A day in the DMZ

Today we cycled through the DMZ, aka "The Demilitarized Zone", which took us from the town of Dong Ha to the town of Dong Hai 100 kms up the road. The DMZ was a 5-km wide buffer zone on either side of the Ben Hai River, which is also pretty much exactly the 17th parallel, which demarked the arbitrary division between north and south Vietnam after the French pulled out of Vietnam. Ironically, when the Americans came, it became one of the most militarized zones in the world, and they prompted destroyed most of it with bombing and artillery.

There's not much evidence of anything today as we rode through it, other than a rather large Vietnamese flag flying next to the river on the north side of the river, and a sign in Vietnamese that no doubt says something about the glory of the empire. Other than that, it was the usual rice fields, old ladies walking their geese along the highway, school kids losing their minds as we rode by, and water buffalos up to their armpits in mud.

So here we are in "the north". Most people don't spend much time slogging through the north since it's a direct shot to Hanoi from here...unless you're on a bike, which means it'll be a while before yer in the big smoke. For now we're just enjoying the new scenery. It somehow seems a little more real here. After all, this is where the communists held strong, and then launched for the reunification of Vietnam, which is where is stands today (i.e., just one big happy communist country).

Funny though, when we got to our non-descript hotel today and decided to go for a walk down the non-descript road it's on, we knew the ocean was nearby. So we headed in that direction. To our amazement we found yet another pristine uninhabited beach that seem to go on for about forever. 5 mins down the beach we ran into a seemingly abandoned 5-star resort, complete with a oceanside bar and wireless internet, no less. So here we are having oceanside beers and sending out this post to the world. Cheers!