almost three hours to climb, stopping frequently to rest, but the view from the top, over the clouds and down to the sea, made every painful kilometre worthwhile.
When we finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, I expected to feel relieved. Instead, I felt slightly sad that it was over. The trip taught me that I am capable of much more than I thought, and that the best way to see a country is slowly, at the speed of a bicycle.