Day thirty-two 2/12/2010

We arrived in Hanoi airport later than expected due to some delays, and our estimated flight time was an hour off in our heads because we didn’t remember we would be changing time zones. No bother though, we were picked up by the hotel owner who filled us in on a lot about Hanoi and Vietnam, he said he would be able to help us with almost everything we were planning to do around Hanoi and showed us to a very clean room when we arrived, we were both tired and fell asleep almost immediately.

We started out the day in Hanoi, woke up early as we wanted to get going on the road. We went and grabbed some snacks for the trip and picked up a small loaf of bread each from a street lady which we munched immediately. We then went to Cuong’s bike rental where we discovered to our disappointment that no Minsks were available. Begrudgingly we accepted to take some Honda’s they had available and walked back to the Hotel. At the hotel the concierge was beyond helpful; she got us SIM cards, booked us train tickets to Ho Chi Minh, and to our surprise was able to find us two Misnks. We went and happily canceled the Hondas and got picked up to go the bike shop on two scooters. Our first ride in Hanoi was only five minutes, and was as a passenger, but this changed quickly. We were instructed on how to start the Minsk and fix it if needed. We then were taken to a gas station to fill up. This was my first time on a bike in about two years, and Sam’s first time ever, and we were in Vietnam in a very big city. The traffic is hectic but strangely simple, avoid people ahead of you is the general move and don’t move sideways fast. Sam picked it up quick, which was necessary, and only had a few stall outs, not bad for a first timer. What was bad was our ability to leave Hanoi. We took about an hour and a half to find our way to the highway from the one way streets, and when we did we felt victorious, not only for escaping Hanoi traffic, but for the fact we successfully navigated what has been called some of the worst driving in the world.

We picked up the pace once we left the city taking what we thought was the road we wanted north, I am now writing this a few days later so the details are a little fuzzy. But here is what I can say for sure, we did not go exactly the way we wanted to and had to ask directions multiple times, we were on the wrong highway which contributed to some of our confusion, but none the less we made it into the hills by nightfall. Some of the pictures from this area are posted here and the area was mostly flat rice paddies. The mountains could be seen in the distance the whole time and were a little annoying since we wanted to get to them but they always seemed miles away. The first day we did around 200km, but it may have been more with all of the confusion of what roads we took.

We spent the first night in Yen Bai, north-west of Hanoi on a map, at a Nha Nghi (guest house) called Quang Phuong. It was a family home and restaurant, but they had an extra bedroom they rented out, thus they were able to call it a guesthouse as well. It wasn’t very clean; the “washroom” was a large room with a stone floor that was tilted to drain out. The four bathroom stalls, Western toilet, squat toilet, washing machine, and shower, all emptied to the outside of the building. When looking through the grate you could see it was the same for the three abutting buildings creating a cesspool between the three that can be best visualized as the bottom of a giant port-a-potty. The son of the proprietors attempted to play cards with us; he had no interest in learning our games and instead taught us some of his. All the games he was interested in teaching required no skill though and instead were just luck of the draw games in the same way the game War is. We played anyway though because we didn’t want to offend him. The daughters, there were two, were very interested in the laptop I pulled out, but refused to touch it, instead they just stared at it as I used it, I know they have them in Vietnam, and in the area we were in, so I don’t know what was so interesting to her, perhaps it is such a luxury where she lives seeing someone actually using one is a bit strange.

The next day we set off at 8am, almost immediately we hit the mountains that we had taken the bikes out in hopes of scaling. It was crazy. I will put a ton of pictures here, but nothing can really do it justice. All of the roads you see in movies winding precariously up and down steep slopes, these were them. Hair pin blind turns with tankers and trucks looming around the bend, thousand foot drops only feet away, this is what we had come for. The mountain villages were a throw back in time. Thatched huts with terraced rice paddies lining the hill behind them was the norm. All families had these same mountain buffalo that were used for plowing, fertilizing, and transporting goods. Most had pigs running around as well and some dogs that roamed in the area. It was a picture out of a national geographic issue if I have ever seen one. This went on for about 250km until we reached the mountains close to the west of Sapa, the northern tourist city, where things became more desolate for some reason unknown to me.

