The whole time we were in Saigon, I had been wondering how to get out of town without endangering our lives… We decided that we would put Elina and the boys in an Uber and I would ride the tandem and trailer, too long for a taxi, to a spot outside the city where we would start riding. We looked up a friend of a friend who had done some motorcycle touring in the area who was going to give us a few tips who convinced us that that was a terrible plan, likely to start us off with a catastrophic show-stopper. It had taken two days to learn how to cross the road, and the traffic moves in an anarchic free-for-all, so we figured he was right.
In the end I found a guy outside the apartment polishing a gleaming minibus who agreed to take us to the edge of the 12 million people, all bikes and stuff included for an only slightly exorbitant price.
Getting the bikes ready for the first ride of the trip in a randomly selected location!
Now, the edge of the city isn’t an edge at all, nor is it a particularly attractive place. I had pictured pootling alongside canals lined with coconut palms, watching kingfishers dipping into the water. Instead, there were deafening, hooting and smoking trucks and swarming motorbikes (also constant hooting) mixed in with barefoot geriatric cyclists towing carts with dead animals on them, alongside ditches of raw sewage. The roadsides were lined with businesses of all kinds, freely ejecting their detritus onto the carriageway. This might turn out to be a bit of a strange holiday…
But after about 10km of this, we turned off the main road, onto roads not unlike those I had fantasized about! Electric green rice fields stretched into the distance with distant palms and shacks here and there like desert islands. And, oh yes, the kingfisher (Grandpa Lionel’s favourite) was there too. We crossed some rivers, tributaries of the Mekong on small ferries, Aran pumped his guejar-trained legs, zev pumped sweat from his tiny pores and before long we had arrived in the medium-sized town of Tan Tho. We decided that we should finish the day there and not put the kids of by making it too long.
A great find for the boys after a sweaty first day on the road!
After a few nativity-style no-room-at-the-inn situations, we found very keenly price lodgings at a truly strange complex that, oh my lord, had a pool with slides and climbing frame. It also offered ear-splitting karaoke, gymnasium, restaurant and, as we later realised, nocturnal services of the carnal variety. All run by a sweet family of several generations. It also, being on a mangrove swamp, offered voracious mosquitos that left our boys looking rather lumpy. We hadn’t planned on getting out the nasty repellant as this is a non-malarial area, but from that day on it would DEET for all!
We spent a very noisy night there with the comings-and-goings of our neighbours, but the boys snored peacefully!
