All of these hints are from personal experience of a recent (August 2009) round trip from Ho Chi Minh City through Mui Ne, Nha Trang, Da Lat and back again. We used one bike between two of us, a small-ish automatic, and covered around 1100km in six days. Don’t take too much luggage. It increases [...]

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My last day in Vietnam and the last proper day of my trip. A sad day, as ever, more-so due to some events back home over which I had no control, but that is for another blog. To cheer myself up I hopped on a xe om up to the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation to [...]

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The longest day riding, and overall one of the longest days of my stay in South Vietnam. We set off from Da Lat at 7:45am with the aim of getting to Ho Chi Minh City by early evening. The route is quite simple – you follow the “20″ which leads you directly from the mountains [...]

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Today was a lazy day – well deserved after the arse-numbing ride the day before. We opted to make use of our legs for a change and took a wander around the lake. The guide books reckon it’s 7km, but it didn’t seem anywhere near that far as we ambled around in just over an [...]

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At one with the locals I’m very late in typing this up and getting it posted but I’ve been really busy since getting back from Vietnam. This post is a brief overview of the trip I took with Thao. I’ll be adding more detailed posts for each day shortly and they’ll be linked from here. [...]

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Today required another early start as we had to make it all the way to Dalat – we set off just after 8am. Being that it’s up in the mountains, we wanted to ensure we caught the good weather. Dalat has a much different climate to the coastal areas, with lower temperatures and some chance [...]

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Today we opted to spend a full day in Nha Trang and go on one of the popular boat trips. They’ve been $6 for years and this hasn’t changed, though it seems they’re adding other little charges now which weren’t levied before. We moto’d to the pier area and parked up then selected “Number 4 [...]

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We got up at 8am and the first thing we did after checking out was to hit the shops. I needed sun lotion, mainly as my face resembled that of a red superhero wearing a white Zorro mask. Not flattering, but at least I knew my sunglasses were working. Our route took us back onto [...]

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We set off at around 11:30 after going to Thao’s to repack our things into small bags. Thao had had a friend check out her motorbike and he deemed it satisfactory for our journey – no need to rent others so a huge money-saver! Aiming for the 1A main road, we zoomed east for about [...]

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In the afternoon, we headed back to our resective homes (Thao her place, myself to the hotel) to get changed into something more comfortable. Well, for me that was just another shirt as I was all out of trousers havign ripped the crotch of one pair wide open getting onto her bike the night before. [...]

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