Vientiane to Australia – Home Jeeves

The Mekong river at Vientiane.

Although only a couple of hundred kilometers apart, Vang Vieng and Vientiane couldn’t be more different. Well, I suppose they could really. If Vang Vieng was the term used to describe that feeling of melancholy and regret one feels after paying to watch a Bruce Willis film and Vientiane was, say, a variety of orange, then I guess they would be more different. But you get the point, they’re a bit different.

            As astute readers will infer from the above paragraph, three weeks riding a motorbike through the rain followed by three days partying in Vang Vieng had done strange and probably long-term things to my brain. Fortunately Vientiane is a likeably boring place, a good place to wind down. It’s not drink-Windex-and-pierce-your-own-nipple, Adelaide-boring or anything, just quiet and restrained, with a smattering of colonial-era French buildings, pretty parks and the muddy Mekong flowing past.

            After a lie-down and a little deep breathing, the first order of business was to offload the bike. I only had a couple of days in town and it had to go. I stayed at the same guesthouse as I had a year before when I had sold my previous bike after riding from Saigon, through the Mekong delta, into Cambodia and up through southern Laos. I bought that bike from the same street in Saigon that I had got this bike from and now I was selling it at the same guesthouse in Vientiane. Viewed on a map, these two trips would make an unbroken loop through Indo-china. The symmetry of it pleased the map-nerd in me no end.

Over 4000kms through three countries on two motorbikes.

            I festooned the bike with for sale signs, posted some more ads on the internet and spent the next couple of days sitting in restaurants with the bike parked conspicuously and waited for the phone to ring. One morning as I lingered over a coffee, I watched an old lady poo into a public rubbish bin. I was tempted – when in Rome and all that – but decided against it. I’m not in Kansas anymore, I thought.

            By the afternoon before my train left for Bangkok, the only offer I’d had for the bike was from a taxi driver who offered to swap it for a ride to the train station – haha. I drank a beer and wondered what to do. I was resigned to riding it to the train station and gifting it to someone when my luck turned. A couple of middle-aged American ladies looked interested. I wandered over and gave them my best pitch. After a brief but terrifying riding lesson I had my asking price of $300us. Those of you who’ve been paying attention will know that that is a $70 profit. Oh yeah.

Not fast, not pretty, but look where she got me.

            The following afternoon I jumped in the back of a little truck with a bunch of other backpackers, stamped out of Laos and boarded the party train bound for flooded Bangkok. It wasn’t advertised as the party train, but when you put enough lonely backpackers together and sell them beer, things kick off.

The train was one of the usual Thai specials with too-cold A/C and arm chairs that turn into bunks for the overnight trip. On the way the to the station I had been espousing the wonders of the Thai dining car to my fellow passengers and once I had chained my bag to the luggage rack I headed in that direction. Beer ordered, I watched the sluggish Mekong pass slowly under the Laos-Thailand Friendship bridge. Not far into northern Thailand the sun set and the backpackers emerged. Unlike the freezing sleeping carriage, the dining car was had open windows and was full of warm tropical air. I had a very decent Massaman curry, begged a cigarette and kept the Singha flowing. When we sped through a village the car filled with the smell of woodsmoke and cooking. Through the flooded paddies it smelled warmly of mud and stagnant water.

Soon eight backpackers had taken over and we set about emptying the ice box. It was like a budget murder on the Orient Express. Only without the murder. Or nice clothes. There was a Belgian, but he had no moustache and his sleuthing abilities were substandard (I hid his beer in a luggage rack but, disappointingly for both of us, he never found it). As well as Herclueless Poirot, there were four Frenchies, an Irishwoman who lived, like most Irish, in Sydney, an Englishman and a Yank. The great thing about meeting people like this is that you know you’ll never see them again. You have about seven hours to conduct an entire relationship. This makes people completely mad, which is fantastic.

ACME Insta-Friends - Just Add Beer.

Except for the Belgian, everyone there was a perfect stereotype. The American was fat, southern and enthusiastic. The Brit’s first name was Conningsby. The Irishwoman was incomprehensible but great craic. One of the Frenchies had just stolen something. Ok that last one’s a bit mean. But she had just been released from a Laotian prison. Apparently the Gallic quartet had come from Vang Vieng to Vientiane with a bagful of leftover weed which they’d smoked in the park. Soon after two of the girls found themselves admiring a clock on the wall of a busy Vientiane café. One of them nicked it. Unfortunately for her the café was owned by the son of a government official. Oops. After two days in jail and a 1000 euro fine she was told to leave the country and never come back.

