Travel Reference
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My back and shoulders are sore from hunching over as I ride. My fingers are gnarled from gripping the
bike's handlebars. And my ass is chafed to a pretty traumatic degree. I'm trying to think of muscles that
aren't in agony, and all I can come up with are those tiny ones that regulate my inner ear. They seem to be
doing okay.
On the morning of day four, though, an interesting thing happens. My heart settles into a steady rhythm.
My lungs find a second wind. My ass firms up like a charred steak. Suddenly I'm able to pay some atten-
tion to the world beyond my body.
It turns out, when I at last look around me, that Vietnam is gorgeous—a tropical, emerald jewel. We're
cycling through green hills and flooded rice paddies, speckled with villages of concrete huts. Along the
roadside, a family of water buffalo munches at the grass. A small child, no older than seven or eight, stands
atop the largest buffalo's back—holding a rope that's been looped through the animal's nostrils. Farther up
the road, dozens of ducklings waddle behind their mothers toward a stream and then sploosh in two by two.
It's the kind of thing you'd never see from a plane and you would speed past on a train. On a bike, you can
roll to a stop and watch ducklings sploosh to your heart's content.
We watch them for a while, delighting at the sight of their teensy webbed feet, and then pedal back up to
speed. Now that I can hang with the main pack, I discover the power of drafting. The cyclists at the front
of our peloton act as an aerodynamic wedge, dragging me along in their wake. There are no cars around for
miles, and we roll down the road in near silence. I hear only the whir of our tires on hard-packed dirt. The
clicking of our chains and sprockets. The wind rushing past my ears.
IT'S downright shocking that the bicycle as we know it didn't come into existence until the 1860s. We'd
already been riding on steam-boats for several decades before that, and steam-powered trains had come
to dominate American transportation by the 1850s. Photography, electromagnets, the telegraph—all these
were invented before the bicycle.
It seems a simple and obvious idea: a mechanical, human-powered conveyance that could replace the
horse as a means of personal transport. It's not exactly clear why it took so long to get the bicycle right, but
part of the problem may have been the lack of practical surfaces to ride on. Smoothly graded roads were
few and far between in the nineteenth century. If you've ever bloodied your knees learning to ride a bike,
you know that getting started without falling over requires an immediate burst of momentum. On a rocky
stagecoach trail, a primitive bike would be difficult to launch and even tougher to keep upright.
Still, an intrepid few strove to perfect the “mechanical horse.” In 1817, a German baron created a
wooden, two-wheeled “velocipede” that was propelled by kicking one's feet along the ground, Flintstone-
style. Later, there were carriagelike contraptions powered by stepping on wooden treadles—like a mobile
elliptical trainer. But most historians agree that the true progenitor of the bicycle didn't arrive until 1867,
when a Parisian blacksmith named Pierre Michaux attached pedals directly to the front wheel.
Despite Michaux's breakthrough, the bicycle's popularity faded in and out over the next couple of dec-
ades. Michaux's front-wheel-drive scheme, upon encountering a bump, had the unfortunate habit of flip-
ping the rider over the bike's handlebars. In 1866 Mark Twain, in his words, “traversed a brick” and toppled
forward while riding his new bicycle in Connecticut. The bike went airborne and landed on top of him. “It
was well it came down on us,” he wrote, “for that broke the fall, and it was not injured.” The early “bone-
shaker” bikes gave way to the “high-wheel” era of the 1870s. But these bikes, with a gigantic front wheel
that allowed faster speeds, were still unwieldy and forced the rider to perch high above the ground.
The bicycle boom didn't take off in earnest until the 1890s, after the development of the “safety bike.”
This design used a chain to send the pedaler's power back to the rear wheel—as modern bikes still do—thus
reducing the bike's tendency to pitch forward. Another vital innovation: In 1888, tire genius John Dunlop
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