"I don't think. My orders say I'm not supposed to know where I'm taking this boat, so I don't. But one look at you and I know it's gonna be hot, wherever it is."

It has been some rough riding. We didn't take many photos let alone stop to see much more than the road. Weather, breakdowns, and near-death experiences. Not that it hasn't been a superlative experience. Qui Non - Quang Nai - Danang - Hue. Read all about it...

Some Hazards:

These were actually taken on day five when the road was like so much glass...and riding while shooting was semi-practical, if stupid. I'd wait until several large vehicles had re-vectored to an intercept/collision course before taking the shot and evading. It gets ugly when the buses are passing the trucks which are themselves passing something else.

making our move

the buses by day are high velocity death-machines, while at night they can be guardian angels...

the train tracks were almost always with us to the right or left and a good indicator that we were still on course...they run mostly parallel to Hwy 1 all the way to Hanoi.

Day Two We generously refer to as "Hell Day"

It started out well enough. We slipped out of Qui Non at first light while the prostitutes, pimps, and touts slept in their karaoke dreams. 30 minutes of power-riding out Adam disappeared on me for the first time. When a cigarette later he had yet to materialize, I doubled back to find him broken down and waiting for the toolkit in my possession. While we were thus occupied repairing his broken throttle cable, a wiry codger with bottle-thick lenses ambled over and intimated we should push the bike across the street to his shop.

There he did some handy fucking work with his bicycle repair tools (his trade) We were duly impressed by his level of capability. He even mod'd some of his tools with his hand-crank grinder to do the job. When he was done thirty minutes later he refused the princely sum of one u.s. dollar instead opting for a viet fiver (that is 5000 dong or $.30 usd)

Satisfied we rode hard for another two hours or so, and seemed to move back inland away from the coast a bit. At least we couldn't see it anymore.

some of the green scene

We sighted one of the usual establishments with its signs promising "Phó" "Cóm" and of course "Bía." They made some fine veggie noodle stew for me and chicken something for the adamn. Disregarding what my book recommends I try to enunciate for communicating my veg-ness, I have always stuck with "toi an chey" which always seems to work. Given the responses it engenders, I had assumed it meant something like "I am a vegetable." I learned recently that it in fact means "I am as a monk" which is tres kool. (we should try it on the pimps)

Also enjoying the establishment were a sodding drunk village/provincial police crew. Oh did they love us. The six of them had powered through over 30 beers by our count, and soon they were hopping around our table, saluting us we as fulfilled their direct orders to pour bottles of the stuff down our throats.

The charismatic leader of the pack gave me some weird soft kiss on the cheek thing. we worried it was going to turn into vietnamese Deliverance for a moment...later he was trying to convince us that we should allow our friendly waitress (lower left) to service more than our table.

lunch break over, they stumbled outside, hopped back onto their motos and sped back to their jobs of enforcing the laws, upholding justice, and disrupting the peace.

bia hoi indeed

They were gonna give me a medal for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army anymore

The road was treacherous already - we had not planned to add drunkeness to the list of complicating factors. In retrospect I honestly think I would have tried to pass that bus in exactly the same manner had I been sober. A maneuver that proved disastrous once it decided to occupy the limited space I had selected to make my move. I lost that game of cat and mouse and immediately found myself forced off the road fishtailing through some really sloppy shit powder before ultimately going airborne in a spectacular accident. Had I been sober, I probably would have suffered the same fate, though my blood alcohol level made me bounce quite easily without suffering much physical trauma. In fact the viets who assembled around my twisted form were wide-eyed when I leapt to my feet, hoisted the bike up, and restarted the engine. Checking the bike over, I smiled at them before speeding off, pounding the side of my helmet with one hand while presenting a thumbs up with the other. Hopefully I imparted a valuable lesson on personal safety precautions that day.

A dramatic recreation of the moment. I didn't really make any such face however...i only remember sort of quietly sighing to myself

my back feels kinda funny... i comforted myself by imagining the "old wound from 'nam" conversations i would be able to have

we rode on through the green

A couple of hours later adamn disappeared on me again. It was a particularly nasty section of road - stretches of slippery slop to surf across and construction crews taking more than half of the already insufficiently wide road. I had no idea whether he was ahead or behind me, so I opted to camp out at a xang station in the next village. 30 minutes later there was still no sign of him...I had no concerns however as he shares the same strange umbrella of incomprehensible luck that I enjoy.

