The Top Gear Challenge Part 4 (817.2 - 968.6km)

Leaving Hue didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped; as soon as I set off the foot rests on my bike snapped off leaving me unable to ride it. After pushing it in the blazing sun for 20 minutes we found a mechanics and got them to fix it. They welded the pieces back together and replaced 3 missing bolts for the massive cost of £1.60.

The route from Hue to Hoi An was due to take us mainly along the main coastal road, that whilst fast was not a pleasant place to be on a bike. It was impossible to spend much time riding without being run into the gutter by either a coach or large truck. As such we were relieved when we finally made it to the highlight for the day; the 22km Hai Van pass. This mountain pass used to be one of the most dangerous sections of road in Vietnam but due to a 6km tunnel that was recently finished it is now mostly deserted. 

The road was brilliant fun, constantly winding its way up the side of a mountain ridge with hairpin after hairpin and long sections that flowed along the coastline with constant views over the sea to the East. At the top of the ridge (nearly 500m above the start of the road) was an old French bunker, later used by the Americans with great views down both sides of the pass. 


[A video of the descent will follow here when I have time to edit it!]


After a great days ride we made it into Hoi An in the late afternoon. Hoi An is a beautiful old town situated on a river about 6km from the coast. We spent most of our time there either visiting the beach or getting clothes made. As Clarkson put it “Hoi An is the Saville row of Vietnam”. We had a good experience getting suits fitted, unfortunately the same could not be said of getting shoes made. Mine took over 3 fittings including once when the owner had made up completely the wrong pair of shoes!

 It was also nice to see that Britney Spears' new look has really taken off in Vietnam...

The Top Gear Challenge Part 3 (281.4 - 817.2km)

We woke early the next day hoping to get a very full day of riding done but we had misjudged sunrise and so went back to sleep until it was light. When we woke we discovered that it had been raining in the night and the roads were wet. As we waited for it to dry up it started to drizzle again so we decided that it probably wasn’t going to happen and bit the bullet of setting off on wet roads.

The first couple of hours was not that much fun. My bike was missing two bits of plastic from the ends of the mudguards which hadn’t seemed all that important until this point. Soon I discovered these seemed to be the only bit of the mudguard that did anything and very quickly my feet and shins were soaked and covered in mud. Luckily not long after the roads suddenly became dry and we managed to pick up the pace for most of the day. This was until we turned off the HCM trail to head for the coast. The road we had picked was in the process of being resurfaced meaning we had a large section of travel to do through mountainous areas on dirt tracks (pictures below).

In the end we didn’t quite manage to get ourselves back on track but if we had a good day the next day (I.e. we weren’t being forced alcohol or driving on dirt tracks) then we would easily make it to Hue for lunch. After finding a hotel and being quizzed by some local kids we found a place to eat dinner and had our millionth bowl of Pho Bo despite ordering fried rice!

The trip into Hue was mostly an uneventful blast along the coastal road. Halfway through the morning we crossed the Vietnamese demilitarised zone; the old border between North and South Vietnam. There wasn’t much to see but the old bridge across the Ben Hai river still stands so we walked across to see the memorial on the South side.

Apart from the DMZ there wasn't much else to see bar one of many examples of the ridiculous way motorcycles are used in Asia. The picture below shows a man happily riding along with a large fridge freezer on the back of his scooter (what can you expect in a country that has to provide special speed limits for motorbikes towing trailers)! We made it into Hue not long after 1; in time to settle in and have a late lunch. It is impossible to describe how happy we were to see a menu and be able to eat something other than beef noodle soup or intestines for the first time in days! New years eve was a fairly relaxed night as Hue isn’t much of a party town; still we managed to get suitably drunk and danced on a few tables.

We didn’t do much on the next day in Hue apart from recover from new years. On the day we were due to leave we visited the citadel as the journey was only short to our next stop; Hoi An. The citadel wasn’t all that impressive though as the site of a fierce battle between the North and South forces it was interesting to see ancient walls shot up by relatively modern weapons (it would make a great Call of Duty map). 

The Top Gear Challenge Part 2 (71.2 - 281.4km)

Thanks to us taking an extra day than we had planned to get the bikes, and the very short distance we covered on the first day we had nearly 750km to cover in the next 3 days if we were to reach Hue by new years eve. As our bikes were fairly slow this meant we had to have 3 full days of riding hopefully with no interruptions...

