Chrass Landing

Hội An was a great town although a bit touristy.  The waterfront is very beautiful.

We all went to the tailor’s and got ourselves some custom suits made overnight.  The tailors in Hội An do not sleep.

We left Hội An yesterday morning for a relatively short 120km ride to Hue.  Almost immediately we got separated.  My GPS told me to take a right turn down a suspiciously narrow highway.  Remembering the highway that we used to get into Hội An this now seemed perfectly plausible.

The road became narrower and narrower until finally it was about the width of a sidewalk.  It took me past rice paddies and small houses.  There was barely enough room for two motorcycles to pass each other.

Eventually the road turned into a dirt track at an intersection with another sidewalk-sized road.  My GPS had long since decided I was in a field in the middle of nowhere and had no guidance about how to get me the hell out of what I would quickly realize was a maze.  I didn’t want to take the dirt track, so I turned towards Highway 1 (at least my GPS knew where I was in relation to the highway).

This continued for a while where I’d travel  several kilometers and either reach a dead end or make another turn in the maze.  Frustratingly, at several points I crossed under Highway 1 but the embankment was too steep and guard rails were in place so there was no way for me to get onto it.

Eventually I escaped the maze and made it onto Highway 1.

It was a pretty uneventful ride to Da Nang which I just passed through on my way to the first of three mountain passes.  I was a bit hung over and wasn’t really feeling like doing a long set of switchbacks so I was relieved to see a sign in Vietnamese and English advising me to turn if I wanted to take the tunnel through the first pass.

I took the turn and rode about ten kilometers to the tunnel.

At the entrance, a guard pointed at me and told me to turn around.  Apparently motorcycles are not allowed in the tunnel.  Unfortunately what I didn’t notice (and would later find out when Grady and Gordon went through the same experience) was that there were people with trucks nearby willing to ferry motorcycles through the tunnel.

I turned around, retraced my 10km route (making a wrong turn along the way that added an additional 10km) and took the mountain pass.  The road was good and on a better day I would have loved it, but for some reason, I just couldn’t get into the zone.  It took about 45 minutes to clear the pass (with some breathtakingly beautiful views of the sea) and, as the road began to level out, I saw the exit of the tunnel which surely would have saved me half an hour had I been able to figure out the protocol for getting through it.

Tunnel on the left, mountain pass on the right

A little later there was a second, smaller mountain pass that I navigated without issue.

This whole time, I had assumed that Grady and Gordon were ahead of me because I had spent so much time lost in the maze.  I hadn’t seen or heard from them since we left Hôi An.  I was about 45km from Hue and decided it was a decent time to take a break and checked my phone for text messages to find out what hotel I’d be staying at.

It turned out that Gordon had had a flat tire, and Grady’s throttle cable had snapped en route.  They were actually still in the mountain pass.  Somehow I was well ahead.  Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise me: “Progress” and “The Specter of Communism” are practically synonymous.

By the time I arrived in Hue, I had had enough time to ride around the city, drink a couple of beers next to the Perfume river, book a hotel, unpack, have a shower, and catch up on my email before Grady and Gordon arrived.

For those of you keeping score, my “unreliable” Minsk has had one failure on the road –a slipping clutch; and even that didn’t stop it; I was able to limp to our destination (albeit slowly).  Grady and Gordon’s Chinese Wins have had more problems than I can keep track of, ranging from broken cables, faulty ignition coils, bent swingarms, and flat tires –clearly not the reliability that most everyone associates with Belarussian vehicles.