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Published: December 12th 2006
The ride
Our Mean Machineso i got into dalat at 2pm. 2.05pm i decided to leave. during this brief interim, i jumped into a taxi, met an easy rider and agreed for him to drive me 700 km round vietnam til we got to saigon.
i checked into the peace hotel, same people as in hoi an, and as with all vietnam, it was same-same. i wandered down stairs after not being scammed by anyone within 2 mins of stepping of a bus, and met peter, (vietnamese) who told me all about the easy riders and what they do. uh, that would be riding easy. i'd read all about them in the LP and had met one (albeit an imposter) in Nha Trang. unfortunately i'd blown this poor sod off because i found rowan, lan and judith sitting at the bottom of the stairs from my exam. i could tell by their puppy dog eyes and slouched frames that they needed some light entertainment. i did my bit and got crash onto the table. (i'm only somewhat entertaining when i've had a beer and my world drifts inline with normal peoples). so cruel were these buggers that they forced me to have a drink
The crazy house
Dali/acid house with them, ball and chain, and made me stand up this con-artist down the road who only wanted to feed his wife, mistresses and collection of illegitimate children.
(only joking guys, i'm a natural pisshead. my daddy taught me well)
anyway, back to relevancy. so i chatted with peter for a few minutes and decided to check my mail. the yanks with the free accomodation didnt reply so i agreed to head with peter for 2.5 days down to saigon. i wandered out of my hotel to see a big gathering going on with loads of booze and the street closed off. i had a 50/50 chance of it being a wedding or a funeral. wandering through the crowd smiling and looking generally 'wedding friendly' while banging away to my ipod, i found out from peter it was a funeral. boy do i suck. (what? everyone was wearing white. reasonable assumption) after doing the walk of shame i made it to the post office near a rather wierd red and white eiffel tower look-a-like. this was where my day deflated from 'oh bugger' to 'save me the hassel and feed me to the dogs'. i had decided to
waterfalls
awesome falls north of Lake Lak dump much weight from my bag before i headed to cambodia. i may have been better off waiting and testing their mail service than the lovely vietnamese burauracy i was about to face. i spent 1.5 hours waiting, packing, unpacking, them checking, addresses, the fact i wanted it by boat not air (i do a good steamboat willy impression as well as a gollum. unsurprisingly gollum hasnt had need for use yet). eventually when all was done and dusted, another two forms came out, stating how much everything had cost in USD. some of this shit i;ve been wearing for 3 odd years and i have no idea. instead of reaching breaking point i lied anout everything and managed to keep my sanity barely intact. just like listenting to an alanis morrissette album. i spent the next few hours doing diddly squat in dalat until i had read my book and found out they had some cool stuff, but i was too late. luckily peter would come to the rescue. i went to bed and hoped for the best tomorrow.
so i woke up, put on the glad rags and headed to breakfast to eat me some noodles and
meet my new friend. while eating my grub i had that old familiar feeling of shiteness that usually accompanies me before i do something good. i decided that this was going to be a good trip. so we headed off on the back of his trusty 'Bonus'. my stuff wedged on the back, his stuff between his legs and the two of us on the seats. i must admit it was quite comfy, and i felt like a king (good spot to the person who emailed me). i sat my arse down, leant back and let him do all the work while donning my dumb helmet. the first thing to note was that like all vietnamese drivers, he loved the horn. infact, it was akin to an epileptic with an itchy trigger finger. i would however learn to make this into a *fun* game. between the stops we made, and before i realised my mp3 player was in my pocket, i'd try and make his horn into a famous tune. took a while but i mananged to get the chorus of 'dont you forget about me' by simple minds outta it. not a bad start i thought, cant be any
coffee beans
freshly picked coffee beans worse than when i was diving; i was stuck with big gay al, 'i'm super, thanks for asking'. 😞
first stop was the crazy house that i really wanted to see the night before, and thankfully it lived up to all expectations. apparently the house is meant to look like a knotted tree branch and it does, but somewhere along the line a serious amount of acid and some visions of salvador dali krept in. still it was an awesome sight, you can even stay there, but the moment you woke up, i'm betting that you'd want to be straight out. soon after we left for the road and the start of my journey proper. after a while we were cruising along and a few hours had passed. the vietnamese countryside is rather like home, the central highlands i was in anyway. as we were riding over the hills and through sweeiping bends it felot kinda like travelling through the brecon beacons, except on a bike. along the way we stopped at various farms and saw some cool things and some boring things. i saw silk worms, watched the harvest process of coffee beans, pepper corns, flower farms, bananas
De Niro Mode
'you talkin' to me?' (i actually had to recite that gewn stefani song to get the spelling. i'm real dumb), elephant ear (plant), tapioca and other stuff i cant remember. the least impressive was a brick factory, but it at least got my arse off the seat for 10 minutes. because we were not travelling the highway between dalat and saigon, we headed out towards the borders with cambodia and laos. i have no idea where we were but not a single person spoke english, and i had to trust peter with all food ordering. the food was unlike anything i have tried in vietnam or asia so far. being a fussy bugger, i wasnt liking the look of things, but afterall i came to see real vietnam and i guess i have to try real vietnamese food. the next two days served 4 new foods for me and an array of vegetables i cant even contemplate. for our 4 main meals, i tried squid (chewy, reminds me of something), eel with mushrooms (wierd but nice), goat (meat nice, giblets not) and last but not least, pig stomach. this looked disgusting, kinda like a two layered piece of rubber but slipped down suprisingly well,
mooo
this little cow went to market nicer than liver anyday. after my culinary masterclass, i've been in saigon 1 day and already reverted back to a crummy hotdog. old habits die hard, but then again, nowhere round here do you find that kind of traditional food. over the course of the two days we travelled through some real 'untoruisty' places. thats the nice way to put them. they dont even appear in the guide books which usually list all the big towns. at the last place we stopped, i sat with the bike as he went to find a room. as i was at a traffic light, the people flow was constant and 95% of them looked at me as if i was a pink elephant. i guess they dont see many whiteys round these parts, in fact, i didnt see a single one til well into day 2. i managed to scare one baby by just looking at her, smiling then waving, and another ran way back to her mother upon catching first sight of me. the opposite happened at an internet cafe last night. people crowded round me reading me type this blog, at one point i wrote something rather rude about them. not
bridge
bombed bridge from the HCM campaign 1975 an eyelid batted, despite not being able of read my insult they carried on and my joke was lost on everyone but the dick who made it: me.
