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Cameron Dueck

My partner pokes me in the ribs and points down into a valley beside the road.
“Look over there! It’s so beautiful!”
I take a quick peek, but all I see is a blur of green before I have to steer us around a right-hand curve. I lean the motorcycle into the turn and before the bike is straight, I am calculating my approach into the next left-hand curve.
The Ho Chi Minh Highway twists through the mountains of western Vietnam, along the Laos border, and it’s the first road I’ve ridden on which I have become tired of the curves.
As if to goad me, a road sign warns of more for the next 330 metres. About 400 metres later, another sign cautions of more curves in the next 350 metres.

The highway is not to be confused with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a complex system of primitive military supply roads and jungle trails in Laos and Cambodia used to move men and materials between North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam war. The Ho Chi Minh Highway, also built for military traffic, is made of concrete slabs and connects a string of remote mountain villages. In many places the slabs have shifted over time, creating a jarring rhythm of bumps when riding at higher speeds.
Still, it is one of the most famed motorcycle routes in the world, winding about 1,200km from central Vietnam north to Hanoi. It passes through remote jungle with very little traffic to distract a rider from the constant curves and verdant beauty. Most riders take about six days to traverse the route.
Our journey began in Hoi An, where we rented a Kawasaki Versys-X 300 and escaped the tourists that throng the streets of the old trading port and Unesco World Heritage site.

The southern section of the highway cuts through the lands of the Ta Oi ethnic people in Quang Tri and Thua Thien Hue provinces. They live in long houses on stilts and have traditionally farmed rice, supplemented with coffee, ducks, fish and other livestock. We soon learn that their buffalo use the highway at their leisure – as do their children – giving us good reason to slow down.
We’ve covered about 200km by late afternoon, when we pull into A Luoi, a small town in the A Shau Valley. Once home to a military airfield used by the French, then the Americans and finally the North Vietnamese, it is now a sleepy mountain outpost.
We have been booking our hotels as we travel, and were tired enough to quickly settle for a rugged, camp-like homestay with draughty cabins and cold showers.
It is cool and rainy when we return to the road in the morning. Due to the length of the highway it’s hard to pick the best season in which to ride it, but weather conditions from March to September are generally the most favourable. We are riding in December, and although we wear all the layers we’ve brought, we still shiver in the early morning chill and spend hours riding in the rain.
Occasionally the jungle opens up to reveal hard­scrabble villages, one looking much the same as the next: simple breeze block or wooden houses; children gawking at us as we pass; and tin-shack cafes set next to grimy workshops.

Hulking, mud-spattered trucks blow their horns as they rumble by and scabby dogs wearily rise from the road to let the traffic pass.
An occasional bigger village boasts a petrol station and we stop at nearly every one, unsure where we will find the next opportunity to fill the tank. Then we’ll pass the last of the houses and once again plunge into the jungle, where signs indicate that we are in a “frontier area”.
The signs drive home the abstract and artificial nature of national borders. We humans can’t cross them but the sprawling jungle, rushing rivers and wildlife ignore the lines drawn on a map.
Our second day ends at Khe Sanh, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam war. North Vietnamese forces attacked American positions here and laid siege to their base. The United States lost about 1,000 men while some 5,000 North Vietnamese died in the fight. Soon after the siege was lifted, the Americans dismantled the base and retreated.
A mouldering museum describes the battle from the North Vietnamese perspective, with opportunities to climb over broken American Huey and Chinook helicopters and a tank.