“I don’t want to go back anyway. It’s a sheet ‘ole.” She told us diplomatically.

The night got louder and drunker as we trundled south through farms and villages. At midnight the attendant told us to stop being silly and go to bed.

Flooded fields north of Bangkok.

In the morning I watched the sun rise over flooded farms north of Bangkok as I nursed an instant coffee and a spongy brain. The extent of the flooding was amazing. For miles the raised train line was the only dry ground. The tops of rice paddy dikes stretched into the distance and islands of dying trees broke the surface. Some houses were on raised ground and surrounded by sandbags, others were window deep and abandoned. Closer to Bangkok the stagnant water had formed motes around apartment buildings and filled streets. People were expecting the water to rise for another week at least and there wasn’t a house without sandbags at the door or newly-built concrete wall.

At the station I shared a tuk-tuk to Koh San Rd where I met Alicia. We spent a day walking near the river watching the water stream out of the drains and over the city streets. There were hardly any tourists around. We boarded the sky-train to the airport under ominous skies and as the doors hissed shut the sky unleashed on the flooding city. It was a good time to go home.

A river-front bar in Bangkok. The water rose for another week after we were there.

Vang Vieng – In the Tubing

Camera tricks and cattle in central Laos.

After three weeks of travel so authentic and off-the-beaten-track that even a Lonely Planet writer would nod sagely in approval, I needed a bit of trash – a place where you don’t need to eat the food, talk to the locals or wear a shirt. A place where Family Guy reruns, grilled sandwiches and marijuana are so plentiful I could be in a student share-house. I needed a place where tube is used as a verb. I needed to get some laundry done. I needed Vang Vieng.

This town in central Laos is blessed with sheer cliffs, stunning jungle, green paddy fields and clear streams. My 1996 Lonely Planet guide book describes it as a village at the end of a bad road where you can meet some locals. Well, not anymore my friends. It’s now Laos’ number one party spot. Kind of a water theme park for people who like to drink a litre of whiskey and have sex with each other. The only local you’ll meet now is the lady selling you magic mushroom pizza at 1am. And thank god for that. I’d fucking had it up to here with natural beauty and foreign types. I wanted to hang out with teenagers from Essex and talk about sunglasses and orgasms. Or Californian college boys who like my accent and want to know which part of Europe I’m from. French guys who say… Well I never really know what French people say, I just switch off.

I was looking forward to it.

A detached headlight on the way to Vang Vieng.

I just had to get there first. The only thing about the place that hasn’t changed since 1996 is the road. The problem is not that it’s particularly bad – I’d had much tougher going in parts of Vietnam – but that it’s a lot worse than it looks. After chugging along at my customary 70kph on fairly reasonable tarmac I’d round a bend to find a pothole so deep I could seeing boiling magma at the bottom. In one hole I discovered a hitherto-unknown species of troglodyte amphibian and had to free-climb to safety. I managed to swerve around most of these behemoths but as I pulled out from a cloud of dust to overtake a bus at 80kph I knew I was in strife. It was about a foot deep, two feet long and 10 feet in front of me. I knew enough not to brake and instead rapped on the throttle and pulled back on the handle bars as hard as I could, shrieking in a manly fashion. The front wheel lifted just enough to skip over the ditch but the back tyre hit the far side of the ditch with an unhappy thud. I stopped at the side of the road to reattach my lips and perform some minor surgery on my pelvis and noticed that my rusty steed’s headlight had fallen off. I got out my toolkit, screwed the light back on and set off.

It wasn’t until a passing truck enveloped me in dust that I realized I’d lost my sunglasses. By the time I got to town an hour later I may have well have had my eyes surgically replaced with a raccoon’s testicles for all the good they were doing me. After I’d showered and scrubbed my corneas with an old toothbrush, I hit the street for a traditional Laotian club sandwich and an episode of Family Guy. I was home.

I now had six days before an unmissable appointment with a pretty blonde in Bangkok. I needed to sell the bike. Incredibly for a vehicle that spelled its own name incorrectly on some components my $230 bike had covered around 2500km in 15 days. To say it didn’t miss a beat would be unwarranted hyperbole (and as you can see from the above paragraphs, I detest hyperbole) but it had gone from the sea to the mountains through all kinds of weather from rain and precipitation to showers and downpours – I think one day the sun even shone – and lived to tell the tale. I gave the old girl a service, adjusted stuff, lubricated other stuff and washed her. I then bought a Laos SIM card, stuck a couple of signs over the headlight and the packrack, and parked her on the street. She sat there glinting invitingly, her gently askew handlebars seeming to say, “buy me big boy, buy me now.” I was sure it would sell. It was time to tube.

