We fly up to Da Hang from Saigon, minibus to hotel and meet up with the rest of the gang: Boyd’s son Jake and his friends Nick and John. Next day, we are shuttled to the garage of the bike tour, where the central focus of this whole trip starts in earnest. We are introduced to our guides, two Australians. Mark is almost a caricature of an Aussie; a tall drawling Queenslander, broad accented and bold. His job is to tail the group and make sure we don’t lose anyone. Lee is quieter, always smiling, and apparently utterly unflappable. He will be leading us. Both transpire to be utterly professional and encyclopedically knowledgeable. We also have Miss Phe, a Vietnamese guide, to make our lives easier, and two Vietnamese mechanics, Mr Chin and Mr Yu.
The most important introduction, and the one we are all waiting for, is to the bikes. A few of the guys opted for modern Japanese dirt bikes, but most have gone for the Minsk option. These Minsks are Soviet era 125cc two strokes, state of the art when they were designed by the Germans in 1942 (before the Soviets arrived and took the whole factory away). They were produced until 2002 and now, they are aging, unreliable and lacking in certain modern features, such as disc brakes, working electrics and rebound damping. What they do have is character. And neutrals – about twelve in every four speed gearbox. In for a penny, in for a pound, I pick number 13.
After a quick test ride and briefing (use your horn a lot, expect people to drive at you from any direction, giving way isn’t a thing here) we head out. In short order we experience the mad traffic first hand, before we rock up at an ancient Cham temple for our first stop and cultural enlightenment courtesy of Miss Phe.
The break also gives our brains a rest to process the experience of riding in Vietnam. Particularly riding Minsks in Vietnam. So the guides duly turn it up a notch and head off down tiny twisting back streets and narrow gravel tracks (which is interesting when you have as little off road experience as me). As we are rin-tin-tinning along in clouds of blue two stroke smoke and with cautiously increasing confidence, the track drops without warning or time to think about it, onto a bamboo bridge crossing a river. A water buffalo looks on impassively as we pull up the other side for photos. “That got yer attention eh?” drawls Mark. Yup.
We head out towards the hills and stop at the first one. It’s hill 55 and is the first war related stop for us. There was a fairly famous sniper school set up here by the Americans and a few years before that, the French got a good stuffing. The Vietnamese monument here leaves little doubt as to the overall winner. It is to be a recurring theme.
On we press through increasing heat. Through villages, dodging traffic, overtaking smoking trucks uphill on crumbling back roads and wishing really hard for a few more horsepower. We stop for lunch at the home of the king (retired) of the hill tribe we will be staying with tonight. He played both sides during the war as some kind of sneaky beaky CIA type equivalent. He’s 88 and has been for at least three years now according to Lee. The food is delicious, varied and plentiful. There is a giant snake in a cage right next to us, the old man’s ornate self carved wooden coffin is just inside the house, and a hut containing vases (a display of wealth / social standing) and framed certificates from the government in recognition of his making Vietnam a better place. The king pretty much just carves things and makes rice wine these days. Driven by our deeply intellectual cultural inquisitiveness, we buy a shed load of rice wine to test later. It’s lunchtime on the first day and it already feels like we packed a week in.
After lunch the road widens and has less traffic. We are getting used to our Minsks, no two quite the same. The lack of power, braking and ever present threat of hitting a neutral on a crucial gear change require a certain amount of forward planning. This is the sort of biking that keeps a man honest but I’m getting the feel for the bouncy suspension, odd handling, and managing to get what I’ll generously refer to as a power band, starting to work in my favour.
But you don’t need a dodgy old motorbike to keep a man honest. Life will do that all on its own. Having got the measure of the beast, I bowl round a right hand bend a quarter of a second too fast. A mudslide has left a wide expanse of wet orange clay, about a foot deep, all across the road for something like 30 meters. Boyd is ahead of me and easily clears it to the left. With the split second I have left, I decide that the line I am on means I should take the truck tyre track through it on the right. Right? – Wrong. Halfway round, I can’t hold the line on the mud. I plough into the thick, perfectly flat sludge at speed. The back of the bike tries hard to catch up the front, which is creating a huge bow wave, my legs flailing to keep balance as the Minsk fishtails wildly from side to side. I steer frantically into each slap, and nail the throttle to try to ride through it, but there’s not much there to give.
Somehow, fuck only knows how, I stay on. I wouldn’t dare claim it as skill. More of a combination of luck, terror and sheer bloodymindedness. But when I finish hooting with exhilaration and relief I feel a bond with 13. I stuck with her (I never anthropomorphise my bikes, but this one’s special), and she didn’t let me down. On top of which, we are both now plastered in orange clay. Roy was behind me the whole way, but by the sensible left route that everyone took, except me. He managed to not fall off laughing at me, an achievement in itself, and return my victory fist pump as I got the wheels in line again. As an added bonus, we both have gopro cameras on our helmets (yeah, we look like dicks but got some good footage) and are both recording the whole thing. I’ll get it on YouTube when back at a real computer so you can laugh at me like everyone did when they saw it that night. I didn’t care, I didn’t fall off!
Ten minutes after the mud incident, Lee leads us down a rocky track to a river crossing. These boys are testing us for sure today. He rides through, checking the level on his tall Japanese dirt bike, and waves us on, on our less tall, less Japanese Minsks. It’s fair to say, on average, this doesn’t go well (edit: looking at the video later, the average score was better than I remembered. Just me and Jake with wet feet then). We take it one at a time. Some too fast, some (me included) with not enough revs. The result is the same. The bikes cough and die two thirds of the way across the river. On the bright side, I get to wash a lot of the clay off my boots (and trousers, it was fairly deep) and prove how waterproof they are. They don’t let a drop out. While I’m paddling the bike out and Jake is swearing like a Fremantle docker mid-river, dad coasts across in one and keeps his feet dry. As I write this a week later, he’s still managing to reliably shoehorn the river crossing into the conversation every three hours or so.
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