The quiet beach town of Quy Nhon turned out to be a buzzing university town with thousands of students. We walked around the town for 2-3 hours and only saw 2 other westerns the whole time. In the end we stopped to eat in a restaurant next to some 5-aside soccer pitches, one of the locals eating there came over and helpfully translated the menu for us. The food was amazing and the local stayed chatting to us for the majority of the meal, he talked to Colm about Vietnam, motorbikes and struggled to understand why Colm wasn't married at 25! Colm has consistently developed great rapport with the locals on this trip. He has the ability to somehow detrieve a conversation from nothing when I'm just struggling to chat in a few sentences. The end result is the locals of every place we go to love him! The man from the 5-aside restaurant told Colm that if we were still around tomorrow he would invite Colm to his house for dinner because he was so friendly and unlikely most of the westerners in encounters. Anyway we kindly declined the kind offer and informed the guy we were leaving for Hoi An in the morning, then headed back to the hotel for some sleep.
We were up at 7am hoping to reach Hoi An and meet up with Daniel and Alan that evening. The weather was looking pretty ominous outside, I think it was the first day we woke up to see dark clouds instead of sunlight, but we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best! Then as we were checking out of the hotel the owner asked in passing conversation where we were going next, when we said Hoi An he shook his head at us. "Don't you know there is an international fireworks competition on in Danang this weekend? Everywhere within 40km is booked up." Eh, no we didn't? So with the news we might not have accommodation when we arrived & the weather looking glum we set off. The goal was to travel 320km that day, with some stops at sights along the way. The first stop was some ruins of Cham empire 20km outside of the city, we drove into what we thought was the entrance for the temples but later realised was a monastry! The monks were really nice and showed us how to get to the temples going through there grounds. At one point their dog started barking at us, one of the monks yelled at him to shut up & when the dog didn't he threw a small stone at it! Not exactly very Buddist of him! The ruins were pretty nice but since Siem Reap we've been pretty much templed out so it would have had to be great to make a lasting impression.
Back on the road again and I'm struggling to remember what else happened from here. The weather started to get darker but I think we just stuck at it on the highway for 2.5 hours. I started to get disenchanted with the journey somewhere along here, highway 1 from Quy Nhon has been pretty horrible. The road is incredibly busy and therefore starts to get dangerous. It is a standard 2 lane road but trucks overtake on the wrong side of the road regularly. Then motorbikes over take the trucks overtaking the cars and so on! If you find yourself driving down the road with oncoming trucks, motorbikes and buses on your side of the road blaring their horns at you to get off the road. The other danger is people pulling out onto the road, it doesn't matter if you are on the road already, motorbikes and trucks will pull out straight in front of you. After one such time when a dumptruck pulled out in front of myself & Col causing us to brake heavily I had commented to him that I didn't think it was phasing me any more, I had grown to expect it. I guess the world decided to test how correct I was in that statement because when we were about 10k away from Quang Ngai it started to rain. We pulled in briefly and then decided that we might as well keep going, it can't last that long can it?
One hundred meters later I got into my first (and I hope last) crash. With the rain pounding me in the face and a bus blaring his horn at me to let me know he was overtaking some stupid local pulled out onto the road about 10 feet ahead of me. I hit the brakes but couldn't steer out of the way because of the bus so I ended up going straight into the back of him at maybe 30kph. We both hit the ground hard and I remember just hoping we had landed enough off the road so the bus doesn't crush us. Luckly it didn't and I jumped back up to drag my bike off his and off the road. A quick check of myself and my ony injury was a cut on my elbow. The pants had saved my legs. The bike seemed fine bar my front right indicator which had snapped off, these didn't work anyway so I don't care that much! The other guys bike was not so lucky, the hefty Minsk managed to smash up the back of it nicely without any serious damage to itself. Thank you Belarus! Once we learnt we were both OK the blame game started, 3 local women came over and with the guy blamed me. I admitted that yes I had driven into the back of him but he hadn't looked up the road to see me or the bus already on it! There was literally nothing I could have done. Some other lady came over and translated the back and forth, in the end she suggested I give the guy money or he would call the police. My first reaction was "Call them!" but a deep breath later and I realised that could only end badly for me with all of these locals on the other guys side, so I paid him 100,000 dong (4 euro) and fecked off down the road.
Colm had been right behind me as we pulled off and between a combination of me being still shook so really really concentrating on the road for the next couple of minutes I didn't notice that he dropped off and then disappeared from behind me. I pulled in and waited, then when he didn't show I went back to the crash site but still couldn't see him. Guessing I must have missed him overtaking me I turned around and covered the last 10k to Quang Ngai without seeing him. The rain had finally stopped at this point so I pulled in and sat down at the side of the road to wait for him. To be honest this was the first time I had sat down since the crash and only then did I realise how much I needed it. Ipod in, calming music and I sat back to watch the traffic go by. Col showed about 20 minutes later, he had ran out of petrol just after the crash site so I must have driven by him twice without noticing him! We set off but no sooner had we covered 2k when the rain started again. We took a half hour break for lunch, and headed into the rain again. Two more kilometers and we called it a day. Colm couldn't see a thing with his helmet and we were both freezing. We headed back to Quang Ngai and checked into the first hotel we could find.
Shower and dry clothes were amazing! The hotel didn't food, net or satelite so we got a taxi into town. We came across a pool hall and headed in for a game only to realise that the tables didn't have pockets and everyone was playing with 3 balls. Yellow, red and white. We tried and failed to work out how to play the game, when the locals stopped laughing at us they point us upstairs when the normal tables were. That was how the rest of the day was spent and I ended up asleep in bed by 8.
So by now I'm getting tried of typing so ye must be tired of reading, summary of the next day is we got up early, 7am, left the hotel. It started raining again so we covered the last 120k to Hoi An very slowly with 2 stops for hot drinks and hot food. We finally got here at lunch time and met the lads. Hoi is great, very pretty and I have lots of pictures but that will have to be in the next post! I'm out!
They were playing billiards in the pool hall.
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