Viet Road Trip Day 14

Viet Road Trip is a blog series about my solo scooter trip through Viet Nam. This is day 14. Day 13 can be found here.

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ay 14 left me with way too many photos. I can't tell if I'm in love with my own work, or just in love with these mountains. Either way, I'm stuck with too many photos for this post. I'll let the photos of the ride speak for the ride. Honestly, I think I've run out of ways to describe how amazing everything looked and felt. The main stories are going to be near the end of this post.

Start your engines!

This is a tourist area near Dong Hoi. I had too far to ride to do anything more than ride through.

Nice ride on the HCM Trail. This is fairly common, and it freaked me out the first time it happened. People would just pull up next to me, get my attention, and say "hi". Other than saying "hi" back, I didn't know how to respond.

A billboard about food safety.

The gas station lady.

ots of homes in the country sell gas in their front yard. Sometimes they have a big metal drum of gasoline and a crank to pump it out. Other times they will just fill up old bottles with gas and display them on a table in front of their house. This private selling of gas is done out of necessity because there are no gas stations in the area.

I stopped at this woman's house to fill up my bike. For some reason, she wanted to try out my sweaty helmet (eww), so I snapped a picture.

These kids were from the gas station house. When I pulled up, they started jumping, doing kung fu moves on each other, and trying to get into anything they could get into.

few hours later, I stopped for a little break. These girls were with their moms/aunties selling corn on the side of the road. It took them a long time to work up the nerve to come over and say hello. They kept pushing towards me, as a group. But they kept trying to move to the back of the group and push the others forward. Like a human water weenie.

After they got within speaking range, one of them would shout a question in English. "What is your name!", then dash back and try to hide behind the other girls. "Where are you from!" runs behind the other girls. They settled down after a few minutes. We took turns asking our names, where we are from, how old we are, and how we are in general. We kicked around a shuttlecock for a couple of minutes, then I got back on the road.

I had seen people kicking these around in Vietnam, but I hadn't seen one up close. This is a shuttlecock and you treat it like a hacky sack, passing it back and forth using only your feet.

made it to Vinh, and I wasn't very impressed with what I saw. The city didn't look particularly nice or interesting, and my hotel room was pretty gross. There's a strange thing about traveling in Vietnam. The culture in Vietnam is pretty conservative. Especially compared to Thailand and Cambodia, Vietnam seems ultra conservative. That's why it's so weird that I kept finding myself thinking "Am I in a brothel right now?"

My hotel looked nice from the outside. Walking up the stairs to my room was a different matter. Most of the guest rooms had their doors open. A lady would be watching TV in one. An older man would be sitting, smoking a cigarette in another room. Some people yelling at each other in another room. It just seemed weird. The rooms had AC. I've just never seen hotels where unrelated people just hang out with their doors open.

My room was pretty rough. It had that baked-in cigarette smell that requires years of dedicated smoking to achieve. My door wouldn't lock. The bed was uncomfortable and had hairs on it, and the bathroom frightened me a little bit.

After a long day of riding, I would usually spend some time chilling in the hotel room, decompressing. In Vinh, that wasn't something that I wanted to do. I looked up restaurants and found a pizza place.

he pizza that I ordered was called The BBQ Chicken pizza. This is what I got. It came with ketchup and mayonnaise on it! BBQ sauce I can understand, but ketchup and mayo? Having lived in Germany, I'm used to seeing pizzas desecrated with knives, forks, and all sorts of brutal instruments. But never have I seen a pizza so debased and humiliated with condiments like this.

I was shocked and disappointed when I saw it, but it was actually not bad. I was happy to have some western food. The guy who worked at the pizza place came over to my table and asked to take a selfie with me. That's when I realized that there might be something cool about Vinh, after all.

The guy took his selfie and I headed back to the hotel. I kicked myself for not getting a selfie with my camera too. As luck would have it, I'd get all the photos I could ask for a few minutes later.

I parked my bike at the hotel and walked across the street to a restaurant for some beer. Reading was what I had planned on doing, but I wouldn't get much done. The beer was a very tasty domestic draft. The cups were big and refills cost less than a dollar.

After a few minutes of drinking beer, a man came over to my table and started being friendly. He only had a few sentences of English, but I invited him to hang out. Soon he was inviting all of his friends over. Next thing I know, I'm taking photos with everyone and adding friends on Facebook.

The man called a friend who spoke English and put me on the phone with him! Hah! We didn't really have much to say to each other, but I thought the whole experience was so strange and awkward that I couldn't help but laugh.

I can't get over the bottom right photo. Who poses with strangers like that!? I laugh my ass off every time I see this.

nly God and our waiter know how many beers I drank that night. I went back to my room with an added buzz that wasn't related to the alcohol. I had so much fun meeting the people at the restaurant, even though I thought Vinh would suck. It was so much fun to be wrong about this city.

The next day would be less jovial. I would see my first road fatality, and film it. We'll discuss that soon. Until then, ride safe!

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Viet Road Trip is a blog series about my solo scooter trip through Vietnam. Read about days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7.1, 8, 8.1, 9, 9.1, 10, 11,12, and 13 here.