Vietnam

Harry’s coverage so far is a solo motorbike trip through the far north — Hanoi to Mu Cang Chai, then on to Lao Cai on the Chinese border.

Obs: the video carries an eSIM sponsorship and card affiliate links. No provider is recorded here.

Riding here

The practical core of the page.

• A Honda costs just under $10 a day, and is what he’s told to rent because they’re the most reliable.
• Over 60 million motorbikes in the country, and upwards of 8,000 road deaths a year (from video – unverified). Traffic drives on the opposite side from the UK.
• Motorbikes are banned from the expressways, and this is the single biggest problem of the trip: Google Maps routed him onto them three separate times, at the cost of hours. See don’t trust Google Maps.
• The fix that worked: deleting and reinstalling the app, after which motorbike routing finally appeared.
• Petrol at 22,000 a litre.
• Vietnamese drivers are slow and give bikes room, in his assessment — the lorries are the exception.
• 38–40 °C in the lowlands, and he burns badly before covering up.

People

The half of the trip he didn’t plan and rates highest.

• Payment is refused, repeatedly. In a village where he stops for directions he is given a drink, shown around and sent off having failed to pay for anything; the same happens at an ice stall and with a free lemonade.
• The further from a city, the warmer people get — his own rule, stated on camera and then demonstrated for four days.
• Everyone wants to know if he’s married, and several people offer to introduce him to a wife.
• The pipe is everywhere. A tobacco water pipe passed to visitors as a matter of course; he is taught the technique properly at a roadside stall and notes he has smoked one in every Vietnam video he’s made.
• Beer is drunk over ice from communal crates, and toasts are constant. He keeps refusing more because he’s riding.
• English is rare, including among the young, which surprises him — he expected the younger generation to have more.

Food

Fried rice, beef, tofu, river fish — and a fertilised duck egg he calls disgusting and washes down with beer. In the mountains, dinner is a chicken that was alive an hour earlier; asked its name, the host says it doesn’t have one, because naming it would make killing it harder.

History and development

• The war is called the American war here. Harry’s summary: the communist north backed by China and the Soviet Union, the US-backed south, and today a single-party communist state with the division still readable in the landscape and the stories.
• More developed than he expected, and he says so twice — the moment that triggers it is an electric sign in a mountain village.
• The lowland industry is visible in the water. He passes a lake the wrong shade of green and won’t swim in it.

The Chinese border

• The crossing at Lao Cai is open, and closed to him: China requires a visa in advance and there is none on arrival.
• A gate runs the entire length of the border, which he hadn’t expected — he’d assumed a fence with gaps. He reads that unfenced stretches exist far to the east.
• He apologises on camera for the title, having failed to cross.

Source

• Solo Journey to Vietnam’s Border with China 🇻🇳 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LtGV7T8ODE