Motorcycle madness in Vietnam: Country-bagging at its most dangerous

January 28, 2015

My plan for Vietnam was pretty simply to get in and get out quickly, taking the shortest possible route through a tiny part of the country to get from Laos to Cambodia. My reasons for this were because I'd heard and read quite a few bad things about Vietnam, particularly relating to the standard of driving in the country which apparently involved quite a lot of alcohol and an awful lot of horn beeping. If my last days in Laos were anything to go by this last point was certain to be true, and at this stage of my journey, with Australia tantalisingly close, I could not be doing with spending too much more time in difficult countries.

So why go at all? Well, Vietnam is still a country, and would count towards my goal of cycling in 100 of them. Even so, plenty of people would argue that just dipping in and out like that was no way to get to know a country and is the 'wrong way' to travel. If you are someone who shares such an opinion, first of all, I assure you that you can learn a lot more about a country in three days there than you can by never going, and second of all, please do feel free to ride your bicycle through 100 countries the 'right way' and then write and tell me all about it.

There was an immediate difference upon crossing the border which was that the forest disappeared and it was quite shocking to see actually. Of course huge parts of the world have been deforested, but the sudden change from such dense jungle to such bare hills, some of which were still in the midst of being cleared, was a startling reminder of the destructiveness of man.

Logging in progress - but it looks like soon they'll be out of work

The first houses I saw were quite different from in Laos. Wooden stilt houses were out, concrete and corrugated metal roofs were in. Makes you wonder what they actually did with all the forest

The other major change was that there were suddenly a lot more people. The last day or so I had been passing through a very sparsely populated area, even by Laos standards, and it was another jolt to the system to arrive at a pretty lively and pretty big village, lined with all kinds of shops and all kinds of people. I stopped to buy bread and a nice man named How stopped by to say "Good afternoon." A lot of people were saying hello to me actually, which was great. But Vietnam has a population of around 85 million people, compared to Laos' 6 million*, and I was going to have to get used to busy roads and people everywhere again.

Getting used to people being everywhere was a particularly challenging thing to do because it seemed as if almost every single one of them was on a motorcycle. Either side of the village the road was incredibly narrow and I could hardly believe that there was space for two trucks to pass each other. It seemed terribly poor road planning, but it almost worked because there were no cars, everyone was going by motorbike, and so the road didn't need to be particularly wide. Until one of those trucks came beeping along trying to get through of course.

Better than them all being in 4x4s I suppose

By the time I reached a big town the number of motorcycles had reached proportions that I would call 'insane'. I'm afraid I don't know the name of this town, but I'll pinpoint it for you on the annotated map that will appear at the foot of this page, so you'll know just exactly where I'm talking about. There was a big park in the town and I stopped to take a little break on a bench, and watch the madness. It was a really nice park too, but there was absolutely nobody there, apart from Ho and Lu.

I sat there on my bench and looked at the busy chaotic streets and noticed that every single one of the motorcycle riders had a helmet on, which seemed extremely unusual based on my previous experience of motorcyclists in Asia. I could only imagine there must be a mandatory helmet law in Vietnam and that it's enforced. I only hoped that there was no mandatory helmet law for cyclists, because I didn't have one.

Perhaps I needed one here though, as I did a brief tour around the town to get a flavour of life in Vietnam. Bikes shot everywhere and I had to really be on my guard. It was certainly not the best place to be a slow-moving cyclist. Not to mention all the beeping. 'Okay, well I've seen Vietnam now,' I thought, 'best get out of here' and I headed out of town on a road that I could see would take me through a National Park and hopefully be away from all the people and be a lot less chaotic.

But the road did not get immediately quieter and I soon decided it was best to get out of the rush-hour-motorcycle-derby and pulled off the road into a rubber tree plantation to camp. Even here, in a location that you might assume to be safe, a couple of times motorcycles came zooming through the trees going who-knows-where. As I crouched down to hide behind a tree and watched these riders pass me I realised that getting any privacy in Vietnam was going to be difficult, but at least they did not have rifles held across their shoulder blades, and I considered this very much a positive thing.

* I don't know how accurate these figures are. I think I read them somewhere, possibly a 2007 Lonely Planet, and seeing as how most of the people in Laos seem to be under the age of seven, there's a good chance they are wrong. I could just google the current population figures, but it's too much effort. You do it.

Today's ride: 23 km (14 miles)
Total: 36,497 km (22,665 miles)

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