Top Gear often has the hosts embarking on some sort of ill-advised challenge where they’re given a small amount of money and a vague criterion like “Here’s £2000, buy a sporty car”. Once they’ve procured vehicles the producers give them various challenges (”Now drive your cars to John O’Groats, Scotland.”)
Hilarity ensues.
These tasks invariably look like [...]
We’re less than a week from departing to Saigon (aka “Ho Chi Minh City”).
We’ve discovered that Gordon and I have different opinions about what type of motorcycle to get.
In Vietnam you can’t get a motorcycle over 175cc. Most common are bikes around 125cc.
I want to get a two-stroke bike because two-strokes generally have twice the [...]
I’m on a layover in Taiwan. The airport here sucks. There are plenty of duty free shops, but almost no restaurants.
Taiwan is 15 hours ahead of Seattle and we flew out at around 2am Seattle time. The flight was 12 hours long so we got off the plane at about 5am on April 1st.
My body [...]
We spent yesterday finding bikes. We met a dude that spoke English fairly well named Son. He’s an awesome guy and a total hustler. Son proffered some pretty sad looking bikes. We told him we weren’t interested. Being an excellent salesman he told us he had better bikes at his shop. All we had to [...]
Yesterday we hit up a mechanic to get new rear tires and various mechanical problems fixed. Mechanics here are everywhere and very cheap –a typical repair costs about 20,000 Dong (US$1).
We rode north east and then south to Vung Tao a resort town that caters to Vietnamese (not Westerners).
The ride was excellent. The roads varied [...]
Two nights ago we stayed in La Gi. While out we encountered a group of men drinking at a sidewalk bar. We offered them cigarettes and one of them came and sat down with us. He didn’t speak English, but he did spoke German. I know a bit of German so we were able to [...]
So far the greatest distance we’ve ridden in one day was about 230km. We were in Pleiku yesterday and Hội An seemed just within reach about 350km away. We could theoretically do it if we really got up early, pushed hard, kept our breaks short, remained foolishly optimistic, and had no mechanical trouble. It would [...]
Gordon had gotten about 30km ahead of us by sunset, and while Grady and I stayed in some quiet, beach side, cottages in Cà Ná, Gordon had made it to the much more metropolitan Phan Rang where he promptly met some locals and went out partying with them and their families.
The next morning, Grady [...]
One of the craziest roads we experienced was going into and out of Đà Lạt.
I didn’t especially like Đà Lạt itself (too touristy) and about the only noteworthy thing that happened there was when Grady and I wound up at an empty American style blues bar run by a Mr. Dong.
Mr. Dong spoke excellent English [...]
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 [...]
We left Huế and engaged in another death march of about 350km. This left us in Vinh which is generally described as a overtly centrally planned, decaying communist industrial complex by the tourist books. The map Grady had brought showed a ferry going from Cừa Lò (about 20km away from Vinh) to Hải [...]
On our first morning in Hải Phòng, we asked the receptionist where to grab the ferry to Cat Ba island and headed off to the appropriate place.
As soon as we got there someone in a booth next to the road flagged us down and tried to sell us tickets to the ferry that was leaving [...]
