The Home Stretch

May 18. Phong Nha to Vinh. 248km.

The road up to Vinh along the Ho Chi Minh trail was not nearly as scenic as the rest of the trail. It was a nice easy ride to Vinh; probably one of the first incident free rides for the five of us! 

Vinh itself was nothing special either. Just another city to stop in for one night to sleep. We checked into a pretty decent hotel and spent the night watching movies.

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May 19. Vinh to Ninh Binh. 201km.

From Vinh we took the A1 highway up towards Hanoi. Unlike the rest of the A1, this stretch didnt have any roadworks and hardly as many trucks flying past, trying to run you off the road. A welcomed change.

Sonny, Scott and I stopped off at a Big C for lunch while Charlie and Aaron continued on to Hanoi, making it there in one day. We opted for a more relaxing final ride to Hanoi, getting in earlier in the day. This was the last day we all rode together.

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May 20. Ninh Binh to Hanoi. 98km.

My last ride together with the guys was barely even spent riding together. Scott was having some issues with his bike so we stopped off at a mechanic in the morning before heading off. He decided to get a coffee, so I joined him. Sonny, not a coffee drinker, decided to continue on ahead.

Not far up the road, Scott had to pull over again to get his bike looked at by a mechanic - I didn't realise and kept going.

I ended up taking a wrong turn and getting onto the motorway. I passed a cop on the side of the road, half thinking that I would be stopped because I was pretty sure motorbikes can't go on the motorway. He didn't even look at me. 

I made great time, blasting along the big, smooth, open motorway - top gear, full throttle. 

I made it into Hanoi, and with my phone not picking up a GPS signal, I had to navigate to the hostel the old fashioned way - with a map. After a good hour of riding around the busy streets of Hanoi, I made it to the hostel Charlie and Aaron were already staying - first one!

I could breathe a sigh of relief, I had made it. 

Thirteenth Stop: Phong Nha

Phong Nha is an incredible place. The area is still a developing tourist destination - five years ago there was no tourism. It's main draw-card is its national park and caves, and they are stunning.

Everywhere you look in Phong Nha you see rolling mountains both off in the distance and even up close.

I stayed at the Easy Tiger hostel, the top choice for backpackers visiting the area. It had a really good hostel atmosphere, the first time in Vietnam I had felt that. The pommie boys and I spent a good few hours taking over the pool table they had for free play.

While in Phong Nha I visited three caves, the Phong Nha and Tien Son caves on one day and Hang Toi, aka the Dark Cave, the next.

To get to the Phong Nha cave you can organise your own group and take a dragon boat down the river to the cave. A group of five of us from the hostel got a boat and went out along the river.

At the base of the cave you have to climb what feels like endless staircases to get to the entrance. In the humidity of Vietnam it was a killer. The view from up there is quite nice, which does make up for it a little! 

Upon entering the cave you can feel an instant cooling sensation, the sticky heat from the outside air disappears. The Phong Nha cave features a board-walk to guide tourists through the cave, and much to my pleasure we were the only ones in there!

Unfortunately photos simply don't do this place justice; the lack of perspective from a camera phone really ruins the shot. 

From here we jumped back on the boat and took a tour through the mouth of the cave along the water, into Tien Son. This bigger, more open cave was apparently used during the Vietnam War by Vietnamese as a weapons depot and hospital. As such the Americans tried to drop bombs into the mouth of the cave, unsuccessfully. 

That night I ventured out to the Phong Nha Farmstay, a more upmarket residence for travellers. The views from here at sunset are absolutely stunning.

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While in Phong Nha I caught up with Rowan, the Kiwi that I met in Japan all those months ago. He had been travelling through Thailand before flying home for his sister's wedding and had come back out to trek Vietnam with his mates he met in Thailand. It's still crazy to be able to meet up with people whom I met thousands of kilometres away, months later. 

My group and his all headed down to the Dark Cave together. The Dark Cave is an adventure cave, not simply a walk through.

We were suited up in life jackets and helmets and told to climb up a tower to the zip line down to the cave entrance. 

From the end of the zip line, we swam into the mouth of the cave. 

It was then time to turn out headlamps on and venture through the cave!

After walking through shallow water followed by a bit of swimming, we reached the muddy entrance and began our traversal.

The deeper into the cave we went, the more sludgy and muddy it became...

Until we were completely covered. 