The first day looked like it was getting off to the worse possible start as after about an hour I was pulled over at a police roadblock; bare in mind we have no insurance, no valid driving licence and our ownership papers were in the name of some random Vietnamese man! The response couldn't have been better, as I slowed to see what they wanted the policeman saw that I was white through my visor and waved me on without saying a word.

Soon after the checkpoint we switched from the main route onto a smaller road to cut across towards the Ho Chi Minh Trail (everything is Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam). The road was mostly one lane wide, incredibly windy and started to pass through some really amazing landscape. At around lunch time we started to try and find food, a fairly tough task since we were now deep in the middle of nowhere. Eventually we saw something that looked sort of like a large outdoor restaurant. This turned out to be wrong, we had instead stumbled upon some sort of village celebration. 

They welcomed us in and sat us down like guests of honour bringing out a table full of food. Some of the food was OK but there was one bowl that was full of intestines, organs and a lot of unidentifiable bits that tasted as if it was cooked in bile. Of course this was the bowl nearest me that I was served several helpings of by the guy sitting with me. Being British I felt the need to finish it off so as not to offend! 

Worse than the food though was the insistence of our hosts that we toast them with their home brewed rice wine, despite the fact that we we riding our bikes! The response to our protests (via sign language as no one could speak English) was that 1. we were eating so it would cancel out the alcohol and 2. this is Vietnam and drink riding is OK! Before we left we were shown inside to a room where people were playing karaoke (they bloody love it in South East Asia) and were eventually persuaded to sing to a roomful of them. Thinking we had found the Proclaimers song I'm gonna be mislabelled as 500 miles we decided we could handle that. Unfortunately it was a completely different song called 500 miles that neither of us knew so we blundered our way through it much to the delight of the audience. 

When we were finally allowed to leave (after one more shot of rice wine for the road) we had fallen behind schedule. When we made it into a town to stop for the night it turned out that we had actually made good progress after lunch. This was partly due to some new found confidence (where could that have come from…) on the small windy roads and a couple of hours spent on the nicely surfaced Ho Chi Minh trail. Even so the extra long break meant we had still only managed just over 200km in the day. This left us over 530km to cover in the next 2 days before new year.

The Top Gear Challenge Part 1 (0 - 71.2km)

Due to the vast experience we now both had on motorbikes (nearly 4 days for me!) we decided that it would be a terrible idea to buy our own bikes and ride to Saigon... So this was the Christmas present Pete bought me (his was essentially the same): 

I could blame the lack of updates on the fact that I wanted to keep the bikes a secret from my parents so that they wouldn’t worry but that isn’t true. I didn’t tell them about the bikes but the lack of blog is just laziness.
Anyway back to the story after a lot of boring waiting around we eventually secured ourselves two 100cc Honda Win copies (apparently all the Wins in Vietnam are copies since Honda stopped making them over 10 years ago) for the sum of $400 each; the most expensive present I have ever bough anyone! This price did, however, include a full day of tuition on how to ride a manual bike and how to ride in Vietnam. Plus mine was 10 years old and had only 559.3km on the clock; definitely believable!!!

We spent a short amount of time studying the one page tourist map we were going to use to navigate Vietnam. After 5 minutes planning a vague route for the first few days between Hanoi and Hue we set off around the craziness that are the city roads in search of some protective clothing. We had already found full face helmets for only £13 but wanted some trousers and hopefully a jacket each. After being laughed out of most shops for wanting to protect ourselves we eventually found that we could just about afford some trousers each so we bought them to at least have something.

By the time we had organised strapping our bags down and were ready to leave it was already after 1 and our early start was clearly out of the window. It was also obvious that the roads became even worse as we left the old district of the city. A small taste of the madness is in the video below complete with awesome starwipe transitions! The city and the heavy traffic seemed to be going on indefinitely and we were beginning to wonder if we would even make it out of Hanoi before it went dark (we had decided we wouldn't be as stupid and reckless as top gear and wouldn't ride in the rain or after dark).

