Gang of Five : Bringing Terror to the Streets

With our street rep spreading far and wide, our little gang swelled in size and although many applied (everyone wants to be a part of a grisly gang with a ginormous Teddy bear) we settled on "The Five".  

We may not have been the fiercest, or the largest, or the fastest biker gang racing up Vietnam... but we were clearly the best and with 1117 km still to go we sent shivers down the spines of almost everything on the road (except for the truckies and busses and cyclists and toddlers and cows and suicidal chickens and cigarette smoking school kids and the dogs and pigs and overloaded motorbikes and bulldozers and donkey carters and rogue fruit falling from passing vehicles)

We left Hue as 5. 

Teddy Teddison, the world's dirtiest Teddy bear... proud owner f very sophisticated donated attire...

Adeena on the world's hardcorestest scooter, Percy

Lorenz, the German guy and Old Benjamin his humble steed

Ben, the token American and his used to be green Minsk, Old Buffalo

Leo, the French Canadian we called "Red"

Dave, the realer Canadian we called "Blue"

Diary of a Pretend-to-be-Biker : Wrong Turns

Sometimes it's worth doing the 20 km detour down the wrong dirt road full of overflowing sewerage pipes and angry police officers... sometimes it's those wrong turns that lead you to those exact people that you are meant to be meeting - the random strangers who are soon to become your own personalised biker gang...

The road to nowhere, somewhere, Central Vietnam

After a whole week of lonesome driving I'd resigned to believing I'd be finishing my motorbike escapades  alone - just me and Teddy and Percy and whatever Vietnam decided to throw at me... and I was okay with that. I'd broken down enough times to know I'd survive. But after leaving Hoi An, a place most people visit to suit up in tailored designer attire (I did my laundry, for me that was close enough) I happened to stumble across  the still unfathomable...

...It was all very surreal too. I was just breathing in the polluted ocean air [on the way back to the real road] when from nowhere,  below a ginormous buddha sat two bikers with a map stretched out. I slammed the brakes, meandered out of the way of a passing truck and the rest is history. We were three [and a Teddy bear].