Phase 2 continues. Today was to be a massive driving day, interspersed with a trip to the Vinh Tunnels. If we could find them. By now we knew well enough not to rely on any signposts or helpful things like directions to guide us there, so “expedition Tris” studiously gazed at the map over a breakfast of deep fried omelette to make sure we knew where to turn off. Ish. The deep fried omelette made me sick, which was just what I needed to set me up for a big driving day, and as I ventured outside a small part of me wished some enterprising passer by had taken a shine to my bike in the night and liberated it from my evil clutches. Or at least done the decent thing and liberated my bike’s evil clutch so I wouldn't have to subject my bum to another day of riding. It was still there. Damn. My bum agreed.
As the morning ritual of strapping the luggage to the back of the bikes began, the rain started to abate. By the time we were set to go it was more of a drizzle, and by far the best condition it had been in for days. There was a small panic moment when Tris realised he’d left his helmet on the bike overnight and thought some enterprising passer by had chosen the easily stealable helmet as the object of his immediate affection, but a quick trip to reception proved otherwise. The receptionist had cleverly put it behind the front desk…
The turn off to the tunnels was a couple of hours drive from Hue, much nearer Hue than Vinh despite being called the Vinh Moc tunnels. The drive was good and smooth, but still drizzly, and we quickly ate up the kilometres. We stopped to refuel, again going through the ritual of de-luggaging and re-luggaging, and took the opportunity to have breakfast, which consisted of a bottle of liquid with the word ‘tamarind’ on the side, and some coconut flavoured biscuits. The drink was interesting, having all the disposition of a frumpy sweet potato with the healthy heartiness of sunny delight. It was hideous, but that was all there was and I gulped it gratefully.
The concept of overtaking is a tricky one for a bike. You have the acceleration, but not the overall speed, so have to wait until a lorry slows down while climbing a hill, goes round a corner, or more likely gets held up by a slower moving vehicle in front before you make your move. In this situation, you have two options. The overtake, on the outside of the lorry, involves some bum-clenching, fearfully brilliant moments of acceleration as you venture out into the oncoming traffic lane and go into sensory overload as all your being concentrates on getting you past the massive object quickly and safely, ramming the throttle to maximum, kicking down a gear or two, and praying. The other option, much more loved of bike drivers everywhere, is the undertake. Possibly as dangerous or coffin-inducing as it’s name suggests, undertaking carries the same grim austere air about it as you would find in any funeral parlour. Undertaking involves using the hard shoulder as the overtaking lane. The major difference being that it’s much thinner than the overtaking lane, and if you mistime it, get it wrong, or fail to notice a stationary bicycle, oncoming traffic (that tends to use the hard shoulder as an alternative to using the correct oncoming traffic lane), or more dangerously, someone popping out from a hidden road, you might end up rather flatter. And slower. And in quite a lot of pain. However, undertaking seems to be the method of choice for most bike riders, and so I employed it to my advantage whenever the situation demanded it, which was quite frequently.
We reached the turn off to the tunnels, gloriously signposted to nowhere, and ventured for about twenty five minutes down some marvellous winding roads, gradually getting thinner and more coarse the nearer we approached the coast. At some point we must have crossed over into prime insect breeding territory, and dragonflies, mayflies, or quite possibly clarksonflies judging by the size of them littered the road and the air just above it. Right at head height. Driving into them is much like being shot at by a buzzing paintball gun. Not particularly accurate, incredibly annoying, and if one hits you it hurts. It also distracts your attention, wobbles your balance, and generally leaves you feeling rather emasculated and shuddery.
As we got closer and closer to the tunnels, I rounded a corner and happened upon a puddle that spanned the entire width of the road, in a trough, with vegetation either side of it. I slammed on the brakes, not knowing how deep it would be, but before I could say anything, Tris flew past me and straight into the puddle.
Disaster.
No, not really. Luck was on his side and the water barely even touched the exhaust pipe. Back up to speed, we eventually approached the tunnels, badly signposted even when only a few hundred yards away, and paid for the privilege of parking our bikes in the provided car park. We were completely in the middle of nowhere, in a snake infested jungle, and at the mercy of the car park attendant, who gave us no choice but to trust her to guard our luggage. Badly needing to relieve myself, I headed for the nearest loo, only to find a bitter old woman running towards me upon my exit, shouting at me and ordering me to pay 1,000d for the privilege. 1,000d amounts to a couple of pence, and I know it's worth a lot more to her than it is to me, but still, the tone of her voice and dispassionate shouting conviction that we must pay was extremely irritating after the friendliness of the locals in the rest of the country. Well, apart from Hue...
