We rode out of Hanoi yesterday, finally stretching the bikes out to a whopping sixty kms/h on the fastest downhill stretches.
The bikes have a certain familiarity but mine has been ridden like a rented mule (I suspect) and the gears tend to crunch slightly while the suspension clunks mightily on bumps. The seat is far more comfortable than any of the factory KTM models I've had the pleasure of perching on though this steed is not blessed with copious horsepower.
My XR150 has about 35,000 kilometres on it already, but Adam has a much newer model. He accomplished this by snapping the throttle cable quite unintentionally on the first bike that was brought out for his inspection. There seems to be a strange concern for the state of the plastics on the rental bikes so I've had to document each nick and scratch to the graphics while turning a blind eye to the quart of oil that gets dumped onto my right boot over the course of a day's drive.
It was my turn to choose lunch yesterday, so eventually I turned in at one of the hundreds of stalls that line the main road out of Hanoi. And here my stuffy nose served me well - Adam informs me that our soup, which included for the first time blood sausage, had a distinctive whiff of the farmyard. I picked up no such detail and happily munched around the aforementioned blood sausage. Until our Vietnamese improves, our strategy is to take what comes when we order two house specials, and leave what we don't like.
We got our first glimpse of the striking karst landscape - limestone cliffs rising from the plain. Both of us resolved to wear full riding gear going forward as some of the high passes grow quite cool. We ended the day with a magnificent plunge into Mai Chau.
While staying in Hanoi's hotels, we fooled ourselves into thinking that we were enjoying Vietnam's famously firm mattresses, but the hotel in Mai Chau corrected our misapprehensions. An authentically firm mattress borders on fabric wrapped plywood. It was not the mattress that kept us awake however, but the karaoke that kept up until after midnight and then was followed too closely at 4:30am by the blare of propaganda music and exhortations to work broadcast from loudspeakers throughout the valley.