Last taste of Vietnam

My sweat acts as an adhesive gluing my t-shirt to my back. The sun fries the top part of my thighs and as I watch them turn from white to medium rare to medium well to well done. I feel them sizzle and notice little bumps forming. "Steve, I definitely need more sun screen." I rub the sticky white cream onto my thighs, but it just mixes with my sweat and the finished product does not absorb into my skin. Rather it creates a light frosting. The narrow ribbon of a road is outlined by bamboo huts on sticks with plastic furniture inside. We stop pedaling and let our bicycles coast to the front of one of the huts. A lady sits in one of the plastic chairs and I pantomime drinking coffee out of a cup. "Cafey?" I ask. She smiles. Luckily, there is a man drinking a cup of iced coffee with milk and I simply point to his and then hold up two fingers. Her eyes sparkle and in just a few minutes we are sipping iced coffees playing hide-and-g0 seek with the sun. We sip our coffees really slowly and even mix the coffee with green tea. Eventually the sun takes a break behind a cloud and we escape while it is resting. The ingredients of the country-side are too much bright sunshine with an abundance of rice fields, vendor carts selling red hairy fruits (lichas), dragon fruits, watermelons, guayabas, coffee and tea stands, and just a touch of shade from the coconut and banana trees. The day is full of smiling warm faces greeting us with "hello, hello, hello!"

After a long day of biking nearly 100 miles, we arrive at our last destination in Vietnam-- Chau Doc. The traffic gets denser-- motorcycles and trucks whiz around us. I try to breathe only through my nose to avoid too much of the exhaust but I feel it in my lungs as I can't avoid taking deep breaths as I lean forward into my peddles. I search between all the foreign symbols on the buildings trying to locate a hotel. A man on a bicycle pulling a cart rides slowly beside me. "Can I help you? You look for hotel?" he asks.
"Yes!" I say, happy to hear my own language.
"Follow me," he says with a smile.
I have trouble swerving to the left through the motorcycle "parade" but am improving at navigating through traffic with each day that we are in Vietnam. Within minutes he pulls over in front of a large high building that actually has one English word on the sign, "hotel." "is good hotel," he says, "cheap and nice people." Steve watches the bicycles, while I have a look. In Vietnam the rooms on the higher levels are cheaper so I ask to see the rooms on the third floor. I climb up a spiral staircase and a lady opens a door to reveal a clean room with a large bed and shower for just five dollars! "Perfect!"

Vietnam:
cone bamboo hats, rice, fried tofu and vegetables, dragon fruit, coffee with condensed milk, smiling faces, warm almond eyes, rice fields, rice fields, canoes, motorcycles, and the winding Mekong river, more rice fields, more motorcycles, a whole never-ending parade of motorcycles, green tea... Vietnam has its own unique flavor of a culture that I enjoyed to the last moment, to the last drop.