The signs drive home the abstract and artificial nature of national borders. We humans can’t cross them but the sprawling jungle, rushing rivers and wildlife ignore the lines drawn on a map

Today’s Khe Sanh is a muddy transport hub filled with cheap motels and heavily laden trucks headed for the border. Once again, we unload our bike into a hastily chosen room and then go hunting for dinner.
The cuisine is a highlight for most tourists visiting Vietnam, but we are quickly learning that the wide variety of dishes one finds in Hanoi or one of the touristy beach towns does not exist in mountain villages. The staple in most mountain towns is a basic version of pho bo, raw-beef noodle soup. While delicious, we soon tire of eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Occasionally, a cafe offers bun cha, a grilled-pork noodle dish, but little else. So we eat more pho, and stop for so many cups of strong Vietnamese coffee that the caffeine leaves us jittery.
The highway leads us to Phong Nha, next to a national park famed for its caves and underground rivers, and we are surrounded by tourist cafes offering hamburgers, Vietnamese delicacies and cocktails. We stuff ourselves with pizza and retreat to a hotel, exhausted after the day of riding.
Our rented motorcycle has served us well, but on the fourth day, I feel the rear of the bike wobble and hear the familiar “woofa woofa” of a flat tyre. We are carrying a spare tube, but do not have the tools nor air pump needed to make the change.
The person whose home we have stopped in front of sees our problem and makes a call. Soon, an extremely drunk mechanic shows up on a scooter. He leads us to his nearby garage, where a crowd gathers to watch him change our tyre. He is red-faced and exhaling alcohol fumes as he keeps the onlookers laughing at jokes I suspect are at our expense.

It isn’t long before we are back on the road, and not much longer than that before I again feel the rear tyre go flat. Our bleary-eyed helper forgot to remove the nail that had caused the puncture in the first place.
Again, we lean on strangers for help, using Google Translate and gestures to bridge the language divide. This time I work together with a different, sober mechanic to remove the bothersome nail before making repairs.
The punctures have left us well short of our planned destination for the day. I am determined to avoid riding through the dark, but we pay for that prudence by spending a night in Tan Ky, a town so nondescript its most notable feature is a large roundabout.
Our chosen hotel is filthy and ramshackle, so we wait in a cafe until darkness, in the hope that that will hide the worst of the grime, before returning to our room.
“A road trip isn’t complete without a truly horrible hotel,” I remind my partner as she climbs into bed fully clothed, to avoid touching the grey sheets.

We have Hanoi in our sights and I am beginning to relax, relieved that we’ve avoided any major mishaps. Then the road begins filling with slow traffic, and oncoming trucks insist on passing whether there is space for them or not.
I repeatedly pull to the side of the road to let the dirty flanks of a truck whizz by dangerously close to my handlebars, prompting panicked warnings from my rider.
“I don’t want to die today!” she shouts at me, pounding on my back for emphasis.
Neither do I, and the stress makes me long for the empty jungle highway a few days behind us, where all I had to worry about was the next curve in the road.


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Riding Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh Highway: a motorcycle odyssey along twisty, perilous mountain roads

The narrow, twisting Ho Chi Minh Highway. Photo: Fiona Ching

The highway near A Luoi, in central Vietnam. Photo: Getty Images

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Hoi An is a popular destination for tourists. Photo: Shutterstock

Writer Cameron Dueck exploring abandoned military equipment in Khe Sanh. Photo: Fiona Ching

Pho bo is a staple served at cafes in mountain villages. Photo: Fiona Ching

Villagers gather to watch a drunk mechanic repair the motorbike tyre. Photo: Fiona Ching

Arriving in Hanoi after 1,200km on the Ho Chi Minh Highway. Photo: Fiona Ching

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Travel

Mountain scenes, quaint villages, chaotic traffic, cheap motels and repetitive noodle soup, punctuated by the occasional flat tyre


Mountain scenes, quaint villages, chaotic traffic, cheap motels and repetitive noodle soup, punctuated by the occasional flat tyre.


Riding Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh Highway: a motorcycle odyssey along twisty, perilous mountain roads

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Mountain scenes, quaint villages, chaotic traffic, cheap motels and repetitive noodle soup, punctuated by the occasional flat tyre

Mountain scenes, quaint villages, chaotic traffic, cheap motels and repetitive noodle soup, punctuated by the occasional flat tyre