Day 07 - The beach

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

Fishermen up at the crack of dawn

We've been doing some looking around, as well as just chilling on the beach or by the pool, as a result we’re all a bit sunburnt from not be liberal enough with the sunscreen… Saturday we rented some motorbikes to have a good look around. Hiring the bikes was designed as a test to see how feasible our conversations of buying some bikes over here to travel a chunk of our journey with might be. Without them you need bike taxi’s everywhere anyway, and we could do our journey at our own pace. So we drove to the centre of Phan Thiet initially hoping to buy some brand new bikes. A few people seemed keen to sell, but we had some important questions that needed answering and went in search of people who spoke more English.

Our pool-side bar our hotel on the beach

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!) where the owner’s 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 rental 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 test-driving. 12 different bikes, and 3 hours later we'd found 3 we were happy with, and after some hard bartering, and a couple of beers later we were the proud owners of 3, fake-Honda, 100cc ex-rental bikes. We got them for around $400 (USD) each.

Buying our bikes
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Following our purchases we celebrated with many beers, then 5 bottles of pretty terrible Vietnamese wine. So this morning we slept off our hangovers by the pool, and this afternoon we went back into Phan Thiet to get some extra equipment to help strap our packs to the back of our bikes, and buy our own helmets for the next exciting leg of our journey. I have named my bike “Lady Pony”.

Once we're done with them the plan is to sell them on again. We'll be lucky to get half the price back realistically, but it's the experience we're paying for. 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 have the experience we desire.

Scenery from the surrounding area

And so here we are, about to check out of our hotel tomorrow, strap everything we own to the back of our new bikes, and head North – 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...