Hoi An

Riding into Hoi An after two weeks in the Vietnamese hinterland was quite the shock. There were westerners everywhere!  Having not seen one of those other than my team mates I found  I was now staring at westerners.  They really look quite different from Asian people, and for the first hour I couldn’t take my eyes off of them .  There was also loads of western foods available — the first time I indulged since arriving in Vietnam, really.  In one place, I ordered a brownie with vanilla ice cream, and found I couldn’t finish it.  It was so rich and sweet compared to what my body had become accustomed to that I had to ask for help from the person sitting next to me.

Hoi An is quite touristy — Unesco added it to the world heritage centre list because it is “an exceptionally well-preserved example of a South-East Asian trading port dating from the 15th to the 19th century. Its buildings and its street plan reflect the influences, both indigenous and foreign, that have combined to produce this unique heritage site.” (from the Unesco website).  It’s simply gorgeous and a great place to sit and have a coffee and catch up on some reading.  That’s exactly what I did.

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March 20, 2011 | Categories: Minsk, Vietnam | 2 Comments

Минск 2

Once back in Hanoi, and feeling a little more worn for the ride, I started considering my options.  Rain was moving into Hanoi, and the temperature had dropped to a not so balmy 12ºC.  The prospect of a warm, tropical beach and a smooth, 18-knot afternoon breeze sounded like a heaven too hard to resist.  Screw this motorcycle thing — I’m going kiting! Enter Lori and Kalen, a mother taking her son for a motorcycle adventure.  This wasn’t their first trip.  A few years ago, Lori rode down Central America from their home in New Mexico with a fourteen-year-old Kalen on the back of their KLR, but this was to be Kalen’s first trip riding on his own.   Anyway, we met at the shop where I bought Минск 1 (aka Larisa) and Lori convinced me to go riding a little more with them.  I invited a Canadian named Dylan whom I had met the day before to come along, and, thus, we had a gang. We left Hanoi before dawn, to try to avoid the deadly traffic and road dust of Highway 6.  Our early departure gave us a glimpse of what goes on in the city before it wakes.  We passed one man making a delivery of four freshly slaughtered pigs all stacked on his scooter — one of the many memorable moment when a camera was not handy. En route to Mai Chau, our first stop, my bike was still acting up even after having it repaired once more.  Lori let me ride her Minsk, and it put in perspective the gravity of the piecofshitosity of my bike  The rear end was vibrating to death, the motor was running rough, and it didn’t seem like it was going to get me very far.  When we got to Mai Chau I was feeling pretty gloomy about the future of my bike, when Lori rode up on a different Minsk for sale in town by a local mechanic shop and in very good shape.  After some negotiations, I got the Hanoi shop to take Larisa back, and I bought the brand new used Minsk — it was even the same color!  With my new wheels, I decided to continue on with the group, and we headed south to seek warmth and evade the rain. Our route took us through amazing landscapes of rice paddy fields dotted with Karst mountains.  It really looks like time has stood still in these places — Vietnamese farmers till the land with wooden plows pulled by water buffalo.  They wear their typical straw hats and wade through the rich mud barefoot.  These farmers harvest the rice three to four times a year in Vietnam, much more than in surrounding Cambodia and Laos.

On one of the legs of our trip, we decided to take a shortcut, climbing over a hill, as opposed to following the Song Ma river, and cutting off 20 km or so of riding.  We looked at the map and had a group consensus on which road to take.  That all would have worked out fine had we actually taken that route, but instead we turned off the pavement at a road that took us on a longcut.  The scenery was gorgeous, but as the gravel turned to red clay mud, the adventure turned a little more serious than we had bargained for.  Everyone in the group except for Kalen ended up laying their bike down in the mud, and pretty much the only way to navigate through the muck was to put your feet out like outriggers and work the throttle gingerly (no touching the brakes).  We managed to get of the mountain before dark but barely.  A nice family took us in, killed a chicken for us, and cooked a big meal.  We tried our best to strike up a conversation using our phrasebooks, but didn’t get much beyond age, family relation, and such.  They wouldn’t let us pay to spend the night, but we did pitch in on the chicken.

