Day 1- Hanoi to Cho Ben

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After witnessing the traffic the previous evening we new getting out of Hanoi would be both very challenging and a little dangerous to say the least. Initially we had planned to wake at 7am, have breakfast, arrange with the hotel to ship the bike boxes then take a tour around Hanoi for a couple of hours then set off around 11am. With Jet lag and probably being a little anxious neither of us slept and probably only managed 4 hrs sleep so our 7am start turned to 9am. A quick breakfast of fried vegetable rice with chicken washed down with coffee (not weasel coffee this time ) and we arranged for the bike boxes to be transferred to HCMC. After a short walk around we went back to the hotel and changed, packed and loaded our bikes and set off at 11.25 destination Cho Ben.



The Garmin was preloaded with the route but initially it started to go off course a little, I think this was due to the vast network streets with some running parallel, our main concern was keeping calm and trying not to crash. The Garmin eventually picked up the route and after a while we settled into the chaos.





It took about 1 hr to get to the edge of the city limits, traffic was still nuts but nowhere near as bad, but both of us still hadn't clipped in the pedals yet. We quickly found out the rules of the road were

  • Whoever is biggest has right of way. 
  • Flashing headlights does not mean being courteous- it means shift or I run you down
  • Anything, and I mean anything is transported by motorbike.
  • Blaring of an horn is a good thing, they have seen you and are warning you 
  • Expect cars or motorbikes to pull in front of you and then stop for no reason 
  • Cars and especially motorbikes will pull out of side roads without even looking
  • Drivers or riders won't give way at roundabouts - It's a free for all
  • Don't expect because you have a green light at a junction it's clear

 Eventually the roads opened up to countryside with limestone mountains surrounding us and people farming in fields with water buffalo.






We stopped off for coffee about 2.5hrs into the ride and arrived at our hotel in just under 4 hours. We both felt we could go on but with the late start we wouldn't of managed to combine it with day 2 before it went dark












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