I hooked up with another backpacker, Chris, not long after I arrived. He’s currently trying to offload a Minsk motorcycle that he’s been using for the last month or so. In the meantime, he’d planned a day trip out up the Red River Valley. Seemed like a nice idea, so I hopped out and rented [...]

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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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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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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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