Motorcycle Diaries

Written August 28th

It saddens me that I never was able to write a blog entry about my first motorcycle experience while traveling on this trip.  The fact is that I was in India when I first drove myself around but was also in the midst of catching up on the blog.  I had still not given up on writing about everything I was doing, and was back-logged by about 8 entries.  At some point around then, I decided that I couldn’t keep up with blogging that much, and somewhere in the mix, my Scooting in Goa story was lost :(

But here we are in Vietnam, and I can write about another experience I had riding around a foreign country on a two-wheeled vehicle.  

I’ve always been scared of motorcycles.  Maybe it's because my dad fell off of his when I was a child and I can remember him having to be in the hospital.  Or maybe it’s because I know how fragile the body is when you fall off of a bike, and falling off a motorcycle surely must be worse.  Or maybe it was just because I hadn’t done it before.

When I was in India, I didn’t really have a chance to be scared.  I had picked maybe one of the craziest, busiest countries in the world to ride in, and once I was out with the group, I had no choice but to just focus and get from A to B through massive traffic with cows walking in the road whenever they wanted.    It wasn’t that hard as long as you knew what petals did what and as long as you didn’t act like an idiot.  I actually started to love it: wind blowing in your hair, the ability to hear the sounds of the city, and the sense that you are really part of the environment that you’re traveling in.  It was exhilarating.

Now I was in Vietnam and I was thankful I had picked India to practice in.  If I thought India was chaotic, I had another thing coming.  Vietnam is THE country of motorcycles and scooters for sure.  Every intersection has no less than 20 motorcycles waiting at an intersection when a light is red.  Scooters pass eachother and sometimes drive 3 side-by-side.  It’s insanity, yet somehow nobody manages to hit eachother, pedestrians, or cars.  It’s amazing.

I had met a guy in Vientiane who told me about the Top Gear motorcycle tour from Hue to Hoi An.  He had told me over dinner that I absolutely had to do it because it ranked in his top 3 experiences in SE Asia and it was unbelievable.  For those of you from the States, Top Gear is a popular television show in the UK that focuses on cars and autos .  The hosts of the show, after taking the ride we were planning to take, remarked that it was one of the best rides they’d ever done.

The night before we left on the trip, I made the mistake of telling my father that I was riding a motorcycle from Hue to Hoi An.  I got an earful about how I should be scared (I wasn’t), what I should wear (he said pants and long-sleeved shirt, I wore shorts and a tank top), and that I should be very careful (I was.)

Me at the top of the mountain.  Hi-yah!

Our group had now grown to 5 people: my two Dutch friends, Carola and Rozan, Tasha from England who was my Halong Bay roommate, and a newcomer, Sylvia, another Dutch on a month-long vacation in Vietnam. We woke up the morning of the trip and gave our backpacks to the front desk staff so they could organize the bag transfer for us while we were on the bikes.  Our bike leader arrived with the bikes and we all tested ours out.  I felt like a pro, and taught the others some things I had already learned in India, like how you should get off of a bike on the left so you don’t accidentally hit the hot exhaust pipe with your leg.  

A quick stop to swim on our way!

We took off, some of us on our own bikes and other on the back of motorcycles with Vietnamese guys driving.  We got through the city pretty quickly and entered highway, stopping a few hours in to swim in a waterfall and to eat lunch.  Some of us noticed the intense sunburns we already had in bizarre places, like mine on the outside of my calves.  

After lunch, we rode into the mountains separating us from Hoi An, and began the stunning ascent.  After a few minutes of riding, we stopped to take pictures and I understood why Top Gear had ranked this ride so high.  Below, the sea was a deep blue, above the sky was a brilliant light blue scattered with clouds, and between the two was lush greenery.  It took a lot of power to not stare away from the road the whole time we rode.

Just me and my shadow.

At the top, we stopped and took some photos, but they hardly captured the feelings we had or the scenery we had just driven through.  We got harassed by some women trying to sell us bracelets or oreos or drinks, but I was on such a high that not even that could really annoy me.

We got back on our bikes and began another fun stretch.  We rode along the beach, at one point spreading across the two lanes all in a row. I thought about trying to get everyone to hold hands so I could take a photo but decided not to attempt something stupid that could get us hurt.  

We continued along, going over bridges, then passing the famous China Beach, and finally getting to Hoi An.  We got off of our bikes in front of our hostel, and like clockwork, the bus with our backpacks showed up.  We took our bags and talked for the next hour about how awesome our trip had been and how awesome we were for doing it!