After a nights stay in Dong Ha, we were on our way further up the coast, with plans to make it over 250ks to Vinh. The ride was going very well and we were making great time, until 50km outside of Vinh in a town called ‘Ha Tinh’ we had our first motorbike accident in our 6 months travelling in Asia. Nothing major and no one other than us hurt. A kid on a bike decided to pull out in front of us, we swerved but with a car in the other direction had to swerve again and ended up on our sides with poor Didgey tipped on top on Justin. Thankfully we didn’t hit the car or the child, and looking back on the situation we were extremely lucky we were not then flattened by a truck that couldn’t stop in time as we were toppled over on the road. |
After asking each other 100 times “are you okay?” we took our Didge (who was making a very unusual coughing noise and had a crumbled bike rack) to a Honda shop. After waiting 15 minutes for them to assess Didge Justin went into a little bit of shock and had to have a lay down in the mechanics, lucky every business in SE Asia has a bed for the staff to relax on during sleepy hours. Lucky for us, there was a hotel next door to our mechanics, we left Didge for the night and hobbled up the stairs to lay in bed feeling sorry for our scrapes and bruises. |
The following day we jumped back on and made our way towards Hanoi with only 1 more nights stop over in Tanh Hoa. Then finally after days of riding up the coast we reached Hanoi, we found a flash-packer hotel called Tu Linh Palace (we were starting to like the whole palace thing) and booked a standard room for a night's rest. During our stay here the hotel recommended we visited a new restaurant called 'Happy Tears', we were up for some good tucker so we decided to give it a shot. Over some delicious glass noodles and spring rolls we got chatting to the super friendly staff who were really curious on all things Australia - especially Kangaroos. After getting them up to speed on the land down under we asked them for some information on Ba Be Lake which was our next destination. One of the owner's husband owns a home stay in Ba Be Lake, but we will save that story for another post.
I better go, we are wandering around the market like giants trying to find a jacket that will fit Justin's broad Australian chest as it is freezing in the North!