CAITA -Day 10 Hue-HaLong 'Touch&Go'

Day 10, Monday Oct 23rd. Hue City To Ha Long Bay 750 km

Today our destination is Ha Long Bay. This sector seemed to be a straight
forward drive along the coastal HW1A. Judging from past days experience, if we could do just 75kmh average, it will be at least 10 hours drive.

We started at 730am leaving the hotel, the start time was delayed by half hour because the last group to arrived the night before was 230am, and needed every minute of sleep they could get. I think they skipped breakfast.

We took a short drive through tour to Hue Imperial Palace ground for picture taking. As our journey is expected to be long (time wise),
we could not spare the time to walk the Imperial grounds. After the photo
shoot at the Imperial entrance, we promptly departed the city and headed north in the direction of
Hanoi.
An unfortunate matter happened to our GPS because the tracer suddenly went on
the blink. We had to slow down to reset the unit to get it activated again and this has
caused the rest of the convoy to be slightly held back for a while. The traffic
at this hour was heavy, the road was laden with bicycles, motorcycles, light
and heavy goods vehicle. We had to drive very carefully after experiencing the
lack of road safety from the Vietnamese public. As the traffic was building up, Harold had to act as a lookout to give clearance for me to overtake on the left
hand side – the proper side. We kept a very small gap between the convoy leader’
s car, and as soon as they attempt an over taking maneuver, we were ready and
able to follow their progress through the heavy traffic.
One of our friends – Wybe Valkema, who happened to work in Hanoi, had been in touch to
arrange for a rest stop place to meet. Our progress had been painfully slow
inspite of our constant over taking the slow traffic – about 45km/h.
We had realized the mentality of the general Vietnamese rd user: when they
decided to cross the rd, they don’t lookout for traffic coming from behind. If
one forgets to honk at the pedestrian or bikey, they will immediately think
that there is no approaching traffic from behind them. We had one such incident
today. The St*^pid idiot just happen to cross our path, which surprised Harold
to execute an avoidance maneuver to clear the moving hazard. I had cold sweat
as it was a really close call.
Lesson learnt – KEEP HONKING when approaching the people. It worked. We hope
when we returned home, this habit will not stay with us.

School life must be quite tough here- we drove past some student cyclist with their red plastic seat for their classroom. (see pic)

The coastal road was quite scenic however, it soon disappeared when the road turned inland.

Wybe later sms us that he could’nt make it due to work meeting. We were really
disappointed.

The rain came, initially was quite moderate. I cautioned every car to have their headlights on and joked about the rain was mild when compared with the heavy rain on the MAL N/S Highway. Suddenly, as if the rain-gods heard me, it poured so heavily, blinding us at speeds of only 40kmh with wipers working at turbo speed. I said too soon. Sorry I muttered under my breath - you win.

We eventually reached the Ha Long P&T Hotel at 8pm
This was another sector that we arrived in the night, which meant we had no
chance to see the city in daylight. After dinner, we were informed that we have
to start very early at 5am the next day for the China border crossing, What a
tiring day again. The drive so far is wearing us out, but the splendid sights
of the ever changing scenery is rewarding in itself. Tired but happy

We were so tired that we decided to rest instead of writing the blog.

Sorry to keep you guys waiting….
Cheers
William and Harold

ps this report was sent while we were in China and re-posted as I noticed that it was not sent out of China. Maybe due to security system. William