           

Saucy minx.

 Now as a few veteran readers will know, you can’t just go tubing. No. Like all the best social occasions tubing has a dress code – fake billabong board shorts, the more lurid the better, a white singlet 4 sizes too big that reads ‘In The Tubing, Laos’, and most importantly, fake ray-ban sunglasses in any primary colour you wish. Optional extras for the more seasoned tubinger include tribal tattoos, dreadlocks and found objects jammed through earlobes. Sadly I had only packed clothes that a human being would wear. It was time to go shopping.

The next morning, resplendent in my new outfit, I walked down to a tin shed stacked full of inflated truck inner tubes, signed a waiver in case of serious injury or death, jumped into the back of a small truck with ten strangers and drove to the starting point.

Basically tubing involves jumping into a swift-flowing river and floating downstream from bar to bar drinking local whiskey or vodka mixed with red bull, soda and whatever else is in the ice box, swinging over the river on huge rope swings and flying foxes and, at one bar, sliding down an enormous tiled water slide which spits you out twenty feet above the water. Eventually you float back to town, return your tube and, if you are capable, go to the pub. A couple of hundred people do it everyday, floating in groups of newly-made friends, bumming each other’s dry cigarettes. Very few are over thirty. There are no designated drivers.

          

At the tubing.

 Like most traumatic memories, tubing comes back to me in unconnected snapshots.

 It’s dark and I’m racing my new American friend downstream, paddling hard and giggling. We notice the Serbian bloke we’d been drinking with is, unaccountable, trying furiously to paddle upstream, away from town.

“You’re going the wrong way!” The American screams.

“And you paddle like a Bosnian prostitute, you Slavic fucker!” I add helpfully.

“Fuck you, English.” Touché.

He told me later that he’d paddled for hours thinking he was heading back to town and ended up in a rice paddy. Bedraggled he knocked on the farmer’s door and begged a lift to the pub.

It’s still early and I’m easing into the afternoon with a beer and watching some lads backflip from the top of a rope swing about 20 feet above the river. One guy bottles it and doesn’t release at the top of his arc. He swing back towards the rocky bank and lets go, hitting the water head first. He resurfaces with blood pouring from a cut over his eye.

“Fookin’ hell,” he says as his mates pull him out. He’s missing a tooth. 15 minutes later the bleeding’s stopped and he’s necking a whiskey bucket and dancing to Lady Gaga.

Sometime later I’m drinking with two Americans and a German by the river near town. The yanks eat from a bag of magic mushrooms. I stick to beer. The police pull up and Fritz and I quickly explain that we’ve not been partaking. The barman backs us up and we bravely scarper. The Americans spend the night in a Laotian police station watching the walls move. They have to pay a $500 fine – i.e. bribe – to get their passports back.

After three days of this I have the liver function of Montgomery Burns and the mental cognizance of an apricot. No one has even looked twice at the bike. I decided to try my luck in Laos’ capital, Vientiane.

The aftermath of a previous tubing outing.

Ky Son to Phonsavan – Bordering on the Sublime

Near the border on top of the world.

The ascent to the Vietnam-Laos border at Nam Can may be the most astonishingly remote, interesting and beautiful ride in South-East Asia. It was a shame then that the thought of being beaten and robbed by men dressed like Albanian generals was somewhat distracting me from the virgin rainforest and startling views. This fear stemmed from a conversations I’d had earlier in Ky Son. When I told the hotel owner I was headed for Laos, he had eyed my old bike dubiously. He checked my papers and when he saw that it was still registered to someone called Tam Loc Nguyen, he shook his head.

“Not you!” He exclaimed astutely. “No good. Police, they take moto, take money.” He pointed vaguely towards the border.

This wasn’t welcome news but I wasn’t going to ride back to Saigon.

Visions of soaring over the border fence Steve McQueen style evaporated as my hands froze in the frigid mist as the road wound up from Ky Son. I struggling to co-ordinate throttle and clutch as I changed down for greasy corners with sheer drop-offs into cloud, wobbling and over-revving like an L-plater. Luckily there was no one around. And I mean no one – for miles I didn’t see a house or another vehicle on the smooth tarmac.

The only village between Ky Son and Laos.

