Hai Van Pass

This was going to be included in the next blog entry, but we had so many good photos that we decided to give it a separate post. Despite Chelsea’s white-knuckle experience in Pakse, we are back on the motorbikes! The occasion: a ride over the Hai Van Pass from Hoi An to Hue.

To settle the nerves, Chelsea rode pillion behind our guide Tony, and was chief photographer, while Dan braved the road on his own. This was a great solution, because Dan could sing AC/DC to himself all day, while Chelsea could play teacher's pet and ask Tony questions for the whole ride. We suspect by the end of the day he was probably sick of talking about the agricultural produce and import/export ratios of the region, and would have happily traded Chelsea for the Highway To Hell jukebox passenger.

We started with a cruise through Da Nang, marvelling at the massive development and infrastructure—the hotels and Miami-style beach strip were NOT here during Chelsea's trip eight years ago! This was the most urban and busiest part of the ride, just to throw Dan in the deep end on the chaotic Vietnamese highway 🙃

We also realised that we had the wrong helmets, so Chelsea looked like a bobble head while Dan's was so tight it was cutting a circle into his head. This was solved at our first stop of the day, the Marble Mountain. Fortunately we had learned our lesson about sunburn in Laos, but that did mean our long sleeves and trousers were a bit of a hindrance once we got off the bikes and started climbing around in the midday sun on an exposed hilltop 🥵 The Marble Mountain is where they mine lots of the stone for making local crafts and carvings throughout central Vietnam.

Next: leaving the city and winding our way over the Hai Van Pass. It's a mountain pass which was a strategic military base for the French and Americans, sitting between Communist North and Capitalist South. Central Vietnam is very slender—we are closer to Pakse in Laos than we are to Saigon or Hanoi. The Hai Van Gate, at the high point of the pass, is now a symbol of the reunified nation.

Through the afternoon we wound along an extremely scenic highway, stopped for the most ridiculous wasabi oyster meal on the beach, and visited an ancient romantic bridge, built in the 1500s so that people on either side of the river could court without getting their feet wet. Lastly, to make up for the sweaty experience on the Marble Mountain, we took a refreshing dip in a waterfall full of Vietnamese children in life jackets.

The rains are still not fully upon us, so the farmers keep burning the fields, even while the rice is being shovelled into sacks and the next harvest is being sown. This meant the last part of the ride—zooming into Hue through burning fields along rice-covered country roads—was an atmospheric conclusion to the day. More on Hue very soon. Czytaj więcej