i believe at one point we were on the cambodian border, but not allowed to cross because i was on the bike, but it all turned out rather well because we cruised around the ho chi minh trail and saw some awesome scenery. saw my first real waterfall which was rather spectacular. it was along these back roads that i found out bruce springsteen is the greatest driving (or cruising) music there is. i was expecting the highway to be jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive, but all i got was cows. cows became the bain of our lives over the journey, constantly wandering into the road and acting cow like. one traffic jam provided the scariest moment of the drive. while bombing along we came across a rather large herd of cows being led up the road (this being a public road), peter slowed down enough to be able to make it through the small clearing between a few of them. great, except when we just
ahh
this is the life came up to said clearing, an evil bastard cow nudged his buddy straight into us. luckily we managed to get through without being run off the road, but it was the 'cross your heart' moment of the day. maybe the cow had it in for me after eating one of his cousins for breakfast, or maybe it was bad karma from the wedding/funeral mistake. doesnt matter really, i'm still left with a serious mistrust of cows.
before we headed into our sleeping point of the first night, we stopped at an ethnic minority tribe. this was one thing i was unsure of and of of the main reasons i didnt head to Sapa in the north. i was told to go for a wander, which i duly did among the little dirt paths. the kids were fine, they'd shout helooooooooooooo and laugh, but the elder people, especially women would never make eye contact and there seemed to be an air of resentment there. i can fully understand, i wouldnt want anyone walking through newport (security reasons - they;d get mugged). as we left, i was glad to leave and just head back throught the rice paddies and waterbuffalo as
crazy house
Would you want to wake up to this? before. as we settled into town on night 1, peter took me along to a barbers/beauticians where we'd get some r&r. supposedly. this was without doubt the freakiest and worst experience in vietnam so far. well maybe. after waiting an hour, i went through nearly 2 hours of torture and had to pay for it.
i sat down on the barbers chairs and relaxed, waited, waited more and nodded off for about 15 minutes while the guy next to me got his treatment. i wasnt quite sure what was going to happen, but i was apprehensive. the lady got out a cutthroat razor and some gel and whacked it onto my face. ok so she goes a little too far under my eyes with the cream, but hey, she's being safe. thats what i would liked to have thought. no she was pretty liberal with her usuage. she went up to my eyes, around them, to my forehead and of course, why bother leaving out the entire nose. i had a tiny hope that she was just doing this to scare me, but then she set to it. the normal shave was fine, quite enjoyable now without a beard
get the fuck outta here
evil cows. major road hazard but she took the plunge and went all the way up to my eyes. i've taken many years to not bother shaving those tiny hairs because i dont ever want them to grow back. she fucked it all up. she then proceeded to shave my entire forehead up to my hairline, then my nose and both nostrils. do hairs even grow there? i was bricking it at this time and then we finally hit the piece-de-resistance, my ears and eyelids. she actually shaved them. of lordy. i now have two choices i'm thinking as i sit there. i cant stop her because having one side of a hairy nose would look even worse, so i let her carry on with it all. do i a) pay for expensive electrolysis when it all grows back or b) join the circus as the incredible wolf boy, make money then carpet bomb the salon back to the stone age? answers on a postcard please.
as it this wasnt enough, i had my ears cleaned. in the dark with a little miners lamp as her only concentrated light source. i'd heard about this in nha trang but didnt expect i would ever participate
more
the flower fetish continues :S in it. she set to work with eagerness. in her left hand were a set of tools that wouldn't look out of place in a torture chamber. i expected in my chair that any moment now she'd prod my eardrum, look me in the eye and repeatedly ask 'is it safe?'. she poked, pulled and generally beat up my ears in a brave attempt to clean them (never gonna happen love). i began to wonder where she got her candles from or if they were home made :X
to round all this off i had an attempted massage of my head. the result was two friction burns where my temples were due to the use of my hair as the massage oil. now when richey says i look like mr burns (simpsons) i can agree with him. at the end i was glad to get away. it was nice to see what vietnamese people do in their evenings, but definately not for me.
i ended today with a 130km ride to saigon, sadly saying goodbye to peter and his Bonus. if anyone ever gets the chance, i recommend it highly, its th only way you're gonna see the real
HMCT
the infamous ho chi minh trail vietnam and the wonderful scenery this country offers. only 3 days til i leave to cambodia. hopefully will see the scots about in saigon, though this is 10x more hectic than hanoi. take care kids, and avoid anyone who offers any massage ever. scarred for life 😞
(pictures as usual when i can get them done)
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richey
non-member comment
Wow. Cruising round Nam
Hey Fez. See your still having fun out east! Interesting shaving experience, glad it is not me. Next time i see you i expect you to look like Chewey from Star Wars. Anyhow, the Easy Riders sound cool and i am glad to see you haven't become a tee-totaller. Keep the good times rolling! Richey