It occured to me today that Columbus was a Western figure and his opinion
that the world wasn’t flat had no impact on the Vietnamese.
It made me wonder if the Vietnamese have their own apple on the head story
about the world being round. I was pondering this because I didn’t ride
up or down a single hill today. zero.
I’m in rice paddie territory. Not the elegant terraced hillside types. The flat, ongoing, never ending, valley floor type. Three things obstructed my view of infinite rice paddies. Karst rock hills making occasional rough black ranges, towns and haze.
The concept that gets me is how do you bury the dead if all the land has houses, is vertical rock or is a rice paddie? Answer. In the rice paddie. I’m about 75% on it being called permaculture. It has to be better than in a barrel in the basement. The other day rains had left the graves flooded with ducks dabbling around. The body, worms, duck, dinner concept left me whistling some song from a tape in the car when i was a kid. ‘A duck may be somebodies mother’.
By the end of eighty km of horizontal dead flat world I had decided that Columbus was either wrong, or just wrong to try and prove otherwise. The world is flat.
James
bisforbike 