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March 16, 2011 | Categories: Minsk, Vietnam | 2 Comments

The Chop Stick Factory

We were riding along the banks of the Song Ma river on the second Minsk expedition when we happened on this industrious scene.  Over a distance of about ten yards, bamboo morphed from raw material into delivery-ready chopsticks.

This video gives an idea of the jingle-jangle production line:

February 14, 2011 | Categories: Minsk, Vietnam | Leave a comment

Минск 1

(translation: Minsk 1) — this post accounts my first Minsk motorcycle outing riding solo in the mountains west of Hanoi — yes, there is a part two.

First a little about the bike — the beloved Belarusian Minsk is a rugged soviet-era workhorse that has served Vietnam backpacker and Taliban fighter alike.  It does well in the mountains, and its simple mechanics lend itself well the to Vietnamese method of improvised and free-style mechanical repair.  What I mean is that you can fix a Minsk with a hammer and chisel which incidentally it appears are the favored tools of the Vietnamese sua xe (mechanics).  For the most part you are better of not letting them touch your bike, and doing the work yourself, but anyways, I digress.  The engine is a 125 cc two-stroke motor with a glorious 10 horses to lug you up the mountain, leaving a global-warming-defeating trail of blue smoke behind.  In general, the urban Vietnamese don’t think too highly of the Minsk and see only its outer appearance of antiquated, smokey, noisy two-wheeler, but you do get a lot of thumbs up and smiles as well when you roll into town with this classic.

It took me about a week to get the bike dialed in: letting the shop I bought it from look it over, and  customizing the seat to be taller and have a little more back support.  The modifications and further preparations to the bike gave me a chance to ride around Hanoi’s bustling streets — a unique experience you can only have by doing.  When 100 or so scooters waiting at a traffic light accelerate at the timer’s five-second mark before green (the traffic lights count down in Vietnam, and why wait for green?) the rumble is impressive.

My initial plan for my first Minsk excursion was to do a clockwise loop around the mountains North of Hanoi and looping back to the city after about  14 days or so.  I set out direction Dien Bien Phu, but events would not allow me to stick to my original plan.  The map below shows my path, and as you can see I had to limp back to Hanoi prematurely.  I melted a spark plug, and had a severe decrease in power leading me to think my engine was seizing.  As it turned out, it was the rear-end of the bike that was seizing.  The shop I had bought it from at a premium price was run by some expats who assured the bike was looked over carefully justifying the higher price.  But this turned out to be baloney, as supported by my rear brake pedal nearly falling off on the way back to Hanoi.

My itinerary went like this:

1. Hanoi to Moc Chau
2. Moc Chau to Song Ma
3. Song Ma to Thuan Chau
4. Thuan Chau to Son La
5. Son La to Hanoi

Click on the high resolution image below to see the itinerary detail.

The trip, short-lived as it was, turned out  amazing.  The landscape started off as beautiful karst formations set in rice paddies, and slowly got more mountainous as I passed Hoa Binh.  As I rose through the altitudes the bamboo forest yielded to misty pine trees, and the temperatures dropped.

When staying in small towns like Song Ma the people are exceedingly  friendly.  If you eat at a restaurant alone, you will be offered shots of alcohol — be it vodka or no-label rice wine.  This can be a dangerous proposition, as pretty soon every one in the place wants to do a shot with the giant foreigner who just rolled into town.  When you are lost, people want to help even if communication is strained or they have never seen a map.  I remember getting a little anxious when some tribesmen tried showing off their reading prowess pointing out Hanoi and other cities 200 km away, as daylight was fading.

Like a good friend, the communist party is never far away either, as the centrally-located loudspeakers blaring out local news and announcements at about 5:30 am or so remind you.  One time, I overheard militaristic exercise sounds coming from the local school yard at a way too early time of the morning, and could only think of George Orwell’s 1984 where big brother required fitness of all party members.

Not reading, speaking, or hearing a language I understood for five days was new for me.  Even though the people I met were friendly, I found myself really wanting to talk to someone after a little while.  In the end, I was happy to return to Hanoi, and ended up meeting my future travel mates for Минск 2 (to be continued…)

February 8, 2011 | Categories: Minsk, Vietnam | 5 Comments