A Few Good Minsks

To be atop a Minsk, where every button takes an extra wiggle, every corner brings a new adventure and getting lost is a way of life, this is living.

We rented our Minsks after much deliberation. Mikes mind was weighed heavily by the rainy weather and my inexperience on a bike. But my confidence was brimming along with my thirst for adventure and much to Mike's chagrin I pulled out the "don't be a pussy" card. That pretty much ended the argument and minutes later we were mounted and ready to go. Our renter escorted us to a nearby gas station, showed us the proper oil/gas mixture, and finally gave us directions to Highway 5 East. We took off grinning and by the time we reached the edge of Hanoi I had learned how to operate the gears and how to negotiate the squirrely, hurly-burly traffic of the city.

Despite the light, on-again, off-again rain, the roads were a pleasure. Occasionally a heavy Russian-made truck or one of those super buses would appear from nowhere behind us and blast their million-decible horn, scaring the shit out of us, but generally a combination of the beautiful scenery and the other people on the road kept our stoke on high. After being here a week we've ceased to be surprised at what can be carried on a bicycle or a scooter. We saw one guy carrying three dead hogs on his Honda Dream. We saw three guys carrying huge bundles of 20ft tall bamboo stalks vertically arranged on their bicycles. One woman had a bicycle laden such that two washing machine sized baskets filled with leafy vegetables.

The trip from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay is about 100km. Or 200km if you ask someone else. The road signs don't really help because I think they consulted the same people we did when they painted them. Our plan was to drive along Highway 5 until Huang Duong, then take Road 183 to Highway 18 which would take us straight into Bai Chai at Ha Long City. Based on the longest estimates, it should have been a 4 hour route. Of course, Road 183 came and went without a hint of a sign, and at some point we both realized we had missed it but decided to head on to Hai Phong.

We immediately became lost at Hai Phong, but decided to just go with it and drive around until we found something. That something was the center of town and a horde of postcard hawking young women, all about 5 feet tall. We asked for directions, and now it seems like so long ago because it was the first time getting directions from a group of Vietnamese people. It goes like this: We say something like "How to get to Bai Chai?" and because we completely mispronounced Bai Chai, they give us a long curious look while their minds work to decipher. Eventually one says, "BAI CHAI!!" and then they all say "Ahhh, BAI CHAI!" and then they all point in different directions and argue about which way to go. Then we sort of take a tally, and choose the most popular path based on the largest number of fingers pointing in any one direction. This has a nominally good success rate, but in Hai Phong it didn't work at all. We had to scoot because a menacing looking police officer saw the commotion and started walking in our direction. We had no intention of explaining our utter lack of paper work and so confident or not in our next move, we gratefully bought several sets of postcards and left.

Ten minutes later we were on the other side of Hai Phong at a small bia hoi. We ordered a couple of coldies and retired to our map. It wasn't long before we realized that: our current position was not on the map, that the older guys sitting next to us were of no help whatsoever and that I had peed on myself trying to negotiate the cramped bathroom inside. Eventually we asked some younger guys and they hooked us up. They told us where to go, they called the ferry company to find out when the next ferry left and generally were an amiable group of guys.

We just barely bought our tickets and made it aboard the ferry. I can't really describe how lucky we get with this sort of thing despite our ineptitude. On board, imagine Mike and me, sitting atop our bikes, surrounded by a hundred people all casually looking at us. Only after we reached Highway 18 later that night did it make sense. They were wondering what two foreign guys on bikes were doing driving into the middle of nowhere.

But the drive was fan-tastic. All dirt roads, rice paddies, small villiages and big smiles. At every fork in the road we'd slow down and yell "Bai Chai!" and someone, usually everyone, would point down one tine. By this time I started to see the patterns in the various stares we were administered. The old person stare, the young person stare, the kid stare - they were all different and conveyed different feelings. The kid stare is usually: "What tha??" The young person stare is more like: "What tha?? Cool! Hello!" The old person stare is usually "Oh jeez! Big deal" but can also be "Oh jeez! Get the fuck outta here!"

Dusk was disappearing into night and with a little jostling we switched on our headlights. Luckily the afterglow of the day remained long after sunset and we did not encounter the near pitch blackness that we expected due to a total lack of streetlamps (or electricity for that matter).

Thirty minutes after leaving the dirt road we reached Bai Chai. Tired, and thirsty as hell we stopped at the first restaurant we saw which had a big Thit Cho sign out front. Mike then remembered that Thit Cho means "dog meat" in Vietnamese, so we relocated our bikes next door at a more homely looking bia hoi. We ate some fresh roasted dried-squid (roasted in the living room) and drank a couple of beers. The table next to us finished their pitcher and ordered another, but the keg had run dry. So the girl working there grabbed the empty pitcher and ran, probably two blocks to another bia hoi to fetch a refill. That's how it is here.

Finding a hotel was easy even without the help of the two guys on a motorbike who followed us the rest of the evening trying to sell us other hotels and restaurants. I fell asleep shortly after hitting the pillow. Mike went out on the town for a bowl of soup and a couple of Tiger beers. I think we were both asleep by 10pm. Total duration of our bike ride: a little over six hours. Total distance traveled? Who knows - our bikes didn't have speedometers or tachometers.

Stay tuned for: Are you Hung?