Ho Chi Minh City to Da Lat – The Fall of Saigon

On the road again. I wanted to take Alicia but she objected to being bungee-strapped to the mudguard.

By the end of my second term teaching I had saved a little money and Saigon was starting to get on my tits. I’d seen Vietnam’s biggest concrete jungle I wanted to see its, um, jungle jungle. The idea was a four week motorbike trip vaguely following the Ho Chi Minh trail to the Laos border and over the mountains down to Vientiane, Laos’ sleepy capital.

In eight months I had left downtown Saigon only three times. The first had been an attempted ride to the beach on a 38 degree day. Three hours sweating through holiday traffic and one motorbike accident later Alicia and I decided to swear at each other for a bit, turn around, buy a considerable amount of cheap beer, set our hotel room’s A/C to Turkish prison and watch Discovery Channel for a couple of days.

My second outing had been a weekend in Bangkok playing in the Asia Championship Australian Rules Football competition for the mighty Vietnam Swans. It was an epic weekend which left me with a near-terminal combination of leg cramp and alcohol poisoning.

C'arn the Swannies!

A few months ago I had visited Cu Chi with some friends from home. I crawled through the damp tunnels where the VC had fought, slept and lived for months at a time and saw the terrifying booby traps they had left for allied troops. At the café next door backpackers drank beer and fired M16s or AK-47s at hay bales covered in paper tigers and cutouts of Saddam Hussein.

            I didn’t think I had seen what a guidebook might twatishly call the authentic Vietnam.

My last week in town was spent buying waterproof clothing and sorting out the new steed. As tempting as it was to do the trip on my mighty Cub 50, I had caved in to common sense and bought a more practical beast. I choose a 110cc Honda Win which, judging from the stickers adorning various parts, had been built in Indonesia, Thailand and China. As the more geographically engaged among you will know, none of those places is Japan. If I had been in the market for, say, a dish of green curry dumplings with fried rice or perhaps an Islamic lady-boy who was handy on the industrial textile loom, then the combination of these three nations would have been ideal. But a motorbike? Hmm… At 5 million dong ($230) at least the price was right.

Note the Vietnamese safety boots.

The Win is basically a road bike that’s designed like a small dirt bike and once I’d got over the loss of the Cub – well, not over exactly, it still stings – I had a great time buzzing through traffic enjoying novelties like brakes and the ability to drive up inclines. In fact it seemed that I had gone from the smallest, slowest bike on the road to the biggest and fastest. It would even pop a wheelie, kind of. I accumulated a tool kit and gave the old girl a bit of loving. After a few hours of TLC we were ready to go. It was the only bike I’d ever owned in Asia on which everything worked. All that was left was to teach my last week of classes.

I say teach but actually I spent the kids classes watching animated films and the adults classes chatting and finding excuses not to let them take me out to karaoke. The thought of sitting sober – sober! – while a 19-year-old girl emotes Vietnamese screech-pop at me just didn't appeal.

The happy absence of Japanese sing-torture left my evenings free to say goodbye to friends, favourite haunts and the contents of my wallet as I caroused around old Saigon town. In between hangovers, I located a photocopied Vietnamese road atlas and an old Lonely Planet guidebook and planned a route – up Vietnam and left at Laos. Easy. My only detour would be to the beach town of Hoi An to get some clothes made.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are a lot of fine things in the world – the first day of spring, a new favourite song, being drunk, an amusing hat, boobs – but for me nothing beats roaring onto a new road with an old bike and a backpack. I felt the early morning drizzle wash away months of stress and concrete dust. My shoulders straightened as the traffic thinned out and the first rice paddies appeared. An hour north of Saigon I turned off Highway One and into the hills.

Highway One is famously dangerous and unpleasant and I was glad to be off it. It is the main north-south arterial and overloaded trucks compete with long-distance buses, speeding BMWs, scooters, tractors and ox carts. In a country of mental roads, this one is Hannibal Lector. At one point I became caught between two eighteen wheelers as they bounced and swayed a foot from each handle bar. I gunned the engine and passed between them in a cloud of water-spray like a big wave surfer shooting out of a collapsing barrel. Goodbye Clarice…

Vehicles like this tend to have right of way.

Soon after I turned off the highway I made the mistake of filling up with petrol. I didn’t know it was a mistake at the time but ten minutes down the road the bike was coughing and carrying on and we were down to 50kph. A new spark plug, a fuel change and cleaning the water trap helped but the old girl was still dying pretty often, usually as I was overtaking, leaving me staring at the grinning bumper of a six-wheel-drive dump truck. My bike was trying to kill me. I could hardly blame her, we had been riding steadily uphill through heavy rain all day. By the time we reached Da Lat, I had been on the road for ten hours and covered 300km and I was spluttering and shivering as badly as the bike.

I found a $10 hotel, a beer and a hot shower and soon I was wet on the inside and dry on the outside which I decided was far better than the other way around.

Happily the rain had eased to a mere torrent so I borrowed an umbrella and went for a tour and some food. The first thing I noticed about Da Lat was that there was something wrong with the ground. Some parts were higher than others and the bits in between were kind of sloping. In the distance other bits of ground were sticking way up in the air, obscuring parts of the sky. This was most odd. I felt like a Dutch explorer. But wait, it was coming back to me. There was a name for these things – hills.

Saigon is on the dead flat Mekong delta and the sight of hills – as well as the forest covering them –  was a nice change, even though the rain didn’t let up. I found a restaurant overlooking the lake, ate something hot and pleasant and wandered through the pretty, old houses the French had built when they used Da Lat as a summer escape from the delta heat.

At the hotel I wheeled the bike into the foyer –  usual practice in Vietnam where theft is a problem – and turned in.

Soggy Da Lat.