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Published: July 31st 2010
Thirsty?
Snake and Frog WineOk all you travelblog junkies. Here it is. Your first travelblog from the trip. A bit delayed I know, but hey things have been a bit delayed here too. So we are even. You might want to get comfortable for this as it may be a long one....
We can start with the basics, then the fun. We made the rounds upon first arriving. Here three weeks ago. We stopped in Saigon to say hi to our friend Thanh. We went down to the Mekong Delta to visit with her family. They were so welcoming to me last time, I felt it would be rude not to go back and say hi. Chuck also got a chance to go to the Delta as he missed it last time.
We also wound up buying our motorcycles down in Saigon because you can find them cheaper down there as most people ride north to south and then sell them (although this has begun to change in the last year or so. There are now dealers for minsks down in Saigon as well and many people have the same idea as us). We wound up buying 2 matching black minsks for a
Broken Bike
at the mechanics shops total of $525 for the pair. We bought some cheap tools off a guy in town who was trying to sell his bike and get out of dodge quick. We would have taken his bike too, but unfortunately it did not have the papers and a bike without a title can be a big problem here.
We quickly brought our bikes to the train station in Saigon; well tried to get there quick but Chuck got a flat 30 feet outside the hotel. after that we got to the train station quick and spent $30 each to ship our bikes to Hanoi. Sounds good so far, two bikes in Hanoi (where we wanted to start our ride) for only $585. The going rate for a bike in Hanoi is about $350 so as long as we stay under $700 we did well.
Our bikes arrive a day late at the train station, but that is okay as we are still getting all of our gear together for the ride. Tools, spare parts, and such. Hanoi is okay city but the weather is shit as there is basically no breeze at all and it is hot and humid. Except
Yummy?
Who doesn't love roasted duck and pig for our second day here as a tropical storm whipped through. It was nice and breezy that day. At the train station the worker does not want to unload our bikes unless we give 100,000VND (about $5). Screw that we paid for our bikes back in Saigon and we just saw him unload a locals bike and the guy only gave him 10,000VND as a tip. We all stand around looking stubborn for a while, until Chuck and I start trying to take the bikes of the train ourselevs. Well he does not like that very much and call Mr. Big Chief over. An authoritative looking man comes over. There is a brief discussion in Vietnamese and Mr. Big Chief gives the worker a stern talking to. Then he smiles at Chuck and pats him on the belly. A minute later our bikes are off the train for free and we are ready to go.
Now the shit starts.....
We head back to our hotel and get everything strapped on our bikes and we are ready to go. We only get about 20km outside of town before Chuck's bike breaks down. I pull up ahead of him about
Kindegarten
Always the damn small stools twenty feet and pull off the highway (there is a guard rail where he broke down) and ride back to him so I can park my bike next to him, but not on the highway. He is fucking with his bike for about 10 minutes when I get off mine to help him. I stand next to him for about thirty seconds when I decide this is not a good place to be working on the bike. I push it forward the twenty feet to the break in guard rail before turning it around and walking back up to mine. Well in that one minute it took to do that. Somebody driving by a on a scooter decided to open my side pack and grab the first thing they saw and drive off. It happened to be my ipod.
FUCKING HELL! I am pisssed, besides the fact that I have just been ripped off but we have planned a 1600 mile ride and that was my riding music. Riding without music sucks. I stand on the side of the road using some very descriptive expletives about the Vietnamese people in general for about 10 minutes before I am ready
Broken Bike 2
At another mechanic to ride again with a set jaw and fire behind my eyes. This is not the first time I have been ripped off in Vietnam, but rather like the fourth.
Okay so now Chucks bike wont drive and I have no ipod. We push start his bike and get another fifty feet down the road when it sputters out again. One good thing about Vietnam is there is mechanics everywhere. We need only push his bike for less than half a mile before we come across a lirttle hut with tires hanging from it. This means mechanic in Vietnam. We wait for about an hour while the mechanic fiddles with his bike. He decides it is a dirty carburetor. He takes it apart blows it out and we are ready to ride again. While I am mentioning broken things I might as well mention that my Charger for my mini laptop stopped working my first day in Vietnam. I wound up having to buy another charger for $30 at a store.
Our original goal of the day was 160Km ride to Halong City. Halong Bay is one of the seven natural wonders of the world. With the wasted
time for the breakdowns and the rain storm that swept through for half an hour and we are not confident that we will make it all the way before it gets dark so we decide to spend the night in Hai Phong. A semi peaceful city that still fells very local but is also semi large. We do not see any other foreigners the whole time we are there. At Hai Phong the luggage racks on both of our bikes break and we need need to find a welder there to replace them. Easy enough done, but their welds suck and the racks break again the next day.
