And then there were 3

 

After a night of excess that saw Toby live up to his "Tumbler" monika, today saw us leave the homestay outside Lam Son after the best breakfast of the trip.  Across the remarkably sturdy suspension an onto a 280km taking in a section running along the Laos border.

Once Neil had navigated us over the bridge, I took over and we started on our longish run.  First it was up into the mountains on narrow lanes with super views and little traffic.  After 60 km we stopped for coffee and, as usual, became the local attraction.


Due to a slightly longer stop than planned (for bike maintence) we pressed on relentlessly for another 100 km.  The sight of a fuel station, in the mddle of nowhere was very welcome; however, it was then followed by many others.

The final push saw us negotiate a very narrow lane, next to a river that had huge cement lorries coming the other way every 5 minutes!

Neil looking for another cement lorry

Finally, the route ended up in a super little place called Mai Chau, a little oasis of fun.  It was over the evening beers that we decided that some of the group were not enjoying the arduous nature of the routes and were not really bothered about seeing the war memorabilia at Dien Bien Phu.  So the obvious solution was for Team Tumbler to depart and take an easy route for the rest of the trip while the remainers continue with the route as planned.  Lets hope we meet up somewhere along the route.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And so it starts

Image
After many months of hetic plsnning we sll set off from Herefordshire on 2  Nov 24, Of note, the Harris boys were still up celebrting George's birthday at 0500 when the rest of us woke up and heded out.   As you csn see, the strain for Neil and Helen was just too much!  After an uneventful 12 hoiur flight (16 for Terry and Toby) we arriven in Saigon. Our first breakfast of the trip was delicious noodle bowls as we prepared to colelct our trusty steeds and bolt on all the goodies that we had brought with us. As we had a spare afternoon, Neil, Tim snd David headed out on bikes to the Chi Chi tunnels with Kay and Helen sensibly chosing to go by taxi.  Who knew there are two Chi Chi tunnel complexes, and yes we missed the girls, doh.  On the return the heavens opened so the boys took refuge in a delightful roadside cafe while the road turned into a river.  After an uneventful return to the hotel, all that was left was to negotiate the haridan on the car pa...
Read more
Hello All, This is my first attempt to produce a blog, so be paitent with me!    We six chaps (with two ladies loosely in tow) are getting very close to departing for our Vietnam Venture where we will, hopefully, manage some of the planned routes shown above.  Sadly Thorpy is a little poorly at the moment and has had to duck out, we all wish him a speedy recovery and a tip top filly nurse to keep his pecker up! You will be able to monitor our progress at trac.extrac.uk, where current locations will be shown.
Read more