This is the part of the story my grandparents will hate, and I know they are reading this so sorry lol. But here it is anyway. We reached the last mountain before Sapa, about 25km by the marker signs, up until this point the roads had been paved with the occasional dirt and gravel patch lasting no more than a third of a kilometer. The road here suddenly stopped. The gravel to the sides of the path and other materials made it clear they were in the process of paving this mountain pass but were not yet finished. The mountain road was covered in sand and gravel, mostly rocks about an inch wide or so. We began our final assent with no problems, it wasn’t too bumpy and we went slow as the lack of guard rails, which was not unusual during the journey, made this even more treacherous. About 5km into the climb I was leading by about 500m and took a turn up a steep embankment, It was a long wide left and turn going uphill and the first half went smoothly. As I began to turn left out of the turn and continue hugging the mountain upwards I felt the back wheel slip on the gravel, I quickly straightened up and recovered with nothing more than a little jitter in my stomach. It is important to note at this point we had been driving for 8 hours with no real breakfast or lunch, just water to keep us hydrated, so we were pretty exhausted as is. I turned back to see if Sam was doing ok and saw him coming around the corner alright, right then, no more than a full second after my first slip and recovery, the back tire slipped again. Already leaning into the turn at this point there was little chance of recovery and I hit the ground bracing myself with my leg and arm. I was going very slowly so the slide was under a foot, but landing hard on gravel tore up my leg pretty well as I was wearing shorts because the heat in the daytime can be brutal. I have included a photo here of my leg three days after the incident as I didn’t feel like taking a photo at the time. Essentially it’s your typical road rash as they call it. There was one decent sized gash and the rest were just scrapes.

Sam didn’t see the fall happen but when he looked up he saw my bike on the ground and me hopping up and walking around saying “I just have to walk it off.” Being a boy scout Sam whipped out some hand sanitizer that I wiped on the wound, and gave me an undershirt to tie around the bleeding area. We then went to work fixing the bike, it was getting dark and with 20km to go we couldn’t stop for long. I grabbed a screw driver and un-bent the best I could the shift lever which had been twisted and pushed in when the bike hit the ground. It wasn’t great, but it worked enough to keep going. We got back on the bikes, me with blood dripping down my leg from behind the t-shirt, and hightailed it the last 20km to Sapa. In short those were some of the worst kilometers of the drive for me, bleeding, tired, lightheaded, and cold (the temperature drops fast at night in the mountains), we coasted down the backside of the mountain into the city nestled there and stopped at what seemed decent lodging. They gave us a room and we both quickly showered, they fed us alongside their family and were nice enough to buy the medical supplies needed to patch me up, which they then proceeded to do. We went to the bar next door to get drinks and use the wifi, I had enough beer to numb the pain a bit, and when the people saw the blood seeping through the bandages apparently they felt bad and went to the store and bought more medical supplies. They then came to my table and said “gift for you” and handed me antiseptic, iodine, bandages, and gauze. I have to say the Vietnamese are some of the nicest people in the world. After downloading some NPR podcasts and checking email I retired to the room about an hour after Sam and passed out without a problem after such an exhausting day.

The next day’s priority one was getting the bike fixed. The shop unbent the shifter, replaced the gears, and gave me a new horn, the previous one never worked which is dangerous in itself as it is used in Vietnam to let people know you are passing. All in all it cost about $12usd, not bad after laying down a bike. Sam spent the day hiking the nearby view-point and going into the rice paddies bellow the city. In an attempt to let my leg heal I hobbled around the city checking out the more local sites. I also got back on the bike and drove around a bit to both get gas and test out the ability of my leg and the new gears. I began talking to some Czech kids in the afternoon and they stopped by as we were heading to dinner to see if we wanted to get some drinks, we resolved to reconvene after we ate and headed to the main street for food. It is odd, almost all of the main restaurants on the street served Italian food, now French would be understandable given the region’s history, but Italian was just nonsensical. We found a Vietnamese restaurant after some searching and ate dinner on a perch overlooking the street. Half way through our meal some young local girls selling the normal knick-knacks of the area began yelling at us “you buy from me,” a sort of catchphrase of the local street sellers. I began yelling back jokingly, “you buy from me,” this escalated for a little while then dissipated until we finished dinner and the Czechs came to get some beers with us. The girls then came back and we began shouting back and forth with them again, it became clear they all spoke English very well and they came up to the terrace where we joked with them for a while as they kept trying to get us to buy stuff. I was far more interested in their lives than their goods and said I would buy something but first asked a lot of questions about how they live in the area. We drank more beers as they hung around and as the place closed they dragged us off to a local place where the pool table is free to use if you buy drinks. They were 14-15 they told us but looked younger, they said it was malnourishment as babies that caused this, but I wasn’t sure if they were pulling my chain or not. They liked playing pool and entertained us for about another hour or two before calling it a night. In this time we found out they all had cell phones, email, and some even Facebook, a far cry from the true throwback mountain people we saw on the way to Sapa, but Sapa is a far more modern city so this makes sense. They gave us their emails and told us to friend them on Facebook, which I plan on doing. We went back to the hotel and passed out soon after. I have put some pictures here of us with the local girls and the Czech kids we met as well.