            My worries were temporarily forgotten when I climbed above the clouds and saw the view. Immediately below me lay a deep valley with a tiny ribbon of brown river an impossible distance below me. Above that I had a 200 degree panorama of mountains peaking out of the clouds. Mist accumulated in small valleys and gaps like snow drifts. Everywhere was deep wet jungle drained of colour by the grey sky. As I stood snapping photos, clouds parted and moved, exposing new peaks and obscuring others. A procession of trucks began trickling past. Most were fuel tankers but a couple were painted olive green and full of khaki-clad men. I guessed that the sudden appearance of vehicles meant that the border had opened.

            An hour later, I reached the concrete arch that housed Vietnamese immigration. We were surrounded by jungle and at least an hour from the nearest town, but it was well-staffed and clean. Nervously I parked next to a vehicle observation pit and said hello to an elaborately uniformed official. He ignored me and pointed inside while he had a perfunctory look over the bike. Inside my passport was grabbed by a disembodied hand darting out from under scratched Perspex. Within a minute it returned and I was waved away. I was almost out the door, forcing myself to walk slowly.

“Stop. Motorbike. You pay.” An older guy festooned with medals and insignia waved me over to a desk.

Shit, I’m going to have to bribe him, I thought. I had some US dollars in my pocket in various bills.

“60,000 dong. You pay.”

“How much?”

“60! Vietnam money. Dong”

Just under three dollars. I paid him and he gave me a stamped customs document.

I crawled through no man’s land in second gear. The Laos border post was empty except for a friendly young guy who took me through all the paperwork in about ten minutes. He taught me some Laotian phrases and shouted in Vietnamese at a couple of impatient truckers.

Goodbye Vietnam.

A hundred metres into Laos the road deteriorated into a rutted track and I was soon despairing of getting anywhere. A couple of miles on, as though playing a trick on the Vietnamese, it reverted back to smooth tarmac and I whizzed out of the clouds and into blue sky, dry roads and warm sunshine. I stopped for a pee and as I looked out over the forest I realized I had made it. I was in Laos on an empty highway in the sun. I did a little dance, hummed a few bars of what I imagined the Laotian national anthem might sound like and sped down the road.

After an hour of leaning hard through perfect bends brought me gently down a curving ridge and into a green valley between tiny villages and rice paddies, I reached the first town. Laos was clearly less populated and developed than Vietnam and the town was a couple of dozen houses, a market, a bank and a gas station. I was low on fuel, had no food or water and held no kip, Laos' currency. Being Sunday the bank was closed and the gas station wouldn’t except dollars. I rode on in a more economical fashion, aiming for the small city of Phonsavan. The weather grew warmer and the road even better and I marveled at how empty the road was. I only passed a handful of trucks and some tractors loaded with straw. By the time I found a $4 hotel room in Phonsavan it was mid-afternoon and I had done at least 250km without refueling. The motorcycling gods were smiling at me again.

The reason you should buy a motorbike right now.

Phonsavan is a flat, dusty industrial town on a high plain and as I went in search of a money changer a dry wind was blowing from the north bringing cold air from China. I exchanged $50 for a wad of dirty kip and set about spending it at a tourist bar near my hotel. I congratulated myself on making it this far with a good coffee, a giant hamburger and a couple of bottles of Beer Lao – what I believe after a couple of years of thorough research to be the best beer in South-East Asia.

This part of Laos is famous for two things – the ancient and mysterious plain of jars, which is just a bunch of old jugs in a field, and the fact that you can’t take two steps into the woods without exploding. That’s because during the Vietnam war American pilots were ordered to drop all excess ammunition on this geographically convenient and sparsely populated part of the world. A lot of it, of course, exploded and wiped innocent villages off the map. But a large proportion didn’t explode as designed and has been killing locals ever since. The two groups most at risk are farmers, who hit the unexploded bombs with their ploughs, and young boys for whom the ball bearings inside the palm sized ‘bombies’ make perfect ammunition for their slingshots.

All around Phonsavan, American military hardware has been turned into building materials. Hammered-flat shell casings become shelves and fences while hanging plants swing from machine gun stands. When I sat on my hotel’s balcony to watch the sunset over another beer, I looked over to see a rusty machine gun with a stack of huge bomb casings stacked behind it – a reminder of stunningly beautiful, fantastically friendly, dirt poor little Laos’ tragic and undeserved history.

Rusting military hardware is everywhere in Phonsavan.