We wind up staying in Hai Phonng an extra day because Chuck drops his phone off at a phone store to be unlocked. We figure it would be good to have a cell phone here. They tell us to come back at 9am the next morning (well they actually wrote 9am, there was no English). At 9am no phone. They tell us 12pm. Okay, we gesture, but make it clear we need it by 12 because we are trying to drive to Halong today. At 12pm no phone. They tell us
Our Bikes
They Look good don't they? 2pm. We are beginning to think maybe we need just stay here another day because we don't like to start our rides too late in case we get lost. At 3pm we go back for the phone, still no phone. We make it very clear we don't care if they unlocked it just get the phone back to the store now. The guy goes driving off in a scooter and comes back with Chuck's phone about 15 minutes later, not unlocked of course.
Whatever. Screw it. Chuck just buys a cheap phone for $18 and I buy a fancy one for $60. I figure it can replace my ipod as it has a 4gb memory chip and plays music and does a bunch of other fancy stuff. My phone at home was also stolen two days before I left so I needed one anyways.
While are hanging out in the cafe at our hotel just relaxing since we are set on staying here for the night. As I am downloading music to put on my new phone, my computer decides it does not want to take a charge anymore and dies on me. Another thing broken. This seems
A Good Day
We actually had one good day of riding. This was it to be a reoccurring theme on this trip. I meet a nice old man at the hardware store when we are buying some extra parts who speaks decent enough english and he tells me he can take me to a computer store for them to fix my laptop. They are closed now, it is 6pm, but he says come by at 8am and he will take me.
First thing in the morning I go to the computer store with him and it looks like a computer factory. There are 6 guys all taking apart and putting back together all manners of computers. I am feeling very confident they can fix my computer here. It turns out they need to keep it for a day or two. So we decide to leave it and stop back in Hai Phong on our way back from Halong.
We are actually able to get the rest of the way to Halong without Chuck's bike breaking down again. As we are arriving the rain is just starting so we grab the first hotel we can find. Later that night we are out around the town and we are talking to people about the
Same Same but Different
Notice the shapes of the bottles? They are the same beer and same price. cruises through the bay on one of the wooden boats. We originally find a person who charges us 1.3 million VND for the 6 hour day cruise. We looked around a bit before that, but most of the prices seem the same. We give the guy a 300,000VND deposit and about 15 minutes later we find a person selling us the same trip for 500,000VND total. We are a bit unhappy about that so Chuck stays with new guy and I go to find the other guy at his office to ask for the deposit back.
It starts poring rain of course as I am driving to the office (as usual here). When I ask for the deposit back he wants to know why, so I explain that we are worried about the weather and if the day is not nice we don't want to go. He tries to convince me that it is no problem. If the weather is bad we can wait another day and he will just keep the deposit for the next day. I tell him no no, it is okay. We feel better if we wait until the morning before making arrangements just to
be sure about the weather. Then he tells me that the guy with the money has left and it is not possible to get the deposit back tonight. My answer is simple.
"Thats okay. this chair looks comfortable. I will just wait."
Well after about ten minutes of waiting he realizes that I am more than happy to sit there for as long as it takes. So he goes upstairs and comes back down with our 300,000VND deposit. These countries are all about patience.
So now everything is taken care of and organized and we are set for a boat tour in the morning. We get up at 6am so we can be at the dock at 7am. As we expected the weather was shit, so the tour was actually canceled. After waiting in the rain for about an hour and a half before being told there would be no boat today, we head back to our hotel. The weather clears up around 12pm and we go for a nice ride through the back neighborhoods of the city. Basically it is just a day wasted as we are really only in Halong to tour the bay. There
A Natural Wonder
We finally made it somewhere is not much of anything else happening in or around the city. The next day we start the process all over again and even though it is raining we the boat still goes out. Luckily the weather mostly clears up and we have a nice cruise through the beautiful karst formations jutting from the ocean.
The next day we are back on the road. Our goal is to stop at the computer shop in Hai Phong, grab my laptop, and then continue on back to Hanoi. We need to get our Laos visas in Hanoi so it is a necessary stop. We get about 5Km outside of the city before Chuck's bike breaks down again. We switch the plugs and that gets it going another 5Km. Then it dies again. We are getting really tired of this bike at this point. We are at a point where we are push starting the bike and popping the clutch just to get it going. I hop on Chuck's bike, pop the clutch and we are moving again. I ride his bike for him the next 30Km just to give him a break from the shit bike so he can enjoy his
In the Caves
I am never that happy underground ride for a bit.
