Day 7 – The beach

Okay, quite a lot has happened since I last blogged. So we left Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) on a bus bound for Phan Thiet on the coast. Seem the place we're stying is in a smaller (and thankfully nicer) village 20km outside of Phan Thiet, called Mui Ni (flickr). It's really rather nice here, so nice we extended our stay an additional 2 nights. The weather is nicer (above 30 degrees in the middle of the day), and we're staying in a nicer resort where we have our own bungalow, and there's a lovely pool! We're considering this our relaxing start to the journey, that turned out to be longer than we originally thought. Also the food is pretty damn good – being on the coast we get to eat some good quality fish, squid, octopus, and shellfish. YUM!

We've been doing some looking around, as well as just chilling on the beach or by the pool. Saturday we rented some bikes to have a good look around, Lukas didn't wear sunscreen, and now has the reddest neck and forearms you've ever seen! :) Quite literally a redneck. And Peter is a total lobster having put no sunscreen on the day before on the beach. I'm the only one will that doesn't look like a Brit-abroad! (touchwood) But the main reason for hiring our bikes was to give us transport to help realise our idea of buying some bikes over here to travel a chunk of our journey with, as it really is the only way to travel, and we were using them often enough has taxi's anyway. So we drove to the centre of Phan Thiet initially hoping to buy some brand new bikes. We found a few places that sell them and were looking at some Honda Dream 100cc bikes, not real Honda's of course, literally everything here is fake, the genuine article is generally very expensive and out of reach for most people living here. But we found it frustrating, as understandably we had many questions about the registration, insurance, and other details that we wanted answering before committing to a purchase. The shop owners seemed keen to sell us the new bikes, but no one could speak a bean of English, so we left in search of more helpful people.

Eventually, back in Mui Ni (just a few hundred metres from our hotel) we found a tour operating/bar/restaurant/bike rental place (there's a lot of these!) were the owners 16 year old son could speak the best English of anyone we'd encountered to date. After he'd confirmed our fears that as foreigners we cannot buy brand new bikes due to registration complications, we expressed our interest in buying 3 bikes, and immediately they were on the phone calling people. Within 5 minutes we had a row of second-hand bikes lined up in front of us to start trying. It wasn't easy, but about 12 different bikes tests, and 3 hours later we'd found 3 bikes who's quality and price we were happy with, and after some hard bartering, and a couple of beer later we were the proud owners of 3 (fake) 100cc ex-rental bikes. We got each for under $500 (USD). Last night we drank many more beers, then 5 bottles of pretty terrible Vietnamese wine to celebrate. So this morning we just rested of our hangovers by the pool, and this afternoon we went back into Phan Thiet to get some extra rope and bungies to strap our packs to the back of our bikes, and buy our own helmets for the next step in our journey. I named my bike “Lady Pony”, and by sheer coincidence my new helmet has 'Jockey' written on the side :)

Once we're done with them we'll just sell them on again. We'll be lucky to get half the price back realistically, but it's the experience we're paying fo0rf. Buses only go to so many locations here, and you pass so much beautiful scenery en-route and have no way of stopping and exploring. Now we have the freedom we need to fulfil our needs.

And so here we are, about to check out of our hotel tomorrow, strap everything we own over here to the back of our new bikes, and head to the next step in our journey were the real adventure begins – up into the central high-lands, to a place called Dalat. There we hope to see the mountains, waterfalls, some national parkland (and hopefully some Tigers), and then figure out what to do next...