Venturing into the tunnels was an odd experience. I expected them to be a typical tourist attraction, but as soon as I had descended the steps it felt… real. There were strategic low-watt bulbs placed at irregular intervals along the pathway, which wasn’t flat. The walls looked as if the rock had been blasted away, and the ceiling height varied enormously, though there was hardly anywhere I could stand up straight. It was very claustrophobic, the only thing not dusty and brown were the delicate wisps of moss that somehow survived on the feeble light produced by the bulbs. Just as I was wondering what it would be like to have to live like this underground, Tris, who was in front, gasped suddenly and for a split second I felt like the walls were closing in and I was genuinely petrified. A few steps further forwards and I realised what had startled him. A set of plastic figurines posed variously, sitting in a sunken cut-out off the main tunnel, just as their real-life counterparts would have been during the bombings. Like a house of horrors at a fairground, but much more real, and somehow genuinely scary. Apparently 17 babies were born underground during the bombings, and the entire village of people survived for 10 days without daylight in the tunnel complex at one point, successfully resisting the Americans the entire time. Ominously inspirational.
Despite the disarming brilliance of the effect just being in the tunnels had on me, the tour was very badly organised! We saw a light at the end of a tunnel, headed for it, and promptly found ourselves overlooking a fabulously unheavenly beach. No signposts (of course) to indicate where we were supposed to go next, so a long set of steps leading upwards seemed like a good idea. Following them to their conclusion left us in the snake infested jungle, hot, sweaty, and most probably quite tasty to any passing reptiles. During some pretty fast walking in the general direction of the car park, we passed through a couple of local villagers’ gardens only to be waved away and pointed in the right direction. Extremely hot and bothered, we endured another round of “you buy something?” while getting back on the bikes, and eventually headed off with a slightly more sombre outlook on life.
After riding back through the paintball-infested clarksonflies and onto the main road, the visit amounted to a 2 hour detour, so we had to make up for lost time. A few dozen kilometers down the road I noticed the needle on my fuel gauge (by now the only functioning instrument on my dashboard) was approaching the E, and motioned to Tris (whose dashboard was similar, but extra-useful with no functioning instruments) that we needed to refuel. We found a petrol station, stopped, unpacked, fuelled, repacked, and set off in the light drizzle. The ritual complete, I turned out onto the road and sank back into my sour pose, full of contemplation. A few kilometers on from the petrol station I realised with some alarm that my bike could no longer turn right.
Disaster.
I slowed down, leaned over to the right and pushed the handlebars left. No problem. I leaned over to the left and pushed the handlebars right. Nothing. There was no oncoming traffic, so no immediate problem, but only being able to turn left was a slight inconvenience that didn’t bode well for the remaining hundreds of kilometers left on the journey, during which I was fairly convinced that being able to turn right would come in handy. I panicked, tensed, snapped the handlebars sharply to the right, and there was a satisfying crunch sound. It worked!
Disaster.
The steering might have been fixed, but the engine roared in complaint, and wouldn’t stop. I breathed in. I twisted the throttle back to a more reasonable position, but the engine still gunned at full power. I stepped down a gear, no change in the engine, and tried to force the bike down one more gear into 2nd. The noise was painfully loud, and remembering the story of the Frenchman who got stuck in an automatic Renault, racing down the motorway after the car engine wouldn’t stop, I ripped the key from the ignition, slammed on all brakes and breathed out as the engine finally died.
Tris returned after his short detour up the road to see what the fuss was about this time and why I wasn’t sitting on my bike driving forwards. A short expletive session later and he was up to speed. We decided the problem must be fixable, and the best way to fix it was to take most of the front panelling off, affording a closer look. Which was fun! As I got the tools out (handily located at the top of my luggage, almost as if I was expecting something...), a young crowd of people started amassing around us, looking on expectantly to see what had happened and what these crazy foreigners were going to do about it.
Even with the engine off, the throttle twisted more than usual. Not good. Once the front panelling had been removed we had a closer look at what the problem was. It wasn’t easy to see, but the throttle definitely twisted more than usual. Yup, that must be it. I had a case of extra-throttle-twistiness that a bit of tightening and rescrewing would surely fix. The drizzling had decided to increase in intensity for the moment, and was almost a pleasant relief from the heat. The various nuts and bolts and screws that we had passionately removed all went into my helmet as we worked on the panelling, and I eventually got a proper look inside. Some poking around and general umming and ahhing later I had a conclusive diagnosis.
