Motorbike discovery of stunning karst towers and dangerous highway 1, Nin Binh, Vietnam (4.-7.10.08)

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Nin Binh is just a 2h bus ride from busy Hanoi. The first stunning karst towers slowly become visible while slowly approaching the city. Nin Binh is nothing special and mostly characterized by the noisy highway number 1 running through it with a constant background sound of honking trucks passing by in highest speed. Vietnam is host to the worst drivers in the world. Traffic rules are mostly ignored and substituted by first way of passage with a sound orchestra to tell everyone about this. The cars are even equipped with horns that have a long lasting echo sound that lasts for few seconds. I wonder if the accident rate is even higher than in China. We found a clean and nice hotel and booked the whole top floor suite for 25 US$. As everywhere the rooms come with Satellite TV and fridge. Vietnam is well connected to the world and Internet and Wifi is almost everywhere available and free. Actually there is a real Internet craze and all the kids and teenagers spend the time with games or chatting.

The next morning we quickly rented a motorbike from the hotel, got a sketch map with the major sites and ventured off into the karst tower landscape. I was nervous while driving along the beeping trucks until we turned onto a smaller road leading to the major area of rivers and towers. We passed rice fields after rice fields with people bringing in the harvest. It is a sea of rice in all colors from light green to yellow. The main area turned out to be somehow touristic with boats carrying tourists along the major sites. We escaped this and went quickly off the main track and climbed few nice hills with brilliant views over the landscape. We were happy to do some hiking and move our legs. The small country road winded through the karst with nice temples attached to some of the towers. It got dark and somehow we found the way back in time ending again on the highway 1 with its craze of trucks.

The next day we ventured out to a nature reserve 50 km away. The tricky part was to find the way since most maps are out of scale, not accurate or too small. We had the surprise to find a huge temple complex in reconstruction. Hundred of monk statues were piled up in front waiting for placement. We took some funny pictures, visited the huge temple halls and continued our journey. We found the park after some difficulties and had a nice 2 hour circle hike in subtropical rain forest. The main problem was that it got dark after we made a short detour along a lake. I had a rough orientation of the direction of the main street, but we ended up driving through small villages in full harvest mode with plenty of rice straw on the tracks and occasionally hundred of ducks being walked home. We had no choice than always to stop and to ask for Nin Binh. The time seemed endless and finally we hit our favorite highway number 1. It was even worse at night time. Luckily we managed to avoid the trucks and found our way home after 10 hour on the road.

We felt we had enough of the somehow scrubby town and the passing traffic and decided to take a night train to the central area of Vietnam.
The last day passed with rides along the most scenic karst village area. I enjoyed it this time from the back seat of the motorcycle since Yuki was improving quickly in her skills riding it.


Practicalities:

Motor bike rental 8 US$ (125 cc)
1l Gasoline 16.000 Dong
Train Nin Binh-Hue 23 US$ (Hard Sleeper)

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Comments

[matthew]

www.poweredbicycles.co.uk
nice collection