Mui ne to Da Lat

Yesterday was spent recovering from Paddys day, Greg had recovered sufficiently by lunch to go ahead of us and make a stab for Da Lat. Unfortunately my phone got robbed/lost so we now have no way of contacting him to meet up again. Greg if you somehow remembered the title of this blog drop me a comment!

We had great ambitions of leaving at 7:30am this morning and making it up here by lunch. O how we were wrong. We eventually left after 8 and then I led us 23km down the wrong road before I realised my mistake. We learned two things from the detour,

1. I now know how fast my bike can go, we made the 23km back to the right road in 20 minutes! Lots of weaving and overtaking at a decent speed! (I have no speedometer on my bike)

2. Alans bike is pretty crap, sorry Al! In order to keep up with us he had to go top speed which burnt half a tank of petrol in 20 minutes! 100cc mopeds may not be the best choice for road tripping Vietnam.

So we got back on the right road, Alan stopped for petrol and 2 minutes later we had our first crash. Some old dude drove into the side of Colm and knocked him into a bike driving along side. Colm went flying off the bike and his clutch handle got caught in the rear rack of the passing bike. End result; Colm went tumbling onto the road and his bike got dragged about 20 feet up the road. Sounds pretty nasty but luckly we were only going about 10kph so he escaped with only a couple of scratches. The bike was not so lucky, I'll get to that. Did I mention that old faithful the throttle wire had already come loose twice that morning.

Anyway, we hit the countryside which was beautiful. In a way it reminded me of Ireland, lots of green fields, ox drawn carts stacked with hay and lines of ducks!

As we started up the hills Colm started to have some trouble, his bike was underpowered and struggling. Eventually he dropped out of sight only to reappear pushing the bike up the hill. A few words were had with Vladamir which resulted in Vlad falling to the ground. Remember that clutch handle, this was its breaking point. Literally. The bottom of the handle snapped off and the wire came out, irreparable. At this point we were 35 km away from the town we had come from and 15 km from the next town. In the end we decided I would head to the next town and see if I could get a replacement. I rocked into what can only be described as a one horse town and found a couple of mechanics. Hand gestures and pointing got across the problem but no spares were around, they did suggest switching the front brake handle with the clutch handle so I made my way back to tell the lads. Bit of DIY later & the bike was up and running again, for 30 meters, then the throttle went. Aggg!! I got some string from Alan and had at it, sorted! My fix managed to hold for the rest of the day so thankfully we managed to enjoy the rest of the mountain roads.


I posted up a video (the quality is pretty poor but had to squash it down alot to upload here) but it doesn't do the roads justice at all, it was fecken brilliant. Small mountain roads, amazing view, tight cornering and wind blowing in your face. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, we made it to Da Lat and are now chilling out with some whiskey and coke. Exploring and more photos tomorrow.

Ps. Fifi, we found a sign just for you!