Motorbiking So Far

Hello World, we thought we'd give you an update on the biking so far.  Since we purchased our bikes, we have travelled over 700km.  Needless to say we are already a hell of a lot more confident than when we first shakily rode through Ho Chi Minh City.

Firstly, we headed down towards the Mekong Delta, a lush green province South of Ho Chi Minh.  We stayed here a few nights, moving around the different towns and cities.  The highlights of our stay here were a boat trip, where we were taken around many floating markets and met lots of friendly locals who politely pretended to understand what we were saying, and a homestay, where we spent a night in a Vietnamese family's home, on a peaceful river island.  It was a treat falling asleep to the sound of the flowing water as oppsed to our usual fight to get to sleep with all the car horns.

The home we stayed in.

The two of us are now making our way to Hoi An, a town on the Central Coast of Vietnam, we travel on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  We tend to ride just over 100km per day, which takes us between three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half hours on average, including petrol stops and lunch stops.  The scenery is absolutely beautiful, it is what you'd expect of rural Italy, with pine trees, and lime groves, with some great aromas.  The roads snake through the countryside and up and down mountains, it truly is breathtaking.  The whole experience is great fun, although hard, tiring work.  It is an adventure stopping to eat, and stopping at hotels, because the area we are in isn't well travelled by tourists, so virtually nobody speaks any English, and we speak even less Vietnamese, but the people are so friendly that everything seems to work out just fine.  We do however feel a little sorry for the owners of hotels when we turn up with our faces coated in dirt and dust.

This photograph does the view NO justice

We expect to arrive on Hoi An within the next five days, until then, we will keep on travelling North along these beatiful roads.  Be warned though, we are both beginning to consider buying motorbikes when we get home, so the roads of Sussex may not be as safe as they are now!