He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't going to get so much as a scratch here.

I didn't want to backtrack but finally conceded that perhaps I should investigate. Six kilometers later I found him contending with another snapped cable, his clutch this time.

One of the road crew workers helped with this quality rig-up that would have made Rommel proud. He spent his hour break working on the bike and refused any dongle.

A couple hours later found us in Quang Ngai, a small town where we mostly encountered friendly people going about their business. We decided to stop for the day. After locating moto-secure lodging (a place where we could park them inside at night) we headed outside of town on an even smaller road to the Son My subdistrict. We wanted to see how the village of My Lai was doing thirty years after being completely brutalized by american 'seek-and-destroy' operations that turned into the mass murder and/or rape of unarmed civilians.

There is a sizeable memorial. Loudspeakers project voices saying Very Important Things in viet.

It's a way we had over here with living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies.

We drove around My Son - it was some exceedingly nice country. Not the kind of area/mood that would seem to inspire organized slaughter, but what do we know...

We stopped at this seriously steampunk forge, this hydraulic hammer viciously pounding some superheated metal. It was some sweet music.

We paused by a series of irrigation reservoirs to watch the sun set before motoring back to Quang Ngai.

All things considered, Day Two came in at a surprising 240km.

Day Three there is not much to say about. I woke unable to sit up or move my neck. I had to manually reposition my head with my hands to avoid a searing pain white-out. I was unstable with a bad case of the shakes, amused at my inability to even type. The latter symptoms made me suspect some sort of neural damage that would soon transform me into some hawkings-esque man/machine delivering esoteric truths through a speak-and-spell. Adam reminded me that I had overdone it on the painkillers before sleeping, and I elected to let that explanation justify remounting and continuing north, following the train tracks towards Hanoi.

here is what pretty much every Comm monument in this country looks like

in every country you learn after awhile the things you can expect to find in their hotels. some have towels, some offer slippers, a few provide coils, prayer mats, and sitters or squatters. here adamn enjoys the security provided by the integrated deployable mosquito net common in these parts

this is a "dragon fruit." it only grows around nha trang. it is delicious - with its soft white meat very much like a big kiwi, with less citrus tang. export this back to the states and i think it would be Big.

We missed the turnoff for Hoi An, which is allegedly a must-see...the Sinh bus even stops there. Instead of backtracking, we proceeded a few kilometers further, just past infamous China Beach to Danang. Though technically the fourth, it's really the third largest city. We met a lot of kool people and some really psychotic touts in Danang, which was surprisingly lacking in western tourists for a city of it's size. (The bus does not stop here] We were able to get in touch with adam's friend Tiffany from santa barbara, a viet khieu currently working and living in Danang. With her assistance we were able to get all the errands we needed done accomplished quickly in the morning, including the acquisition of two ponchos as the skies were laden with threats of much wetness.

Day Three was a breeze, 160 km covered

Day Four - Monsoon Riding

Total nightmare. Our even numbered days were turning out to be as miserable as odd numbered trek movies. 15 minutes outside of Danang the rain began, a light-hearted shower that developed into a freezing torrent. Thirty minutes out of town we were also lucky enough to hit a significant mountain pass. Visibility in the fog dropped to about ten meters. Unable to see through goggles or facemask, we had to just take the icy downpour in the face. While contending with the unforgiving traffic, hairpin turns, snarled traffic and mud, adamn and i lost track of each other and met up an hour or so later for robin eggs and tea at the bottom of the mountain.

Vietnam is supposed to be a hot, swampy, humid hell furnace. There isn't supposed to be a cold day in the entire country. Why? In NO movie do soldiers complain about the cold . While this may (or may not) be the case in the south, Danang actually delineates the northern end of the tropical zone. North of here, the climate is cool and dry and the mangroves and banyans give way to pine trees. It very much resembles Northern California.

It was bone-chilling cold. I reluctantly brought one pair of pants on this part of the journey, adamn had no long sleeve shirts. Between the two of us we pooled enough clothing to stay warm long enough to make it 100 km to Hue, ancient royal city and modern tourist trap.