Kon Tum to Hai Van Pass – V-wet-nam

The weather closing in again near Hue.

Like many great things in life, motorcycling is never just ok. It’s either magnificent of awful. It’s a freedom machine effortlessly bonding rider and road, or it’s an angry badger gnawing at your scrotum. You’re either steering a cloud through a bed of flowers or piloting a rotting pig up the devil’s arsehole.

            Sorry about that last one.

            The ride from Kon Tum to Hoi An fell into the latter category. In 12 hours I did 250km, got lost three times and swore at a duck. It was rain as heavy as I’ve seen and it didn’t stop for a second. At one stage I found myself riding the wrong way up Highway One alternately singing Sheryl Crowe songs and screaming obscenities to stop my frozen face peeling off.

In fact, I don’t want to talk about it thank you very much.

            All I’ll say is that by the time I got to Hoi An’s old town, everything I owned up to and including my spleen was wet and, oddly, I could only speak German. I found ein zimmer in a small hotel and jumped fully-clothed into the shower. After thawing, I hung everything up to dry, turned on the air-con, crawled into bed and started a relationship with a man named Jeremy.

Jeremy Wade is a middle-aged Englishman with questionable oral hygiene and – at the risk of sounding like Mrs Slocombe from are you being served – a big rod. That’s because he hosts a fishing show called river monsters which Discovery Channel were playing ad nauseam. As the only English program on the hotel TV and with the rain still rattling the windows, it was my only choice. Also, it’s really good.

With Jeremy’s dulcet cries of "fish on, fish on" ringing in my ears, I slept.

Yet another ye olde tailor shop in Hoi An.

            I woke late the next morning to find a weak sun steaming the cobblestones dry outside my window. In a country of concrete-box housing and broken footpaths, Hoi An’s historic architecture and partially pedestrianized old town is a welcome change. Tiled roofs cover cracked yellow render and there’s hardly a straight line in sight. Moss tinges the roofs and fills cracks in eighteenth-century houses that lean drunkenly on each other. Before several decades in which one war blended into the next, many of Vietnam’s towns looked like this. By virtue of being an obscure, unimportant fishing town, Hoi An had been spared the bombing and bullet holes. Some streets look the same as they would have 200 years ago. Except that nearly every building is now given over to one of the town’s tourist draw cards – cheap tailored clothes. Virtually everyone that visits gets something made and the locals are cashing in. Even my hotel doubled as a tailor’s shop.

I ordered an American breakfast from an English menu and watched the round-eyes bump telephoto lenses as they ambled through by far the most touristy place I had seen in Vietnam.

            If you can’t beat ‘em and all that so after breakfast I went straight to Number One Design and got measured up, noting how much the price had risen in the two years since I’d last been. But $35 for two shirts is still cheap, and the one I’d bought there last time was still going strong so I knew the quality was ok. Mostly to stop them hassling me, I then commissioned a rather snazzy pair of pinstriped shorts from my hotel’s tailor.

A morning of being touched in unusual places left me in need of a beer so I hit one of the riverside cafes and filled up on 40 cent draught beer and noodles. I spent the afternoon chatting to backpackers, glad of some conversation that didn’t involve miming or the word kangaroo.

The following day I gave the Win some overdue loving, changing the oil and adjusting the chain. As I drained the oil, trying not to spill too much on the World Heritage listed footpath, a local pulled up on an old scooter. He said something in Vietnamese and I soon realized he was asking me how old the oil was. I told him 1500km and he grabbed the greasy bottle, miming that he wanted to use it in his bike. I admired his dedication to recycling.

Behind Hoi An's market.

The day was warm and with nothing to do but wait for my clothes, I decided on a test ride to the nearby beach. When I arrived I saw the upside to all the crap rainy season weather – good surf. The rain had been caused by a typhoon which had recently buggered parts of the Philippines and stirred up the South China Sea. Not generally considered a surfing Mecca, as the phrase goes, Vietnam’s line-ups are spared the hordes of he-men that make being a rubbish surfer like me so embarrassing in Australia. After a quick review of my surfer’s dictionary I got stoked, hired a gun and charged the next set. Two hours of being sucked under the lip and dragged over the falls had given me a gnarly board rash and a sick fin tattoo so I paddled in. It was time to get away from the beach and back to speaking the Queen’s tongue. I returned to town and picked up my clothes, which had been made in a day and fit perfectly

The next morning I turned onto the coast road past palm trees and shiny new resorts that obscured both the view of and the access to the stunning beach that I remembered from my last visit. This area has become one of Vietnam’s most popular coastal getaways for international tourists and a growing number of wealthy locals. On a drizzly day in low season it was hard to see how demand could keep up with the speed of development. I soon left the empty resorts and arrived in Da Nang, where I joined the rush hour traffic.

Da Nang is one of the biggest cities in the country and with its beach-side location and interesting history it probably deserved more than a cursory glance. But I was in a hurry. I wanted to get to the Hai Van Pass, allegedly the best stretch of road in Vietnam.

The mighty Hai Van pass.

Glued to the side of cliffs with views of rocky coves hundreds of feet below, the pass is 20 km of biking heaven. The Hai Van tunnel channels trucks and buses deep below the twisting tarmac so apart from the occasional private car, motorbikes have free reign. This is how it should be, I thought as a leaned into corners and clicked through gears, a world of bikes. A two-wheeled utopia with no belching trucks and fat old men in their polar bear-killing, four-doored smog boxes. Then the fog rolled in and the rain started.

What I wouldn’t give for a four-doored smog box.

Soon the road descended from the fog and joined Highway One. After an hour I got to the city of Hue, pleasantly surprised that I hadn’t been smeared up the road like meaty lip balm by the homicidal truck drivers. I steered at random through city streets and over the perfume river and found myself in the centre of the old city. I pulled over to consult the map and noticed that I was parked in front of one of the only western bars in town. I took this as a sign from the hamburger gods and ordered one with the lot. I topped up my dangerously low cholesterol levels and steered towards Laos. I was going back to the jungle.

Enjoying a rare break in the weather at Hue.