The last time in my life before I had chicken blood on my hands (and tires)

“I could tell you guys have spent some time in Vietnam.”

Duc waved us over to sit with him. “You’re at this bar.” A freelance motorbike tour operator, Aaron and I had admired his ride as he arrived, although commenting to each other that he looked slightly ridiculous astride such a large hog.

We considered his words quite the compliment.

Crazy house

It was a very Vietnamese beer café. As soon as we sat down a woman in a matching beer endorsed outfit—in this case a green number for Beer Saigon—came over and immediately clinked down mugs each filled with a giant ice cube and bottles of beer beading with condensation in the humid night. One plate of nuts and one of kim chi. Duc had a dried squid, torn up into pieces. The waitress, a friend of his, was sitting with us. She kept staring at Aaron. Was he French? She fidgeted and watched. Duc translated certain items of conversation for her.

View from the highway to Elephant Falls

What he was translating, however, was hardly highbrow. In true tour guide fashion we were swiftly regaled with tales punctuated by expressions “meat banana” and “punani”. Did we like Vietnamese women? Several beers later I asked if I could take his bike for a spin. “Why fucking not?” Another favourite of his, “Oh my Buddha!” He slapped me on the back as he laughed. That one must always kill with the tourists.

We eventually left to go to a pool hall. More beer and nuts. The locals crowded around as we played. We started hot, each potting a series of balls before we regressed to the inebriated mean. They kept checking in.

Elephant falls

We were in Nha Trang and trying to avoid the Thailand-style strip that was riddled with gaudy bars and sunburnt tourists eating pizza, pasta and burgers. We dined on Banh Xeo, a sort of pancake studded with quail eggs and seafood, served with a sweet and orange glutinous rice paste, salad and a slightly sour sauce. $1 each.

The decision to go to Nha Trang was one made less on the promise of the town than the ride it would take to get there from Da Lat where we had been staying for three days. Very French and in the mountains, it was cold and my bike showed the strain of many kilometres as it struggled to torque its way up the hills to get there.

Banh Mi man

The main nightlife in Da Lat took place at coffee houses in which groups of youths would smoke and drink coffee and tea with aggressive techno blasting incongruously. The town is pretty. The man-made lake at the centre algae green. The crazy house gaudi-esque. Breakfast baguettes and coffee. After leaving them behind in Kon Tum the Estonians caught up with us again.

Drinking red wine out of beer cans—a brand not supplied at the bar at which we were surreptitiously consuming—we played pool and talked shit with some travellers we’d run into previously in Hoi An and one of whom I had met in Bangkok almost two months prior. Eventually there was a minor confrontation with the bar owner who demanded a surcharge on our canned wine. The Estonians haggled it down.

Wine in a can

Previously they had sauntered into another bar with three bottles of wine for which we lacked the requisite means to open. Not only did they get three corks three-quarter drawn, but also enjoyed a sampling of a finer quality Da Lat red on the recommendation of the barman. This was shortly after they strolled into a large and fancy hotel in the hopes of bluffing their way into the sauna. Later still they would steal the keys from the reception of Aaron’s and my hotel in order to plunder a room for a guitar and ancient bottles of spirits. An act that made the next day’s checkout somewhat tense.

Clouds

On budget malaria pills in anticipation of heading south the Mekong Delta, Aaron had been taking the wrong dose for some days—double the required amount—and the side effects had been doubling down. Sunburnt and stinging, the quest for powerful sunscreen and aloe vera ended with a tiny bottle of SPF 45 and a tube of nappy rash cream. Later attempts to protect his scorched knuckles included bandages that frequently unclipped and fingerless gloves, relics of Turkey.

The rain fell heavily in Da Lat. Discrete, large, wet, and every afternoon. We spent the second morning hunting the Elephant Falls. Another pleasure of a the self-guided biking tour of Vietnam is that instead of having to book a day-tour or catch a taxi we always have the means of traversing along some spectacular mountain highway and exploring all at a fraction of the rate and with a much grander sense of adventure.

Out of the clouds

As Aaron hobbled more slowly behind on his still troublesome toe I ventured too far into the falls and became drenched by spray. Needing little more excuse, I was next to be found sitting under the cascade. Aaron, in his jeans and t-shirt, followed suit. Other tourists came and stared, but none joined us. Then, when we saw locals fishing in the pool behind the fall, we decided we too should be able to swim there. A fine plan until getting out proved slightly slippery.

Sitting with Duc several nights later in Nha Trang we told him of our adventure. He, like the guides who had seen us drenched and emerging from the falls that day, was incredulous that we had gone swimming. He remarked, more colourfully, that the water was not so clean. Upstream the feeder river is apparently quite a popular toilet.