Cuo Lac to Ky Son – The Wild Wild West

They call it rainy season for a reason.

The first two trucks I had seen in days were side by side coming around a corner towards me, spitting a hard mist of water and gravel. Thank God for that, I thought as the bike squirmed through soft grass between the overtaking truck and a concrete retaining wall, I’m back on the Ho Chi Minh Highway. Narrowly avoiding being smeared into an abstract painting felt familiar and comforting after yesterday’s ride through empty jungle – at least it would be a quick end. Better than spending two weeks drinking my own wee before being raped to death by monkeys, or whatever happens in the jungle. At least now I was making good time in my race for the Laos border.

            I spent the next three days muttering as I rode through patchy jungle, flooded rice paddies and constant rain. Occasionally steep mountains would loom out of the mist, giving me a glimpse of what was probably a very pretty part of the country. I stayed in no-name towns and passed the evenings looking for food and attempting to dry my belongings. As I veered left and away from uncle Ho’s highway I began climbing, following a swollen river. Washouts and mudslides became more frequent and often I would have to wait for an oncoming truck as it bounced and skated on the edge of an eroded cliff. By the time I arrived in Ky Son the river had narrowed and the road clung to the side of a steep hillside that angled into thick cloud.

Another truck edges passed a recent mud slide.

            Ky Son is the last town before Laos and a steady trickle of trucks rattled down the main road. At the end of town where the highway turned sharply away from the river and into the mountains, I checked into a sprawling wooden hotel which half hung over the muddy river. It was a nice change form the narrow concrete-box hotels which scar most Vietnamese towns. I changed into less wet clothes and walked the length of town. Squeezed between the river and a mountain Ky Son stretches maybe a mile along the highway but is never more than a hundred metres wide. It felt like a border town, the locals were less curious – obviously used to strangers – and many people looked more Laotian than Vietnamese. Floods had ripped through the area a couple of months before and the river banks on both sides were freshly eroded. Jury-rigged stilts held corrugated iron houses above the torrent. On the other side of the highway a mudslide had partially engulfed a small house. I bought some unidentified fried food and a beer from the market and sat on the hotel’s deck watching workers reinforce the riverbank with sandbags and gravel in an attempt to save a teetering house. I wondered how they would fare in this latest flood.

Ky Son's riverside houses hang precariously.

            That night I broke a personal rule and accepted an invitation to karaoke. In normal circumstances, like all  people with properly functioning ears, I would sooner tear off my own eyelids than let someone sing karaoke at me but the novelty of talking to a fluent English speaker proved too much to resist. Huy was an engineer from Ha Noi who worked for a Chinese company contracted to built a hydro-electricity plant nearby. With a touch of characteristic Ha Noi snobbery he made it clear that he was only here for the money and hated living in this backward nowheresville. It was Saturday night – I hadn’t realized – and as we chatted in the backroom of the karaoke joint he drank Johnny Walker while a group of younger guys shyly filtered in. With Huy translating we made introductions and shared bowls of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells on the floor and watching the joint fill. Loud young men with stupid haircuts drank quickly while pretty girls in heels sat in quiet groups, drinking nothing.

            Groups began moving into the private karaoke rooms and soon conflicting pop beats boomed around the building. As I returned from the bathroom – a room built above the river with a hole in the floor – two giggling teenagers pulled me through a door. The windowless room was the size of a small bedroom. On the wall a large TV sat on a stack of speakers. A guy belted out a local pop tune into a cordless mic and twenty people danced and jumped. The music was deafening and the scene lit in strobe snapshots. A familiar funk of testerone, cigarette smoke and blind energy filled the hot room – it was exactly like a Saturday night at the small-town pubs where I did my formative drinking. Young people cramming a week’s worth of dangerous, desperate energy into this one night a week where they were free to drink, scream, fuck and fight before returning to real life in a dead town. It could have been Benny’s Tavern in Leongatha circa 2001.

Like that teenaged haunt, the room had a strong undercurrent of violence – an exaggerated, fragile crust of camaraderie that could break in an instant. As I was pushed and pulled through the crowd, grinning youths shouted questions at me in Vietnamese and gave me plastic cups full of sugary vodka mixers. One of them pulled me into the middle of the room where half a dozen guys were half dancing, half fighting, laughing as they shoulder charged each other and spilled drinks. My new friend began talking to me, his face a couple of inches from mine. He was skinny and shorter than me – at 5’10” I was the tallest guy in the room – but all muscle, like one of the workers you see shirtless and barefoot on Vietnamese construction sights. Even if I spoke Vietnamese I wouldn’t have been able to hear him over the music and screaming so I just shrugged and smiled. He still had a tight grip on my arm. Maybe he’s gay, I thought. I’d been propositioned a couple of times in Saigon, once during a class I was teaching. Before things got too awkward Huy found me and, with some difficulty, dragged me outside.

