Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Having an untrustworthy map in a place so foreign and remote is no comfort. It had
never occurred to me that the road I'd planned to follow to Hué, the one on the map
marked in relative bold, might be a phantom, but as I passed through A Luoi and didn't
find the turnoff, I had a pang of unease. I rode for a couple of miles before my sense-of-
direction alarm went off, and I turned around for another look.
This time I located it on the far side of town. There was no sign, of course, just a nar-
row paved road cutting off at a sharp angle, the entrance partly hidden by a boulder and
some trees. I hoped this was the right road, anyway, though it occurred to me that the
road to Hué could be elsewhere or might not exist at all; if ever there was a place where
“you can't get there from here” could actually obtain, this was it.
I took the turnoff and, despite the uncertainty, for several miles the ride was a pleas-
ure. The scenery was bucolic, the pavement reasonably smooth, the sky a deep, cloudless
blue, and thinking back on the previous twenty-four hours, I was pedaling with a sense
of relief and self-congratulations at having emerged with aplomb from a sticky situation,
forever equipped with a marvelous and funny adventure story to tell.
Naturally, the adventure wasn't quite past. The road wound and climbed, and the
views were lovely, if a little forbidding in their revelation that I was heading into wil-
derness. The only sign of civilization as far as I could see was a telephone wire strung
alongside the lonely road like Hansel and Gretel's trail of bread crumbs. Eventually it,
