Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Here's a section of the article, lightly edited:
The man lying in the hammock remembered the supply trucks rumbling past his house
at night.
“Yes,” he said, through an interpreter, gesturing at the road in front of him, “this
was the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
We got back on our bicycles and continued south.
This was in Giang, a river village some 500 miles north of Saigon, in the Central
Highlands. The road is known as Highway 14, but that's a joke. Though it has been
widened since the Vietnam War ended, it is still a precipitous and tortuous route that
negotiates densely overgrown hillsides, the roadbed in places a red-dirt path that often
turns to mud in the jungle dampness, in others an obstacle course of jagged stones.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was constructed largely in Laos and Cambodia, of course,
out of the way of American bombers, but it didn't take much to imagine Highway 14
as part of the network of roads used by the Communists to haul supplies and reinforce-
ments from north of the demilitarized zone to Dak To, Pleiku, Kontum, Ban Me Thuot
and the other southern battlefronts.
What was tough to imagine was this as a bike route, and indeed for the next several
days it was slow, even dangerous going, a rattling endurance test for both bike and body.
Eleven of us navigated Highway 14—we'd left a larger group in the coastal city of
Da Nang—and nearly all of us took nasty spills and were forced into roadside repairs.
And more than once we had to cut short the riding day and board our support vans be-
