Back on two wheels again

It’s been a long time since I rode a motorbike but today I hired a scooter and headed off into the countryside. I learned in the crazy traffic of Saigon when I lived there and have only ridden a few times on holiday since then. It didn’t take long before I was comfortable on the bike, though no bike will match the 1964 Lambretta I had in Saigon! The roads were quiet so it was easy.

I drove towards Hoa Lu – formerly the capital of Vietnam in around 970AD. I took the back roads and got a bit lost which was fine because the scenery was lovely! There’s not much of the old capital left but I visited a couple of temples with some archaeological remains and climbed a karst peak to get a view over the area. I also went to Tam Coc, a small tourist town where taking a boat trip to see the karst mountains is popular. I went for a walk rather than go on a boat because by the time the boat trip finished it would be nearly sunset and I didn’t fancy driving back in the dark on small, potholed, unlit country roads when I hadn’t checked whether the lights on the bike worked. (They did, but, as with pretty much every bike in Vietnam, the speedometer didn’t work.)


Both my main blip and the extra are places I drove past and had to stop because I liked them. Not all the scenery was nice; there are also some ugly factories belching out pollution and for a lot of shots I had to frame precisely to cut out all the rubbish thrown everywhere.