Motorcycle diaries

I hired a motorbike, it was Russian and it called a Minsk, they have a bit of a cult following amongst overland travellers I understand. They ain't the most reliable machines in the world but when you hire them the shop knows this and they give you a bag of spare parts, some tools and a quick tutorial on how to change each one and how to diagnose common problems. The aim of this excursion was too get a good experience of solo travelling after seeing Matt depart for NZ on 01/02, I wanted to get off the well beaten track and see some of the 'real Vietnam'. I have been thinking about it and I think I have succeeded, I list the reasons as follows:

1. I didn't see another western tourist for the entire time I was away (6 days).
2. I haven't had an English conversation or seen a menu featuring English in all this time.
3. Riding the Minsk through the village roads (where the term road is used loosely to mean any surface made up of mud, gravel, land-slides, tar seal and streams where motorbikes, cars and trucks share a single lane, and no section of 'road' is straight for more than 100m) it feels like I just won the tour de France and I am doing a victory lap with children running out of houses yelling hello and waving. Generally they hear the Minsk coming as it sounds like a tractor.
4. As riding into the first town one man (middle aged) with a very young (~2yo) passenger on his lap was riding into town beside me and so surprised to see me there tried to start a conversation at about 40kph. Well it ended shortly after that with him slamming into the back of a woman on her motorbike, after impact he glanced in my direction and I swerved to avoid him and he just clipped my back wheel, however luckily we both managed to stay upright, the same could not be said about the poor lady.

The Minsk has actually performed fairly well considering the treatment I have been dealing it. We have done over 1,300km taking 36hours of riding (for those of you non-engineering folk without a pocket calculator handy, this is really slow an average of about 36km/h and that is not because of my riding, trust me no-one was passing me that's just how bad the roads are!).

However, the following recommendations are made to Minsk (aka: stuff I broke):

• stronger clutch cables (the locals had a good old time gathering around right behind me to watch me change this)
• more durable clutch handles

That is all.

PS: bufty was the best striker in the team!