St Patricks Day

I guess I forgot to explain who the guy in this photo is, eveybody meet Greg. He bought a bike from Kevin as well and joined us in the journey north. So we are still in Mui Ne nursing some hangovers from yesterday. The day started much like this one laying by the pool in the sun. Its a hard life!
According to the lonely lier Mui Ne has some giant sand dunes just outside the city so we heading off after lunch to go check them out. We had only made it 1 mile up the road before Colm ran out of petrol, the first of an eventfull biking day for Colm. We managed to get petrol, I drove back and got him oil and we set off again. The coast road here was beautiful, massive sand dunes on the left and crashing waves on the right. We trailed one of the tour jeeps to find out where to stop and met some Russians who liked our bikes, "Belarus, Ya!".
First stop along the way was a red sand canyon, we went for a quick explore, took some nice pictures then jumped on the bikes to follow the jeep. Greg fired up, I fired up, Colm's throttle wire fell out. Fail. He fixed it up, closed up the throttle, reved the engine, wire fell out. Fail. We opened it up again, and in the first of what I imagine will be many jury rigged repairs we managed to tie up the wire with some string and tape. Closed up the throttle and success, we were off! We had long lost the jeep at this point so we headed down a dirt track ourselves, I had my first "crash" when a gust of wind hit me and I slid on the dirt off the side of the road. Didn't come off the bike but did hit a big rock off the exhaust, however the trusty Minsk took it in its stride and kept going. The trail ended at a locked gate but we jumped off and headed into the dunes for some exploring. The dunes went on for a couple of miles in each direction but had a wall running through the middle of them which we used for exploring. Colm got some pretty good pictures here, most of which I have uploaded onto facebook.
After about an hour of exploring we set off again, but only made it about 300meters before Colms throttle wire fell out. Again. Bit of tampering with the string and tape and off we went. I took Colms camera for some action driving shots, and we almost made it all the way back to the hostel before Colms broke down for the 4th time. His feet rest broke off and he pulled in to do a "quick" fix. I shit you not when I say at one point 7 locals were gathered around the bike oftening advice, one guy's missus even rocked up to give out to him. Its nice to see no matter the country the culture of men is still the same, "No, you should use this", "not that way, this way".
It took an hour of one guy hammering the peg with a rock and a second bit of string from the side of the road before he fixed the bike and we finally made it back to the hostel.

The rest of the night was spent boozing it up. We met some Irish people, went to a club full of Russian's and threw some shapes on the dancefloor. O ya, a new rule was brought in after all of Colm's antics, for every breakdown which holds up the group, said person has to have a shot that night. Queue up 4 shots for Colm!


Day three complete, 1 almost crash, 4 breakdowns, 0 deaths.