            “Man, you shouldn’t go in there.” He said once we were back in the bar. “That guy you were talking to is a gangster. He’s crazy.”

            “A gangster? Bullshit.” He had been about nineteen.

            “No bullshit, he’s crazy.” Huy repeated.

            We said our goodbyes and I made it safely to my hotel and lay in bed. After a couple of minutes I decided to dead lock the door. It had been a strange and strangely fitting last day in Vietnam after an amazing nine months.

Tomorrow night I would be in Laos.

Soggy little Ky Son.

Hai Van Pass to Cuo Lac – Welcome to the Jungle

The steep mountain road north of Khe Sanh.

Somewhere north of Hue in central Vietnam, I stopped for a snack of Vietnam cold turkey, checked the map and turned my motorbike from the ocean to silver city, pausing only to sell my soul with my cigarettes to the black market man – I was going to Khe Sanh.

Those of you who have the gross misfortune of not being Australian have probably decided that I’ve descended into incomprehensibility. In fact you’ve probably stopped reading. How rude. If you did grow up riding the sheep’s back through a sunburnt country though you will know I’ve been paraphrasing lyrics from one of the most iconic Aussie song of all time, Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’ – a tale of a Vietnam veteran’s struggle to adjust to civilian life.

The battle of Khe Sanh was a 1968 Viet Cong offensive against an American military base. By the time the VC took the base six months later, around 1,000 Allied troops and 5,000 North Vietnamese had died fighting over a lonely hill of questionable strategic importance in the middle of the jungle.

As I rode north west from Hue through what had been the demilitarized zone between north and south Vietnam, the roads deteriorated. There are, I thought to myself as I dodged potholes and dozy buffalo, probably better reasons for visiting somewhere than a familiar song title. But the name that had been scratched into my subconscious needed a face.

            A day’s ride that began amongst the English breakfasts of Hoi An topped the bitumen splendour of the Hai Van pass and left the highway near Hue before ending in the mountains and mist of the country’s west. It was like an advert for motorcycling in Vietnam.

Outta the way dopey.

            Although Khe Sanh is now called Hu’o’ng Hoa, I recognized it by a huge monument to the battle in the middle town. I spent $6 on a damp room with a TV remote chained to the bed and a fan that didn’t work and began my nightly routine of hanging up drenched clothes. From a balcony strewn with drying bedding, I watched clouds scud over the treetops and listened to the afternoon chorus of birdsong.

Hu'o'ng Hoa's subtle, restrained monument to the battle of Khe Sanh.

Hu’o’ng Hoa is little more than a couple of streets straddling a mountain ridge with the usual assortment of mobile phone accessories shops, mechanic’s workshops, banks and a market. I wandered around for an hour before the sun set and found a little hill-top cemetery next to a muddy sports field full of shirtless kids playing soccer and buffalo grazing on the pitch. More than anywhere else in Vietnam I felt like a novelty as I smiled, waved and snapped photos. Mothers smiled at me and encouraged their kids tosay hello. Older kids giggled and hid. After an hour the rain started again and I decided that the town would be better enjoyed from somewhere with a roof. Since I left Hoi An and crossed the old north-south border, my few words of southern-accented Vietnamese had been useless so I found a street-side stall, took a tiny plastic stool and pointed at beer and noodle soup.

Mum cooks while her teenaged daughter serves steaming noodle soup in Hu'o'ng Hoa.

The bike’s old fuel problem had reared its spluttering head again yesterday and facing a long ride through what looked like empty jungle on my map, I decided to do something about it. Reasoning that my hotel room couldn’t possibly smell any worse, I drained some fuel into a beer can which I had fortuitously emptied earlier, pulled off the bike’s carburetor and sidled past reception. After having previous bikes butchered in interesting and unusual ways by untrained local mechanics, I was reluctant to let anyone near this one.

Using the bathroom sink as a parts washer and the writing desk as a work bench, I stripped the carby and found the problem – contaminated fuel had clogged the main jet with what we in trade call black shit. After a quick clean out and a late night test flog up Khe Sanh’s main drag, I was ready to go.