“It’s broken”. Two engineering degrees between us and a sense of wanting not to disappoint the crowd that, by now, was clearly enjoying the spectacle, we decided to do a more thorough investigation, and came up with a reasonable hypothesis. The accelerator cabling had come loose at the front of the bike somehow during the course of the day (during the refuelling?), catching on the plastic panelling (now torn, following 'the incident') when I was trying to turn right. When I snapped the steering back into line, I must have ripped the accelerator cable into a more taught configuration, meaning that the throttle was now ‘shorter’ and permanently on. It actually made sense! When all this became clear, it also became clear that this was not a by-the-side-of-the-road fix it job, duct tape had it's limits, and we were going to have to get a mechanic to look at it. Preferably one with experience, rather than an engineering degree. This urgency was picked up by the crowd of locals, who excitedly pointed up the road to a small hut, indicating (I presume) that there was a mechanic in there.
This was, quite simply, the last thing we needed. However, buoyed by the possibility of a mechanic, and the good fortune I seemed to keep having at breaking parts of my bike exceedingly near to someone who knew how to fix them, I put the gear in neutral and pushed my (incredibly heavy, it turns out) bike the few hundred metres up the road.
As it transpired, the guesswork or translation of the excited pointing on behalf of the locals was only partially correct. There were a few straggly bits of pipework and an inner tube or two hanging up in the shack, but no-one at home, and it didn’t look like a proper workshop. Someone pointed to a watch and indicated that we could possibly wait an hour or so, but we couldn’t afford to lost that much time, so set out again along the road. In the middle of nowhere. Plan B. Tris volunteered to push the bike while I sped ahead on his still functioning one to look for another mechanic shack. With a mechanic in it. About a kilometer up the road I found a smattering of huts and a lot of people changing the tire on a bus. Excitedly, I went up to them and asked, pointed, gestured and mimed the situation. They seemed completely baffled by the whole attempt, and only twigged when I had the good sense to hold up the bolts and nuts and screws, and half of the front panelling of the other bike and mimed a shrug. Then they understood! They pointed across the road to a much smaller hut, occupied by what looked like a very young family.
I sped over to the hut, tried the same mime, gesture and pointing little act, and the father figure seemed to get it too. I motored back down the road to find that Tris had made good progress, turned round, and within a few more minutes my broken bike had been manhandled into the small hut in the middle of the Vietnamese wilderness. I made a twist of the throttle action, made a roaring engine sound, and we were given small plastic seats to sit on to watch the rest of the action.
The next hour or so passed quickly. There was absolutely no chance of English, the six or seven kids were all boys, giggling and laughing, and all of them proudly displaying their homemade slingshots made of old inner tires and bamboo (bamboo is used for everything here!). One of the older kids held a dozen huge but dead rats by the tails and another held several emaciated chicks by the necks. Quite dead. There was a baby being fairly violently rocked in a makeshift hammock, and a breastfeeding mother who turned away from us. And a well dressed man with a mobile...
While the mechanic tinkered away at the poor bike, the well dressed man (dressed like he was from Interpol) soon arrived, extremely interested with two westerners in his midst. He proceeded to take photos of both of us individually on his phone, seem quite pleased with himself, and then sat behind us, obviously sending our images to HQ and talking on the phone. I took little relief from the fact we were in the DMZ and was convinced we were being tracked on our journey through the country.
The total bill came to 150,000d for a new accelerator cable, two oil changes, a couple of chain re-lubrications and a general tightening of bolts and screws all over both bikes. We were so buoyed by the service, it’s hard to state how in the middle of nowhere we were, that we offered 50,000d as a tip (pocketed exceedingly quickly). Amid much giggling and laughter, we set off back up the road feeling much better about the state of the bikes and I was amazed at how lucky I was to have broken down within reach of someone who had exactly the right length accelerator cable ready to install. The joy was short-lived however, as Tris realised that the laughing, giggling kids had taken it upon themselves to liberate the umbrella that was fixed to the back of his bike and keep it for themselves. They stole it, and after we volunteered such a generous tip…
It had been raining the entire time and the journey onwards from the hut continued in the same vain, though without incident, and we made it to Dong Hoi with the rain still falling. The guide was disappointingly vague on this town, so we headed to the cheapest hotel yet, less than $5 for the night. The receptionist spoke a simple selection of English phrases, and interpreted our hungry requests into an escort to a really awful local restaurant. We ordered some beer before realising just how awful, and had to quickly drink up, pay, and leave without disturbing the badly dubbed soap opera blaring out of the TV in the corner. We headed instead to QB’s, recommended by the guide for it’s uniqueness. It was certainly unique, an American diner homage to decades gone by. Round one was some flaming B52s, followed by some more well deserved beer, and a steak washed down with the most artificial tasting chocolate milkshake I have ever had the misfortune to put to my lips.
Still, after such a day, the nourishment (of sorts) was exactly what I needed. Seeing as we had, again, failed to eat into the huge distance still ahead of us, and seeing as the number of days before the flight home was diminishing quickly, we had no choice but to have another gargantuan day tomorrow.