With the Motorbike through Viet Nam
May/June ‘16
It was from beginning on in our head, that we will give our shoulders a rest and travel Vietnam on a motorbike.
Not just any motorbike, a cheap pre-owned motorbike. First of all, those old bikes cost comparably nothing and secondly, it seemed amazing to be completely independent, to be able to stop anywhere and even to camp at night on the way.
The first week in Saigon was filled with a little bit of sightseeing, staying at Selina’s aunt’s house and of course doing some motorbike test rides.
We got used to the insane city traffic quite quick. The trick is to stay at the same speed than the 1000 surrounding bikes, to never look back, be more than 200 % concentrated and only focus on the road.
And always be aware that you share the road with a million:
- other motorcycles coming from ANY direction,
- motorcycles with trailers,
- motorcycles with side cars,
- a motorcycle as four people carrier,
- motorcycles as moving shops,
- cars,
- trucks,
- bicycles,
- trolleys,
- pedestrians,
- vendors,
- children,
- cows,
- goats,
- chicken,
- dogs,
- cats,
- potholes,
- farm property extensions (for hay and rice drying),
on the opposite lane, your lane, any lane.
The craziest thing is, that all of this feels nearly normal after a few weeks.
A few days passed and we decided to get ourselves a semi-automatic Honda Wave. We found a really nice one, took some pictures of it to show it to a mechanic to be sure that those leaks are nothing too serious. The mechanic did not have time to check it for us, simultaneously as we asked, another couple picked up their, just maintenanced, fully manual Honda Win, as they were about to sell it back to the guy they bought it from.
We got into conversation, they were super nice people who seemed to have really taken care of their bike and kept it in good condition, so we decided spontaneously to get their bike instead. The deal was made, four days passed whilst they did their last road trip, we had a ‘how to ride a manual’ lesson, transferred the money and finally got the key.
Our first ride took us to the very southern tip of the country, through the Mekong Delta which is a very lively part of Vietnam with a lot of agriculture, colourful markets, friendly locals and small villages. The river itself is, unfortunately, the most polluted and smelly water we saw since the start of our journey.
We navigated the direction with the help of Google Maps and a really useful trick is to use the foot- instead of the car navigation to avoid big roads and stay on small paths.
We drove further south, to cross over to the holiday island Phú Quốc, which was not as nice as expected.
Let us imagine this island 10 years ago: calm beaches, local restaurants, tracks through the forest; simply authentic island culture.
Nowadays: empty 6 lane concrete streets, polluted forests, Hamburger and Pizza shops, one construction site next to construction site, fenced beaches, construction workers living in awful temporary camps.
In other words; if you stay in one of the finished five-star resorts you will have a super nice beach and an unpolluted environment. As soon as you exit the resort property; well you can imagine it.
We left the island and started the trip up north. On the way, we picked up our new side boxes for the motorbike that we ordered a week earlier. They fit perfect on the bike and we loaded them with all our luggage.
The first part of the Up-North-Adventure took us along the coastline. Unfortunately, the coastline was no different from what we experienced on Phú Quốc Island. Abandoned half finished resort complexes (which were fun to wander in and around), fenced in land, polluted beaches in between, the local life banished. All in all a really sad atmosphere like in an apocalypse movie.
We left the coastline to drive through the inland, into the mountains, which turned out to be a very good decision. We stuck to the Ho Chí Minh Road; beautiful curves and bends up the mountains, small roads through cities, countryside, deep jungle and minority villages. The locals of the minority villages live a very basic and nearly self-sufficient life. They work in agriculture, build their own wooden houses, wear traditional clothing, have their own language and are very friendly to foreigners, even if the language barrier is huge.
Wild camping on the way is difficult. Not because it is dangerous, but because there is just no free land. People are living everywhere, rice fields are never ending, it is just impossible to find a little spot for a tent or hammock in the wild.
Therefore we decided to use Selina’s Vietnamese knowledge and to ask every evening around if it is possible to put our hammocks up in someone’s property or in a hammock café along the way.
Through this we met many different locals, from fisherman who wants us to eat tonnes of his fish to a minority family living in a bamboo stilt house within their own rice field, young families inviting us for simple dinner or putting up the hammock in between coffee trees and finding out first hand where our coffee is from. Coffee for which we pay several Euro per 100g, from which the farm gets only around €0,15 per kilo. We did some maths after we left the farm and concluded that the whole farm has an average revenue of €1,50 per day. €1,50 for four adults and six children and not to forget the farm’s expenses. And still, this was one of the most welcoming places we stayed. Including the traditional home made rice wine drinking, the iconic hammock spot in between the coffee plants and the hospitality.
We learned on our trip that hospitality in Vietnam is sometimes understood as ‘you pay me and I am nice to you’, which was on some day really a letdown, especially when we really enjoyed the evening with the super nice people we stayed with.
At some point, it kind of gets on your nerves; that you can not trust anyone, even with the best feeling and impression that you have of a person, that you have to question everything, EVERYTHING. At some point we were really, REALLY annoyed with this issue, in this, so, SO beautiful country.
On the way, we drunk a lot of refreshing iced drinks. Very popular drinks in Vietnam are coffee (a very full and smooth sweet character always served with at least two spoons of sugar, sweetened condensed milk and ice. Or in other words VERY sweet), sugar cane juice or tea, of course, all of those drinks are served ice cold.
We enjoyed the food in southern Vietnam the most. The markets and food stalls in villages sell a colourful mix of soup and rice dishes. The most we liked to eat vegetarian food which gets sold a lot through a quite high Buddhist population. The vegetarian food is called “Chay” and every village in southern Vietnam has at least one chay restaurant.
Tourist destinations have good and diverse restaurants, but in the countryside of central and northern Vietnam, the meals are limited to rice with meat.
Fruits are amazing. We passed, for example, a region with only pineapple farms (where we saw for the first time and were amazed by how a pineapple plant actually looks like) and bought some. And those were the most delicious pineapples we had in our life. Other regions are selling mangoes, jackfruits, mangosteen,… Fruits we can only dream about in Germany.
Vietnam is probably the easiest country in the world for an inexperienced person to maintain a motorbike. It does not matter where you are, there is always a person who knows how to fix a bike. Sometimes it seems like every second house is a mechanic. The mechanics are having little garages stuffed with tools and second-hand parts and can fix anything within 10 minutes. The prices are fair, for small problems where no parts are needed will just cost about €0,50.
After 6 weeks we arrived up north in the capital, Hanoi. We were so relieved that everything worked out well and the old bike did not make any trouble at all.
Now it was time to sell the bike.
The North
Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed it.
We have a newsletter. Do you like to sign up?