We began the next day around 10am, after eating breakfast and paying our bill we grabbed the bikes and hoped on the bus road back to Ha Noi. We initially said we would take three days to return, but as the day went on we knocked that down to two in the hopes of making it to Halong Bay for a day. We stopped at some random town for lunch and ate pork, rice, and steamed veggies, standard throughout Asia it seems. They guy their showed us his bong type pipe they use for tobacco and I snapped a picture of it as you can see. Quick side note, weed is widely available here as we were offered it numerous times in Sapa, with the mountain climate it makes sense that it could easily thrive, but the bongs seen throughout Vietnam seem to be for tobacco only. We were booking it back to Ha Noi, the scenery was nice, but nothing compared to our route on the drive up. And the road, while dangerous compared to the US standard, was smooth sailing when compared to our route farther to the west. This is the road buses normally take to Sapa and tourist say is scenic ironically. When the sun began to go down we were only 150km away, it was here we made a crucial decision, we called the hotel from the first night spent in Hanoi, setup a two day trip to Halong Bay the next day, and booked a room for the night. Then we sped, we got to about 110km away when it got really dark, and by then we were on a main busy road into Ha Noi, the traffic wasn’t too bad going in and we made it to the edge of the city in about 2-3 hours. This is when hell started. Sam had gotten good at riding, but playing first gear wasn’t his forte, my clutch wire had stretched and was no longer engaging, so stopping fully would stall the bike out. This problem had happened earlier in the day as well, and I had somehow managed to fix it, but it became very apparent that my fix was only temporary. Here is the picture of me fixing the clutch roadside. We were lost as hell in Ha Noi with bikes puttering to a stop constantly. After stopping for directions three times and ending up who knows where someone finally offered to guide us to our hotel, and wouldn’t even accept money, once again the people are very nice here. A ton more stalling frustration and horrible traffic later we made it to the hotel alive. Another quick note, Ha Noi traffic at night is about ten times that during the day it seems, the day traffic is a mess, but at night it’s just a constantly shifting jam. Bleeding, sweaty, and covered in grease from fixing the clutch still, we got our room and showered. We grabbed a quick bite next door to the hotel and passed out at midnight. All in all in one day we went about 450km and spent twelve hours on bikes. We were both proud of the accomplishment, but wow does it take it out of you.


We woke up at 7:30am the next day and caught the bus to Halong Bay, upon arriving we boarded a small boat to a larger one we would be spending the night on. We ate lunch on the boat then were brought to some tourist ready caves for a little lesson in how the bay and caves were formed. After that we got to kayak around the bay for about an hour and jump of the roof of the boat for another half an hour. All of this is best shown through pictures, so here are some. Sam couldn’t get my camera right so I ended up jumping off the roof five times in an attempt to get a mid air photo, better be worth it because the last one that finally got the picture seen here killed my knee when I landed. After this we headed to an area for the night where all the boats go, this is to avoid piracy that has happened in the past, strength in numbers. We ate dinner and talked with our ship mates for a while, I will just list them here as I found it interesting where the different people came from.


Five older nurses and one of their daughters from Australia

Two Swedes in their early thirties, one a nephrologist (kidney doctor), the other an anesthesiologist

A couple from San Francisco in their early thirties, the guy was in construction management, the girl in fundraising until they decided to pickup and travel Asia for as long as they could

A British couple in their mid sixties

A Vietnamese family that live in Sydney but were visiting for lunar new years


All were very interesting and took a lot of interest in our time in China, we stayed up drinking beers for a while before retiring for the night still exhausted from days of activities.

The next day, today, we grabbed lunch with some other folks who had been on the three day version of the Halong Bay tour with the same company. The bay was nice going in for lunch even though the day was overcast. Some of the people were Danish so I had a good time discussing Denmark with them and we all talked about the expensive and crappy US healthcare system to quite an extent. Also discussed was how I found it funny Casper, a name associated with “the friendly ghost” in America, is very popular in Denmark. We got back to Ha Noi in about four hours due to traffic which gave me some time to read more in Hells Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, an appropriate book given the motorcycle theme of the trip thus far. I am now in the hotel about to go eat, so hope this update is as fun to read as it was to live.