Vietnam Bike Tour: Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (Day 1)
Felix and I got up fairly early with the intention of getting on the road before lunch. We met a friend of Felix's that he knew from his Wharton MBA program at a fancy breakfast cafe. The cafe was really rather nice by any standard and was still reasonably priced. I think we all ate perhaps a bit too much -- sadly we forgot pictures of that meal. Just imagine a giant fruit salad, an egg sandwich thing and smoothies.The one piece of riding gear we couldn't get from the rental place was gloves for me. So, we set out to try and find proper motorcycle gloves for sale in Hanoi. Turns out there is one motorcycle gear shop pretty much in the whole city, even though the interwebs told us there were two -- the first one only sold snow gloves. With the help of Felix's friend (a native Vietnamese) we found the shop and got some gloves -- I paid an american price for them, but safety's worth it!
Alright, no more lollygagging, time to get on the road! We packed up the room and took all our stuff downstairs (it took three trips in the elevator, with saddle bags etc.) and got ready to load up the bikes. The first time we put all our gear on it was around noon. In the sun. In front of the hotel. Strapping down bags. Sweating buckets. It took us about twenty minutes to finally get it all secure and roped up; hopefully we get better at this! We then went back inside to the AC to look at the map and plan our day 1 trip one last time.
We figured trying to follow any real preset route to get out of the city would be hopeless, so we set off heading vaguely in the direction of the highway (south east). Turns out this was a pretty good strategy and we ended up doing pretty well and got remarkably close to the highway when we stopped to check the GPS. Felix and I both have years of motorcycle riding experience and didn't have any trouble blending into the unashamedly chaotic streets of Hanoi, though for a novice I can imagine it would've been way too much. I can only describe the experience as organic; unmolested by the vampiric fun-hating health and safety people that would dare to add rules to a traffic system. Street lines? None of those. Traffic lights? We found maybe two of them. And, I'm going to get flak for this I know, but I feel like the system works rather well. There are millions of motorbikes on the street, and I'm certain in the city there are hundreds of accidents a day, but since in the city everybody is doing maybe 10-15mph max at all times, they're all extremely minor. And the upside is there is almost no standing still, traffic flows rather well and you get where you're going quickly. Even for the full size cars, they're almost never standing still and can make their way through pretty well, though admittedly there are not many four wheeled vehicles in the city.
It took us about 45 minutes to get out of the major city area, though we never really left civilization. All along the roads there were buildings or huts of some sort. People living in some way most of the way. About 30 mins out of Hanoi we stopped in some shade to get water. We bought a pineapple from a vendor (which is really a charitable description of what this was) which we watched them cut up right infront of us. $1 for 2 pineapples! A great road snack.
After our short water/pineapple break we got back underway. We used a bit of a "stop and go" navigation technique. We'de ride for maybe 45 minutes or so, or until we hit a major fork in the road, and check GPS there. Look at what the next few turns where and then keep riding until we forgot what the turns were. Check GPS again, rinse and repeat. Seemed to work fairly well all in all. Â On some of our stops we simply had to stop and take photos.