Highway to Elephant Falls

He did tip us off to a cleaner waterfall a few kilometres north of Nha Trang, the Ba Ho Falls. So the next morning we headed there before going south towards Mui Ne. It took a rutted and muddy path that saw several stalls and a new coat of mud on my bag, a small walk and some stone hopping before we arrived. While less spectacular than the elephant falls in volume and power, we were promised we could jump off some rocks into the pool at the base of the waterfall, and so we did as a Russian girl photographed us and promised to send the pictures once she got home.

Vista

At the top of the mountain that was en route to Nha Trang from Da Lat I could not see more than ten metres in front of me. The ascent was such that the road travelled now through low lying cloud. With no functioning electrics and thus no light on my bike, I was slowed to a crawl. Waterfalls punctuated the road, flowing down the sheer face on one side, under the road, and down the sheer drop on the other. Eventually the road dropped out of the clouds as it slunk down the mountain, each turn offering a new vantage point for a hazy blue world rendered gradually into focus.

View from the hotel, Phan Danh

Out of the cloud and rain we dried on the road down, the temperature climbing steadily until the return of thick humidity at the bottom. Thirty kilometres more and we were in a squall of driving rain, painful as it hit the body exposed on a powering motorbike. Minutes later we were back in sunshine, the brooding clouds behind us and the rice paddies bordering the arrow-straight highway lurid in the afternoon sun, blue mountains and blue sky casting stark relief.

En route to Mui Ne from Nha Trang we were hung over and burning. We pulled over to refuel. The man shook his hand in a fashion reminiscent of a loose and spread-fingered Queen’s wave. The Vietnamese sign for ‘no.’ We sat on our bikes blinking in the glare off the tarmac. Across the road water glistened through and arch. There was also a hotel. We decided we’d had enough for the day.

Maxin' relaxin'

 
Phan Danh, I believe the place was called, although it is unlisted on google maps. There were two hotels next to each other with one other visitor who we met over breakfast the next morning. From our window shone the ocean, Mediterranean coloured and coral filled. In the morning fishermen in round tubs manoeuvred by an eggbeater paddling style went from beach to boat. In the late afternoon kids swarmed around the rock formations chasing crabs and families emerged for a cooling dip. At night the breeze was a caress. As I sat reading on the beach a man came over and squatted next to me. After staring for a minute or so he got up and walked off.

Fisherfriends

The smell of dried squid and salt hangs over much of the south eastern coastal highway. On the inland sections there are root vegetables foraged through controlled burning, cut and placed on tarpaulin to dry on the sun baked tarmac. They have a wonderful sweet carbohydrate smell.

Tiny town gives way to slightly larger town, then suddenly a strip of resorts. Mui Ne town is small and quiet, home to a bay full of fishing boats. The coastal highway we’d taken to get there from Phan Danh so undeveloped we ended up in a town at one stage painted like a Moroccan medina before it followed a beach on which a shanty village of mismatched corrugated iron and tarpaulin housed the local fishermen who shared soggy cigarettes with Aaron and used their phones to take photos standing next to me.

He liked my sunnies

Scattered resorts on the drive in to the town give the illusion of a sleepy coastal retreat. Until you hit the long stretch of placid beach between Mui Ne town and Phan Thiet which is crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with guest houses, resorts, restaurants, bars. It is a bit gross. The first night we stayed at a budget resort with the Estonians before making a hung over transition to a grungy guest house back closer to Mui Ne town in an area far more Vietnamese and far more Aaron’s and my sensibilities. We tried surfing. Tried.

"Kowabunga, dude!"

Swimming at Ho Coc beach at sunset Aaron and I would periodically shy away in the water. Yet another ambiguous plastic bag slash jellyfish. The beaches of Vietnam area fairly accurate representation of the country as a whole, stunningly beautiful but also inundated with garbage. Riding down one highway twenty kilometres outside of Mui Ne across which the wind blew laterally, one side was shrub and red earth, the other shrub and red earth and rubbish amongst which the cows grazed methodically.

School kids

12.43am and I was in the bushes outside the hotel. Seconds earlier I had been in bed after a pleasant evening’s dining on the one strip of shops in a village picked at random along Ho Coc beach. Torches flashed along the row of rooms. I had been hustled out through a side gate in only my boxers and was huddled behind a tree attempting to flatten my body against the ground, prickly and crunching. A mosquito buzzed around me and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was malarial. The police were doing a hotel inspection and with my passport in Ho Chi Minh city, I apparently was somewhat of an illegal. We had been tipped off to their arrival and briefed of the escape protocols, but it hadn’t made my hurried exit less absurd.

Sunset, Ho Coc

I woke the next morning to explosive diahorrea and vomiting. The previous night’s seafood was not sitting well. So vile the bathroom was a biohazard. Dehydrated but emptied, we decided we had to get out of there. So a 140km motorbike through the midday heat to Ho Chi Minh City was on the cards, sweating and burning. I lost Aaron somewhere in the clusterfuck of traffic. Pulling over at the nearest struggled upstairs and messaged him the address before basically passing out and sleeping for the next 16 hours.