Plei Brell, Gia Lai, Vietnam
June 28, 2014
We woke early to rain, a lot of rain. Rain that was pounding down so hard and made a racket on the roof two floors above us so much that it was still was enough to wake us up before the alarm. We pulled our small amount of gear together and headed downstairs to grab a coffee and pull our heads together for the day ahead. A couple of coffees later we realised this rain was not going to let up and that we needed to head off all the same. The bike was loaded up with petrol and our small bags and we were loaded up with caffeine, off we went.
The first 50km or so was plain sailing. Wet but nice easy tarmac to ride on. We hit a random town at this point where we needed to turn off and swing further South towards Dalat and we stopped for 5 minutes to check out a traditional Vietnamese house and a couple of tanks that you see here and there, obviously to show the power of the communist country that we are traveling through.
A short distance after the heavenly strips of tarmac the rain kicked up another notch and the road changed from tarmac to mud and deep pot holes. And it did not let up. There were obviously roadworks going on but no actual work as such seemed to be occuring. They had stripped the road back to the surface underneath and obviously had intentions of repairing and relaying the surface but all that existed was the apparent surface of the moon in a monsoon.
We slowed down massively and bounced and ground our way through roads that I can not put in to words. Fair enough the roads were relatively quiet but if this was at home you would give up in five minutes and turn off somewhere else. Here you had no alternative. There was no diversion. No alternative route. They pull up a road to it's it guts and that is what you ride on. Visibility was down to about 20 yards and the rough surface was littered with puddles where you didn't know if they were 5 inches deep or 5 feet deep until you rode through them. Many times I had to decide which pot hole to go through and we had to live with the consequences. of that decision.
This was a serious challenge. No where else to go but South along this road. Within 30 minutes the front shocks on Dora were ruined and every pot hole produced a shoulder jarring ear shattering clunk. Every so often a wagon would blare it's horn in your ear and clatter past at times nearly toppling over as one side would disappeared into a small lake of deep water.
We cracked on with no other choice and I adapted to the surroundings we were in. Progress was massively slow and at times you would have to wind from your side of the road all the way over to the other just to make some small progress forwards. At times we even rode through the odd shop front or building we came across just because you could spot a route that way compared to the road itself. We did this for six hours non stop.
After those six hours the luggage frame at the the back was bouncing around and we knew that something wasn't quite right. We pulled over and took the bags off and put them on ourselves under our waterproofs looking like bright blue turtles with our house on our back. We squeezed uncomfortably back onto the bike . An hour later we entered a small town with tarmac and spotted a bike place on the left and pulled in to see if they could fix it.
As we pulled in the guys there stared at us as if we were aliens and they spoke no English at all but once we pulled the seat up and checked what was wrong we all knew what had happened. The bouncing and smashing through potholes had cracked the small frame at the back that is normally used by the passenger to hold on to and that is where our custom luggage rack was tied on to. The older guy in the place removed the luggage rack unscrewed the hand rail and disappeared for an hour to his friends down the road. On his return it was all nicely welded up and we packed the bags back on and bid farewell. The repair looked good to me and I was confident that was the last I had seen of luggage rack repairs.
As we rode through and out of the town it eventually changed back to a construction site and Dani shouted up that the back end was bouncing again so I pulled over. As we ground to a halt I looked behind me and the entire back end of luggage fell off the bike and landed on the ground. I was in tears of laughter at this point, if I didn't it would have been tears of despair so I went with the better option. The welding had lasted all of ten minutes and we were back to square one. There was no way we could continue so again we lashed the bags around ourselves once more and headed back to a hotel we had spotted near the bike shop and sorted some accommodation out for the night. Once sorted I headed back to the bike workshop only to find it was shut. This was it for the night. It was dark now and we were going nowhere. We would need to get sorted in the morning and crack on from there.