Eventually we did make it out of the mayhem and onto some open roads. Whilst this was good for having scenery to look at it didn't do much for the safety and we soon learnt the nature of the highways in Vietnam. There are basically 3 road laws:

1. If it is bigger than you it has right of way (this applies to both sides of the road so just because you are there don't think a coach won't overtake a truck and drive head-on towards you, it is not your lane you are only borrowing it).
2. If it is coming from your right it has right of way (so at every junction Vietnamese will ride or drive blindly out of side streets at full speed without looking).
3. If it is in front of you it is your problem (so other road users may stop, turn or randomly swerve about the road (usually drunk or texting whilst riding) but they will never check their mirrors first).

We stopped for lunch at one of the many Pho Bo (beef noodle soup) shops that lined the roads. As we were sitting and watching the road we witnessed our first bike crash; 2 bikes came together as a van cut them up and drove off. One of the guys was left on the floor but within seconds people had appeared to help him and in less than 2 minutes he was off on the road again. We finished our day after disappointingly covering only just over 70km! Stopping in a random little town we had our first taste of tourist free Vietnam. Unfortunately this also seemed to mean restaurant free Vietnam and so we again ended up eating noodle soup... a pattern was beginning to emerge here! Though the town appeared to have no restaurants the same could not be said for dentists with every other shop seeming to contain one. The most curious thing about this was that they were occupying "high street" style shop fronts with glass windows so that you could see into (and take pictures of) the surgeries!

The speedo shot at the end of the first day disappointingly short day:

Leaving Laos and Hanoi

After our motorbike tour we went to the local bus station with the aim of booking a coach to Hanoi in North Vietnam. We had read that there were daily coaches from the town and they took a full 8 hours less than the 24 hour bus from the capital of Laos. Unfortunately the lonely planet had lied to us and the bus was only twice weekly. Instead we would have to take the 6 hour bus back to Vientiane and then get the 24 hour bus from there! This sounded pretty bad to start with but when the bus broke down 2 hours into the journey it became much worse. We ended up sitting in the midday sun for about 4 hours waiting for another bus to pass by. When this eventually happened it was of course full so we spent the next 4 hours sitting on plastic stools in the aisle! 

The bus to Hanoi wasn’t too bad really; except that we were lied to about it having beds, it drove back over the same route we had spent the previous bus ride doing and it arrived at the border in the middle of the night meaning we had to spend 6 hours just waiting for the border to open.

4 men on a motorbike

We didn’t really do too much in Hanoi apart from drink and wander around. On one particular night I drank far too much and ended up getting lost. The point at which I regained my memory was as I was pushed/fell down some stairs by some annoyed Vietnamese guys in some sort of fancy uniform. That earned me a nice cut on the knee that ended up lasting over a month (yer that’s how far behind the blog is). A few days after that we went out to Ha Long bay for Christmas but there isn’t much to say about that as we were drunk pretty much constantly the entire time we were there!

The other interesting point from Hanoi is that I spent all the money in the next picture on Pete’s Christmas present and he did the same for me…

Laos Part 3: The Tha Khaek Loop (Part 2)

After having lunch and cleaning off as much of the dust as possible we set off in the wrong direction for the cave in search of a hot spring marked on the map that looked about 5km up the road. It turned out to be more like 25 and when we arrived (after plenty of encouragement from locals giving us directions) we were met with laughs and told “no, no hot spring”, this despite us seeing signs for it!
 

After wasting a lot of time on this trip out of the way we set off at a fast pace in the right direction. The roads here were much better, no wind, no gravel, no sand and there were some really good views over the valley we would be riding into for the end of the day. Things were going really smoothly until on a straight section of road a chicken made a kamikaze leap from the side of the road and stuck it’s neck right under Pete’s wheels! I narrowly missed its body and we stopped a short way down the road. Pete and the other guy we were riding with went back to asses the bird whilst I waited with the bikes. It turned out the stupid chicken wasn’t dead and was instead still flapping about; apparently Eamon was about to hit it with a brick when the owner came over from her house. 

Instead of being annoyed and asking for compensation she just laughed and kicked the bird a bit before picking it up and walking off! After this the rest of the day wasn’t too dramatic though the scenery we passed through was. We ended up in the small village of Kong Lor which lends its name to the cave we had travelled so far to visit.

The next morning we were up early to visit the caves so that we would have time to make the 200km trip back to Tha Khaek to return our bikes. At the mouth of the cave we got on a narrow local wooden fishing boat and were motored through the cave. The whole cave is 7.5km long and contains a river which winds its way under a mountain. The height of the ceiling changed dramatically along the way from being low enough to touch to chambers up to 100m high. At certain sections we had to get off the boat and walk across strange beaches whilst the boat was carried up shallow rapid sections. After about 45 minutes we finally saw the daylight at the other side and emerged into a jungle area to an isolated village. After a short break here we returned through the cave (though this time we could ride out some of the rapids downstream) to collect our bikes.