Early the next day I loaded the bike, fueled up and headed north. A few miles out of town I saw a sign for an American airstrip and turned into an empty, muddy parking lot. Beyond a low fence was a junkyard of military hardware patrolled by two barking dogs. A man in khakis yelled at the dogs and invited me in. Lining a concrete path were rusting skeletons of tanks, fighter planes and helicopters overgrown with weeds. Beyond them was a long red airstrip sloping down to a wide valley – all that was left of Khe Sanh military base. The wreckage of a small fighter sat next to a huge B52 bomber that looked like it could fly tomorrow. The airstrip too looked like it could still be used. Everything else was slowly returning to the jungle. Foot-long shells lay beside the path and the garden beds were made of more military scrap. According to the register in a small museum next to air strip, the last visitor had been two weeks ago. The book was full of entries from Australians – the most moving were from veterans. Besides racks of guns, the museum mostly contained photos of grinning young men and ripped-apart bodies, their captions full of dodgy English and propaganda.

A downed US plane displayed proudly at Khe Sanh airbase.

Back on the bike I was soon on a skinny concrete road bordered by jungle. I left the scattered houses behind and sped past a sign that loomed out of the mist. I was in Phong Nha national park with at least 150km before the next village. At the end of a cutting a muddy path led into the jungle. I hid the bike in the undergrowth and pushed into the damp jungle. The path became mud-choked and patterned with footprints. When I stopped the silence was complete and although I was climbing steeply I never got a view, never knew where I was. I tried to imagine what it must have been like during the war, straining your ears for a cracking stick or a clattering leaf that might mean ambush, studying the trail ahead for signs of a trip wire or a covered pit full of sharpened bamboo stakes. It made my skin crawl. I slid back to the road and was happy to hear the bike start first try.

The air got cooler and the corners tighter as the empty road wound through the trees. The mist lifted and I got my first view of unbroken, uninhabited jungle. With no rising smoke or logging scars it was a perfect panorama of green bush and blue-tinged peaks. Although only a few miles from the Laos border I could see the port of Dong Ha and the sea beyond – all the way across Vietnam’s skinny waist. Farther on the rain started again and I was once more in the clouds. The road became narrower and more overgrown and I hadn’t seen another vehicle for hours. I came to a landslide that had covered the road as it wound around a steep hillside. A bamboo fence blocked the road. Several motorbike tracks led around the barrier. Without enough fuel to get back to Khe Sanh I had no choice but to crawl through the rain and over the steeply cambered mud. On my right the road dropped away into the mist. I feathered the clutch and looked straight ahead.

Beyond the mudslip the road improved and I saw my first house. I have never been happier to be chased by a dog. Late in the afternoon, wet, tired and low on fuel, I limped into the town of Cuo Lac. I’d had enough adventure for one day.

The view across Vietnam, from the Laos border to the South China Sea.

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.

Da Lat to Kon Tum – Uncle Ho’s Highway

Dodging showers somewhere near Da Lat.

During what the Vietnamese refer to as the American war, the Ho Chi Minh trail was the name given to a network of paths and roads that supplied the VC with fresh troops and supplies from the north. It ran along Vietnam’s western border, snaking in and out of Laos and Cambodia. Some of the heaviest bombing and nastiest jungle fighting of the war took place along this route. In the ‘60s and ‘70s troops sometimes took months to trek through the jungle. Now, thanks to the Ho Chi Minh Highway, I was cruising comfortably at 80kph, leaning around rolling bends past tractors and water buffalo. From jungle hell to Vietnam’s best road in 35 years – not a bad effort.

Come to Vietnam. Get a bike. Do it now.

We’ve all seen the movies so we know how to describe this part of Vietnam - hot, muddy and mountainous with dense, stifling, tangled jungles, right? Well, maybe, but it’s also really… pretty. Jungle-clad hills flank fields and rice paddies, waterfalls burst from sheer cliffs high above the valley floor. Everything is green, wet and fertile. Villages with newly-thatched houses and yards full of pigs, water-buffalo and kids hug the highway. Every market is stacked with fresh fruit and vegetables, live chickens and Chinese electrical goods. In every field someone walks knee-deep in mud behind a buffalo or sits on a motorized rotary hoe which looks like an evil mix of paddle steamer, bicycle and lawn mower. People wave at me. Where is the desperate poverty and hostile locals I had been warned about in Saigon? Where are the dead dogs, flyblown kids and bomb craters? I’m not saying these people are wealthy – they're not – and maybe it's just the time of year that made the country side look so fertile, but I couldn’t help thinking that there are worse places to live – like Belgium.