From here you could just lay in the mud. It was only a metre or so deep but the sensation of laying in mud is bizarre - you are totally buoyant! You could easily lay flat on your back and float a few inches below the surface. The mud didn't really feel much thicker than water either, it didn't really have much substance to it. Very unique experience for sure.

From here we walked back out through the path we took and slid down a rock face into an open water pool to swim through and rinse off a little. 

The final part of the cave tour involved swimming for a hundred metres or so to the end of the cave, switching our headlamps off and swimming back in darkness, with only a very feint light in the distance lighting up our surroundings. 

After leaving the cave we got to kayak back to where it started. All in all it was a great day!

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You can really just turn a corner anywhere in Phong Nha and see amazing scenery. There are a few expat-run accommodations and each one has its own brilliant landscape on its doorstep. It's really not surprising why people are moving out there to live. I'll finish this post with a few more random photos from the area.

The Road to Phong Nha

May 11. Hue to Quang Loc. 69km.

Walking outside from the hotel I was staying at in Hue I noticed a big puddle under my bike - and it hadn't been raining. I had a closer looked and noticed fuel was leaking from the carburettor. Quick 

stop off at the mechanic and $25 later and I had a new carby. 

You can see here from the distance travelled we didnt make it far this day. The aim was to do the ~180km to Khe Sanh and make it to Phong Nha in two days but the powers that be had other ideas.

The idea was to continue along the Ho Chi Minh Trail from Hue to Phong Nha, to experience the most beautiful side of Vietnam - the mountain ranges and smaller towns.

The road up here was quite mountainous and Charlie's bike was really struggling to make it up the hills. Once we got to Quang Loc we pulled over to assess the problem - the clutch was pretty much shot. It was slipping through the gears and was struggling to get off the line or up hills on down changes - no good.

Dropping it off at a mechanic he advised it would be a two hour fix. We didn't get an early start out of Hue anyway so decided to call it a day and find a hotel.

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May 12. Quang Loc to Khe Sanh. 109km.

Once again, we didn't make a whole lot of progress the next day, for different reasons; we got stuck in a storm - a big one.

Riding along I had noticed it was starting to get a bit darker in the sky, and soon enough a few drops were falling from the sky. I pulled off to put on my rain jacket and continued riding. Within minutes I was riding through a proper thunderstorm. Off in the distance there was continuous lightning flashes.

With limited visibility and everyone going at a pace they felt comfortable with, we all got separated.

I rocked up at a big intersection and saw Charlie flag us down to a nearby restaurant. We stopped for beers and a meal to let the storm die down. While eating we heard and saw a massive crack that shook the table - crazy!

After an hour or so we took off and continued up the road. We came across Aaron stopped drying off his gear. I checked my phone and had a message from Sonny saying that his bike had broken down. We had no reception and no way of getting in contact so we waited a little before continuing on to Khe Sanh. 

After the sky had cleared up I had another great ride through the beautiful landscapes that is Vietnam.

We found a hotel in Khe Sanh and Sonny caught up to us. His bike had become waterlogged and wouldn't start. Apparently the mechanics pulled off various pieces and poured water out of them!

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May 13. Khe Sanh to Phong Nha. 248km.

Comparatively to the other days, the final stretch to Phong Nha was incident free. I decided to head off first, early in the morning to try to avoid any potential downpour that usually happens later in the day.

As you can see from the map above, the roads were twisty and great fun to ride, up, down and around the mountains. The entire stretch in the map above only has around two tiny towns, one of which I stopped at for food. If something were to go wrong with the bike I would be in trouble. Luckily the old girl is as reliable as it gets!

Shots like you can see above are just throughout the Ho Chi Minh trail. It is simply stunning around every corner. My only complaint is that its hard to take in the sights while concentrating on the roads!

I arrived first to the hostel in Phong Nha, Easy Tiger. An hour later Sonny rocked up. An hour after that Charlie arrived. Much later that night Aaron hobbled in. 

His accelerator cable snapped (for a second time) about 60km out of Phong Nha in the middle of no where. He had to pay an exorbitant amount to have someone drive out from Phong Nha to fix his bike, riding back alone in the dark. 

He ended up having a fall on the way back, misjudging a corner in the dark and hitting some gravel. He ended up with a few scrapes on his knee but otherwise got away pretty well, the bike largely okay too!