How I ended up with 40 empty days
I had just finished the Camino de Santiago, two months on foot from Le Puy-en-Velay, and I had accepted a job in Vietnam with a French agency called Havas Media as an account director. The job started in September. I was 23, I had never been to Vietnam, and I knew nobody there.
What I did have was a dream of riding a motorbike the length of the country, and roughly 40 days before anyone expected me anywhere.
So I flew into Ho Chi Minh, went to Bui Vien, the backpacker street, and took a shady little room that I paid for one day at a time. That felt appropriate.
Can you learn to ride a motorbike in one evening?
Apparently, yes. I met up with a friend who was already living there, Henry, although everyone calls him Riton. Red-headed, solid, and completely at home on a motorbike. He was awesome about the whole thing.
He taught me to ride in a single evening, on a street in Ho Chi Minh. Clutch, gears, where the brakes are, do not die. That was the entire training programme...
The next morning I went back to Bui Vien, found a motorbike shop, and bought an old Honda Win 110 copy. The day after that I rode out of the city at first light, deliberately early to miss the rush hour, because the one thing I did understand was that Ho Chi Minh traffic and a rider with one evening of experience were a bad combination.
I had never ridden a bike. I had no idea where I would sleep that night. I LOVED it!
You learn fast when there is no alternative. Within a day or two the gear changes had stopped being a decision and started being a reflex, and I could actually look at the country I was riding through.
The first night, with a family who cut cashews
I pointed the bike at Buon Ma Thuot, up in the Central Highlands. My accommodation strategy, if you can call it that, was to stop at the side of the road in the evening and ask a family if I could sleep at their house.
So that is what I did. That first night, past Buon Ma Thuot, I stopped at a poor house where the family's work was cutting open cashew nuts with a small hand tool with blades in it. Hour after hour, nut after nut.
It was rough, and they could not have been more welcoming. We cheered, we drank, we toasted things neither of us understood, and they let me sleep in their home. In the morning I thanked them, offered to pay, and rode on.
That night set the pattern for the whole 40 days, and it is the thing I would tell anyone planning this. The route is not the trip. The people who put you up are the trip.
Where this goes next
From there I kept heading north towards Pleiku and Kontum. I had worked out that I could count on the generosity of the Catholic communities in the highlands, and I did. What happened there is a whole story of its own and it deserves its own post, so I am going to stop here and write that one properly.
The short version of the rest: Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi, then all the way back down, 40 days in total, and I sold the bike when I got back.
What I would tell you before you buy the bike
- Buy in Ho Chi Minh, sell at the end. The bike is a consumable, not an investment. Budget to lose some of it.
- Leave the city at dawn. Whatever your riding level, the first hour out of Ho Chi Minh is the most dangerous part of the whole trip.
- Do not over-plan the nights. Riding until evening and then asking is how I met everyone worth meeting. It also means you ride at your own pace instead of a booking's.
- Learn on a quiet street with someone who knows the bike, not on the highway with a loaded rack. One evening is enough if the teacher is good.
- Carry cash and offer to pay. Often it will be refused. Offer anyway.
Thirteen years and sixteen other expeditions later, this is still the trip people ask me about most. Not because it was hard, but because of how little I knew when I started. Turns out that is the point.