 

The ride back was mostly uneventful apart from the gear situation on my bike getting worse and worse becoming almost impossible to shift down without stopping first. About halfway back Pete’s poor luck on the bikes struck again and a horrible black, orange and yellow bee landed on his leg and proceeded to sting him. On the way the route took us over the top of a steep mountain pass with a view point at the top that took our breath away.

We made it back to town with time to spare and so dropped our stuff off at the hotel (next door to where we had rented the bikes) and were about to go to the bus station to organise our coach to Vietnam. As I tried to start my bike it kept failing as it had been doing on and off for most of the trip. Just as I was getting ready to bump it the owner came over to give it go for me. Instantly he noticed the broken gear shifter and pointed it out to me. With my best acting I said “wow wasn’t it lucky I made it back before that happened”, either he bought my story or thought I was a massive idiot who had been riding it like that for the last 3 days without knowing! Anyway his response couldn’t have been better, he just pointed at another (less broken) bike and said I could take that one.

Laos Part 2: The Tha Khaek Loop (Part 1)

Back from the Christmas interruption to the actual timeline, even if I am still nearly 3 weeks behind. So we were in Laos and had 5 days to kill before our visa for Vietnam started (it was actually 6 days but we managed to waste one of those away through laziness). This isn't enough time to get to Southern Laos as it is a 24 hour bus ride down there and we had to be in Northern Vietnam for Christmas. Not really knowing what to do with ourselves we decided to just go to the bus station and see what was leaving that day. 

The first bus out of the station was heading to a place called Tha Khaek so we bought tickets and boarded for the 6 hour drive. Luckily we were one of the first people on the bus and so managed to get extra legroom seats for the journey. On the way we read up on what there was to do in the town, it seemed that the best local attraction was a cave a few hundred kilometers away called Kong Lor. The best way to get there was to rent motorbikes and take a 500km round trip over 3 or 4 days. Due to the timing of our visa and the local buses to Vietnam we decided to sort our bikes and leave the following day on a 3 day trip. The bikes were 100cc "Honda" Waves, an extremely popular bike in this part of the world. It also seems a very popular bike to make crappy copies of and then brand as Honda's. After a 2 minute tutorial on how to use geared bikes we were sent off onto the loop with nothing but 2 dodgy little helmets and a hand drawn map. And I mean nothing; the bikes weren't in a happy condition, no speedo, no milometer, no fuel gauge,  no electronic ignition and barely working lights. However the engines seemed to be alright so we went for it.

The first day wasn't all that interesting, we visited a few small caves but most of the day was spent battling ridiculous cross winds to make it to a town with a guesthouse for the night. With a few hours to sunset we thought we were making good time until the road turned into a dirt track. For the next 2 hours we battled through gravel, sand and dust feeling more like we should be on dirt bikes than a couple of scooters! 

We made it to the tiny village where the guesthouse was and managed to find it just as darkness fell, something that happens quite fast around here. That night the temperature fell sharply and as we were sitting in our stilt house commenting on how we could see chickens underneath us through the floor loud music suddenly started blasting outside. We went to investigate and it turned out that there was going to be a Muay Thai (or Muay Lao?) competition that night. The fights were pretty cool even though they were mostly between children aged about 12 to 16 who were guarded by men with big guns!

 

  

After a fairly cold nights sleep we set off early the next morning. We had been told the next 65km would take us around 4 or 5 hours to complete and there would be another 140km to do after that if we wanted to make the loop in 3 days. It was soon apparent why it would take so long to do the first 65km. The "road" had now narrowed to one cars width and had potholes you could mistake for quarries. 

We took a lot less than 4 hours in the end but the speed we moved over the terrain took its toll on the bikes. Both me and Pete regularly had to bump start the bikes and mine now required a real kick to shift down gears. In addition at one point I though it would be funny to top gear style crash into the back of Pete's bike, unfortunately his mud guard hung a little lower than I expected and half of it broke off... it was still funny. By the time we returned to tarmac roads we were all covered head to foot in dust.

I've run out of time to write any more so I will continue with part 2 at some other time...