Harvesting rice. Probably.

            For four days I cruised north from Da Lat through the bustling regional centres of Boun Ma Thout, Pleiku and Kun Tom, staying in $10 hotel rooms and eating fresh baguettes for breakfast and spring rolls with noodles for dinner. I especially liked Boun Ma Thout which sounds like a Scottish swear word but is a lively market town surrounded by low hills. In the towns along the highway I stopped for sweet coffee and endless refills of hot tea, pleased and surprised at my ability to communicate these desires. Despite months in the country my Vietnamese was still horrific.

Fishing near Boun Ma Thout.

            As the highway took me north and slightly west towards Laos, the hills turned into mountains and the farms into jungle. I began passing fewer ox carts and more logging trucks. There are still thousands of square miles of jungle in this part of the country and it is being felled at an alarming although predictable rate. Muddy scars appeared where loggers had torn huge holes in the jungle. Some logs were so big that one trucks could only carry three. The villages disappeared but occasionally I would see locals walking on the road. The men carried machetes and the women wore traditional long skirts and carried woven baskets on their backs. They were leaner and had browner faces than most Vietnamese. One man turned off the road and onto one of the muddy paths that I had presumed were animal tracks. In five steps he vanished into the jungle. At a tiny market cut into the trees, a woman sold vegetables and machetes. Dangling from a vine rope tied to her thatched shelter were three live animals that I didn’t recognize. The size of a big rat with squat, powerful bodies and short, grey fur, they had strangely human feet and a long nose like an anteater. I guess they were someone’s dinner.

A cloudburst over denuded hills near the Laos border.

            Hunting and deforestation has caused massive damage to an area still feeling the effects of American defoliant used during the war. At about the time I came through the area, a study announced that there were now almost certainly no wild tigers in Vietnam. In my time in the country the only wild animals I saw were a couple of beautiful white-furred animals that looked like big ferrets and one huge green snake. All of them were deep in national parks and I’m afraid to say that I accidentally ran over the snake. Oops.

I was told that the white, dead trees are a result of American defoliant. Birth defects here are very common.

            Despite having been bombed and shot at rather a lot by people who looked like me, the locals were almost pathologically friendly. For three days I didn’t see a fellow white devil or meet anyone who could speak more than a few words of English but I never felt lonely. In fact I felt like a rock star. There wasn’t a village in which the kids didn’t run after the bike screaming ‘hello’ at me as I waved, or a gaggle of girls that didn’t giggle as I walked past. Even the old men playing checkers with bottle caps gave me a nod. It was all very good for the ego.

            When I finally did see some westerners, they were on bicycles, which, as we all know, are for people who can’t operate an internal combustion engine. I was clearly the superior human being.

            Twenty miles down the road, I was forced to question that last piece of offensive nonsense when I ran out of petrol. As I pushed my bike through the jungle listening to the prattle of unseen birds, I prayed the bikists wouldn’t pass me. If they did I would obviously have to kill them to prevent word reaching home. Fortunately, before they pedaled to a grisly end I found a house at the end of a muddy path. A table of guys drinking morning beers and listening to booming Viet-pop fell silent as I wheeled the bike up the path. Someone turned the music off. They couldn’t have been more shocked if a giant octopus had landed in their garden. Soon they were all talking at once. I explained that I needed gas and someone staggered to his bike and began siphoning fuel into a coke bottle. I told them I had ridden from Saigon. One guy pointed to my bike.

“What, on that piece of shit?”
At least I’m guessing that was what it translated as judging from his mates’ laughter.

They offered me a beer and the thought of staying in the middle of the jungle getting loaded with these boys was tempting. Then I remembered the pedal-fanciers behind me. It wouldn’t do to let them catch me.

            I limped into the nearest town and filled up on petrol and baguettes.

            When I left Saigon, I had been worried about the fact that it was still rainy season. So far it had rained everyday but usually only for an hour of two, which was ok - I had learned long ago that God’s revenge for continually referring to him as a ‘beardy twat’ was to make it rain every time I even looked at a motorcycle. It’s just a fact of life - if I’m on a bike, it’ll rain. I had waterproofs, I had a helmet visor. I figured I could handle it. The ride to Hoi An would prove me wrong.

            Beardy twat.

The rainy season in full pique provides a perfect backdrop to this photo shoot. Not so great to ride through.