When we get to Hai Phong, it turns out they are unable to fix my computer as they can't get the part they need. Apparently the main board is fried from the crappy charger they sold me in Hanoi. I am told I can probably get it fixed in Hanoi, so now have another reason to go back to the capital. While we are stopped at6 a cafe in Hai Phong, Chuck's bike just starts spewing gas from the bottom. The cafe attendant runs up to get us as there is about a gallon of gas pouring of Chuck's carburetor. The float is sticking and after a few hammer whacks and some more gas, we are ready to go again.
We are only about 20km down the road when Chuck's bike starts sputtering and losing power again. We push start it and we are able to keep moving again. Our goal is to get to Hanoi where they have mechanics hat actually know how to work on Minsks and also have actually parts for the minsks instead of little scooter parts. Unfortunately. As soon as Chuck's bike is driving I get a flat tire
and have to pull of to get it fixed. While my tire is being fixed the daily rain storm sweeps through. We wait on the side of the road having tea until the rain stops and we can be on our way again.
We happily make it back to Hanoi without further incident. It is evening time by this point and the mechanic is closed so we have to wait until the morning. I won't continue to go into these details but you get the idea about the bike. It gets fixed again. We try and leave the next morning, we get about 15Km outside of town and Chuck's bike dies again. We tie a rope from His to Mine and I tow him to a mechanic that is only about 3Km away. He fixes the bike but we can see that he has fixed it with scooter parts. We decide the smartest idea would be to head back to Hanoi again and replace the new scooter parts with real minsk parts. We get just to the outskirts of town before Chuck's bike dies again. At this point it is around 5pm, rush hour and we figure there is
too much traffic to tow chucks bike so we wait for traffic to die down a bit and around 8pm we tow Chuck's bike through the city to the mechanic shop. We just lock it up there and leave it. We figure we will come back in the morning ( I feel I should mention that every time we fix the bike we are fixing different pieces and different problems. It seems this bike was basically just useless from the start)
The next day we start the process all over again. This time we get 35km outside of town before his bike breaks down. We are basically in the middle of nowhere at this point and there are no mechanics around. We call the mechanic in Hanoi who fixed it yesterday and tell him the same thing has happened. He drives out to us about 3 hours later. Works on the bike for about 5 minuets then tells us he cant fix it as he does not have the piece we need. Now it is time to throw Chuck's bike on the back of a truck and give it a lift back to town, as there is no way
it is driving back on its own.
The next day the process begins again. We go to a different mechanic. He works on the bike and says it is good to go. We have absolutely no confidence at this point. Chuck took the bike for a 20Km test drive yesterday and it seemed to be working alright. Today we are going to take a 140Km test run. 70Km each way to the Perfume Pagoda hopefully we will make it. It the bike works out. We will hopefully finally be leaving Hanoi on Monday afternoon (that is when our Visas will be ready). If the bike breaks down again we are trading the bike in plus some cash and Chuck is going to be driving a new bike on Monday. So hopefully, no matter what, once we get our Visas on Monday. We can actually start our border run to Laos as we are both rather anxious to actually have an enjoyable motorcycle tour and also to get the hell out of Vietnam. It is just been one frustrating country for us this time. So this is where we find ourselves now. Stuck in Hanoi trying like hell to get
Towing
Notice the blue rope? That is how Chucks bike got here. I toed it with mine to Laos.
Oh did I mention that there is a warranty center for my computer brand (Lenovo) here in Hanoi. Perfect right. My laptop is still under warranty so I take it there. Well Lenovos are warrantied in Vietnam, just not my model and they want to charge me $200 to fix it because IBM wont authorize the warranty here.. I explain the computer only cost $250 brand new. Oh well. I guess there will be no book written this trip. At this point I am planning on shipping my laptop home as I see no reason to carry a 4lb weight around in my backpack.
What a relaxing trip so far huh?
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Mommy Gail
gail dvoretz
long trip to nowhere!
Hi honey I was happy to see your story this morning....sucks about the computer and Ipod but that is part of traveling to these countries and the more people know how to handle those kind of situations the better the story.. that is part of writing ...educating us so we know what to do.... hope you got out of there and are enjoying your journey love mom