The Beach

We spent the day climbing over many mountain passes on the coast, some of which have an elevation of 15%, they can certainly build steep roads in Vietnam! there are much easier routes but that would mean taking the highway which is more inland, the highway is very busy with wagons hooting their air horns, which is a constant deafening noise, you wouldn’t believe how loud they are, they are as loud as a ships fog horn, it’s so unpleasant, so that’s why we always choose the difficult route, yes it’s longer and involves many climbs over the mountains, but it’s well worth the effort, there’s hardly any vehicles, and wagons can’t come this way as the roads are just too steep and winding. It’s also easier to camp on this type of route, clinging to the coast means we can camp on the beach, we much prefer camping to being in accommodation, especially by the ocean. We always try and camp slightly elevated from the beach, that way there’s no worries about the tide coming in and there’s also less mosquito’s, as the ocean breeze keeps them at bay.

As you can see from first photo with the tent, it looks like a beautiful location, but if we show you behind the scenes you’ll disagree.

Just look at all the plastic, sadly this is a very common sight, most countries we’ve cycled through are full of litter, especially the beaches. We were in a very remote area, now body lives here, therefore all this plastic has come from the ocean, this area actually isn’t as bad as most of the other places we’ve been.

When we camp on the beaches we like to spend some time collecting as much of the litter as we can and then burn it, but of late there’s simply no point in trying to clean an area up, the ocean is completely saturated with plastic.

From Villages, towns, countryside to the small fishing islands and beaches, there’s litter everywhere, but what are the local people supposed to do with it, there’s nowhere to put it, and then there’s the added rubbish that’s shipped over here from the Western Countries such as the UK, yes did you think all your recycling stayed in your own country?.. well think again!

Why are we allowed to produce all this unnecessary crap and then dump it wherever. So next time you buy all those unnecessary products in plastic, think again where it all ends up, maybe in Europe some people think they are controlling their waste by recycling, doing their bit etc, the answer is no, it’s much worse than you can ever imagine in the rest of the world and it will only get worse.