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Day 4

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Hanoi → Da Nang

Saturday was a travel day internal to Vietnam. I wanted a couple of lowkey days in country to burn off the weariness of 27 hours of air travel and jet lag before being recharged enough to start the real adventure. It was a rainy Saturday morning in Hanoi and we booked a taxi through the hotel. It was a sedate ride – no Captain Kidd – that passed through areas we had come to know on the way back to the Hanoi airport.

We checked out bags and made our way to security. At the security checkpoint, Lauren was pulled out of line and escorted to the baggage counter. All this was happening with little or no English, so it was tense. It turns out that I had mistakenly placed my lithium battery phone power bank in my checked bag and it was discovered on x-ray. Lithium batteries are understandably not allowed in checked baggage as is the case in the U.S. Apparently they thought my bag was Lauren’s hence they pulled her out of line. 

Or, they simply preferred to speak with the attractive 27 y.o. woman rather than the white-haired old man – a theme that repeated often in Vietnam.

I booked tickets from Hanoi to Da Nang on a VietJet Airbus 320. Tickets are very affordable, the equivalent of $45 U.S. each way per person if I recall. VietJet is a private rather than government company that has mastered the art of colorful marketing, upselling, add-ons, etc. You buy your meals in advance when you purchase the tickets, which I did because I knew we would not have time to sort out a place and logistics for lunch. The airplane was packed with every seat taken, as we had come to expect, and we seemed to be the only Westerners. It gives one a glimpse of the way minorities might feel in the U.S. Everyone including the crew were in good spirits. The flight was about 90 minutes.

Da Nang Airport

Buses to and from the airplane and the terminal were really packed. Think crushed together with little room to breathe, then add 20 more people with their bags. Bad news, you have to stand. Good news, you would not fall down if you lost your footing. 

After we collected our bags at the beautiful Da Nang airport, built on the former Da Nang Airbase. Using my local sim I booked transportation on the very popular and very good rideshare app called Grab. It is like Uber but easier and much CHEAPER. We got an easy and uneventful ride to Tigit Motorbikes to meet our motorcycles. 

Game on for the adventure to start. 

By this time it was 2 PM and we needed to get our transportation, get sorted, and be on our way so as to reach our destination before dark.

Renting Motorcycles

Tigit Motorbikes is a first class operation. They have a fleet of well maintained motorcycles based in a number of cities in Vietnam. They are easy to do business with, pay serious attention to safety, and gave me the confidence that we could call on them in case of trouble. They also prepare and publish lots of educational videos on YouTube that were incredibly helpful when planning something we had never done before.

Our Grab ride dropped us at Tigit in what appeared to be an industrial section of Da Nang. The Tigit office was small and quite, staffed by 3 young gentlemen, one of whom was reasonably proficient in English. Weeks in advance I had prepaid via credit card on the internet, which guaranteed the reservation and made check-in a breeze. 

We bought motorcycle gloves and rain-covers for our backpacks. We were fitted with safety gear – elbow pads for me, shin guards for Lauren (I brought armored motorcycle pants), a helmet for Lauren (I brought my own).

Gearing Up

We spent 20 minutes or so sorting through our belongings and transferring our essentials for 9 days travel into our backpacks, careful not to make an omission because there would be no turning back. Our luggage and anything not going in the backpacks were checked with Tigit for pickup when we return the bikes.

An orientation to my Honda XR150 and Lauren’s Honda Blade followed. Getting used to the XR150 was easy for me as it operated as the Hondas of my youth, except that it had 5 gears, one more than I was previously accustomed. I was struck with how tall it was, almost requiring me to use tiptoes when at a stop. But that was a feature of the excellent suspension, which based on my concern about lower back pain after 9 days riding was the reason Tigit recommended the model. It was a splendid choice with long fuel range and able to handle anything we encountered.

Orientation to Lauren’s Honda Blade was more novel. It is a semi-automatic bike with gears that you manually shift but no clutch. It is styled with the design and dimensions of 99+% of the motorcycles in Vietnam. It fits in. While designed for urban use, it was able to handle most of what we encountered. Honda and this model are considered premium choices when compared to local options. 

I hired Tigit for a lesson on Vietnam riding and traffic safety. They led us the warehouse district with little or no traffic for about an hour of exercises to get the motorcycle equivalent of sea legs. 

We returned to the Tigit office and secured our backpacks and belongings to the bikes. Our Tigit friends bid us farewell and good luck. By now it was 4 PM and we had a room booked in Hoi An perhaps 90 minutes away if we didn’t make any mistakes.

The bikes were not full so finding gas was the first order of business. Of course, we got separated almost immediately and had to circle a couple of times to land at the same gas station.

Getting gas is organized chaos, at least to our eyes. Bikes, sometimes 6 converge on a gas pump at the same time, open their gas caps and shout their desired purchase to an attendant. Because of speed and to maintain throughput, the attendants do not reset the pump after each fill. Rather, customers shout how much they want in Vietnamese Dong and the attendants expertly pump to that precise amount. And so on in rapid succession.

Getting the locked cap off for me required some fumbling.

Lauren’s gas cap was under the seat which took maneuvering and rearrangement of the strapped-on backpack. Needless to say, we slowed gas pump operations considerably. And we wanted to fill up rather than purchase a fixed monetary amount (how would we know how much?). Fortunately, YouTube taught me the gesture for fill-up – bringing a horizontal hand to your face and raising it skyward over your head.

Then we had to fumble with cash. All of this was in the first 15 minutes of becoming free range with our bikes. Mildly exasperated, we pulled to the side of the gas station out of the chaos and the pumps, caught our breath, and gathered our courage.

Da Nang is a beautiful city! It has traffic, but nothing like Hanoi or what I am told Ho Chi Minh City traffic is like. As mentioned before, we were in the industrial section and had to find our way through the city, across the river, and to our destination, the village of Hoi An.

Thank goodness for Google maps and excellent local cell phone service. We both entered the destination in our handlebar-mounted phones. Most of time, the 2 phones using the same Google Maps service agreed, but not always. We made promises to each other to not get separated, elected who would lead, and resolved to meet at the destination if separation did happen. We chose the coastal road to Hoi An which I hoped would mean slower speeds than the inland highway, but perhaps more cross traffic.

And we were off.

Independently riding motorcycles in traffic was an absolutely foreign experience. All senses were overloaded and my nervous system as on full alert.

First order of business was to not get killed. Then to fit in with the traffic as best we can. There were almost always other motorcycles. The key was to follow them and NEVER get in the lead. That protocol served us well over the coming days.

After the first few miles, some of the tension melted. Far from relaxing, at least I could take in the scene and enjoy what a remarkable accomplishment to having gotten this far with my daughter.

We began to settle into the rhythms of the traffic and the tempo of our machines. With the ocean to our left, the miles slid behind us and the sun sank.

We pulled into Hoi An where travel volume was much less, but the much-narrower streets seemed to keep velocities up, like your thumb on a water hose. I had booked a room at the excellent Lantana Boutique Resort Hotel. Getting to the hotel meant finding one’s way through town, finding a bridge, and crossing onto an island. 

The Lantana Hotel has an outdoor dining area and bar facing the river. It was here that we pulled up on our motorcycles in full view of guests enjoying their drinks and dinners.

It was clear that we were a novelty as none of the mostly Western guests (but no other Americans) were traveling by motorcycle. We looked at one another and laughed. We had passed the first test and had a place to stay.

The hotel was beautiful and the room was gorgeous. We changed out of riding gear, put on street clothes and went out for a beer and dinner. The location was wonderful as we could walk to the city’s attractions and night market.

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