So I’ve had by far my biggest holiday adventure in Vietnam so far over Tết (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) where we get a week off work. The only problem is the whole city shuts down as everyone goes back to their quê (home town). If I was a good Vietnamese boy, I’d head down to Ca Mau in the very deep south of Vietnam or at least visit my remaining direct relatives down in Saigon. But I’m not a very good Vietnamese boy (and my Saigon uncle was off gallivanting on his first trip to Oz, where the rest of his family has abandoned him to), so instead I left Hanoi on a 6 day motorbike trip with a couple of friends.

Our total planning would have taken up all of about 10 minutes discussion, actually telling eachother we should meet up and talk about it took longer. Guided by an ancient war map with outdated names and missing major geographical features from the last decade or so, we ended up going from Hanoi – Son Tay – Mai Chau – Tan Xuan – Moc Chau – Phu Yen – Yen Bai – Phu Tho – Hanoi.

Highlights included:

- Breathing clean air and driving on near empty roads.
- Driving into Mai Chau Valley (amazing scenery)

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- Hanging out with local White Thai students who fed and watered us and forced us to merrily sing to/with them.

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- Being stuck overnight in the forest near the Laos border and being interrogated (for hours) by the local authorities after straying and taking directions and suggestions from various strangers. The authorities even borrowed my torch to assist them in interrogating us as their village was blacked out. They seemed uninterested in a watermelon we had brought along as a potential offering. It was a fine watermelon. A good account of it written by Ben is here.

- Driving through towns with local villagers waving and cheering at us, my closest experience to participating in a Tour de France I suspect.

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- Reaching a massive lake (not on our map) with colourful hills on the way to Phu Yen. The drive into and around this lake was unexpectedly spectacular, no one talks about this place as far as I know and we didn’t see any other westerners all trip. The sun was even in rare winter shining form that day.

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I could talk about it in more detail but I’m lazy and my fellow biker Ben has written a good account of it, complete with a video montage, here, here, here and here.

So i was chatting with a work colleague today when i started to notice a rather putrid smell exuding from his general vicinity. We’re at the point now where i can be fairly direct and insulting towards him, he’s kind of like my understudy, so i mentioned that he was exuding a putrid odour, which in my Vietnamese 4 year old tongue would have translated to “you smell notta gooda”. To which he replied “I’ve been sick, and haven’t showered since Saturday”. His theory was that when you are sick (he just had a head cold as far as i could tell) you shouldn’t shower, which perhaps makes sense historically when water was less clean and without heat. But Saturday was 5 days ago! and his smell consumed most of the available oxygen in our office, luckily he decided that he was well enough today to take a bath, perhaps tomorrow will be odour free.