Editor’s Note: Stivi Cooke is an Australian expat who has lived in Hoi An City in Quang Nam, a province in central Vietnam, for six years. In this second part of a four-part series written exclusively for Tuoi Tre News, Cooke describes how he got to Hue City from Lang Co, a township in Phu Loc District, Thua Thien–Hue Province, in the central region on his recent road trip from Hoi An to Hue City. Hue is the capital of Thua Thien-Hue and the former capital of Vietnam. 

>> A jewel in central Vietnam – Part 1: A ride after a while

From here to Hue, the greens of the fields take on a slightly softer shade (What? You thought I was going to say, ‘softer hue’?) and the air becomes cooler. It’s said that the mountains dividing this part of Vietnam help create the cooler weather of northern Vietnam, taking the edge off the steamy humidity of the East Vietnam Sea. Depending on how quickly you want to do it, from Lang Co to the other side of the mountains is not much more than an hour or slightly more, the road flattening out to a straight run along the coastline to Hue.

It’s at this point that we needed to get our game plan together. My friends were intent on getting to Hue so our speeds would be higher, but little ‘fraidy cat’ me wasn’t going to match speeds with my inexperience. The kids, as I called them, (all in their twenties) had GPS working overtime as they’d never been this far by bike either. The plan was for them to stop and take bearings while I could catch up. Three toots of my horn meant I needed some time out for water and to stretch my bones.

The road wiggles and snakes across the coastal rice field plains, often near the shoreline, for another two and a half hours to Hue. The large trucks and buses would take up most of their lanes in either direction; however, there is a one-meter-wide gap between the outer white line edge of the road and the real edge. This is where all of us, the motorcyclists, would squeeze in as trucks bounced and rumbled past. In a way, this is great as it forces most people to slow down as they pass, yet the margin for error, centimeters from each other, was nerve-racking for me.

Again the obvious hazard is people coming into the flow of traffic from the sides, so the left side mirror monitors traffic coming up from behind with side vision firmly on the right as we passed though any populated area. The highway does widen out through small towns, although construction work to widen the road complicated matters frequently. It didn’t leave many opportunities to slow down and gaze at the scenery around me, but it’s all quite fascinating.

You’ll never see Vietnam’s energy and life-blood pumping around the country more effectively than on the highways – these arteries sustain 90 million people spread across 3,000 kilometers of coastline and they are busy. 

You get the knack of it quickly – see a large truck coming up behind, slow down slightly, try not to look at the wheels that are almost touching your bike, then it’s gone and you breathe again. It’s the roar of constant movement that gets you – lucky I had a full-face helmet to reduce the sound or I would have been deaf in Hue…

Ginormous truck stops and huge gas stations hundreds of meters long are everywhere. Dodging the potholes as you come in for petrol is fun! Yet the walk to the toilet is so far that you just ride the bike a hundred meters to it. I remember the truck wash stations particularly – truckers running in for a quick bite while the staff (mum and kids) used four-meter-long brushes and high-pressure hoses to spray down the truck dust just as fast.

One disconcerting feature is the hundreds of small cafés advertising booze to take away all along the highway. At least I can confirm that Larue is the nation’s best selling highway beer! The love life of the region must be amazing too, judging by the amount of oysters everyone’s selling.

What’s interesting is not necessarily what a tourist might want to see. It’s miles of rice fields punctuated by small towns, yet there is strong sense of history and age around this area - the deep canals running parallel to the highway feeding the fields seem to have been there for centuries, the small pockets of carefully tended trees, the weather-beaten cemeteries with their old temples and pagodas clinging to the small hilltops. It looked old but well-managed.

The coastline is rocky and craggy, without much protection from the sea. I didn’t see any great bays or lagoons along this section except the lonely moored fishing boats bobbing around in the grey waves. The overwhelming feeling is one of quietness, even next to the highway.

This feeling starts to fade as the road improves closer to Hue City. As the dust and traffic increase, urban Vietnam reappears – the rows of tall, narrow houses, the shops and the schools. On the outskirts of Hue, I saw my first ‘pillbox’ – a rusty, pockmarked concrete sentry box with narrow slits for guns to stick out in the middle of a field with cows munching away.  From what war I don’t know, but after the peaceful scenery of the highway it’s a shock to remember the nation’s past.

It’s a rough run from the mountains to Hue – often dusty, bumpy and narrow due to the debris of the widening of the highway. It’s great that they will have a wider, and hopefully safer, road in the future for tourist buses, yet it’s somehow sad to see the roadside fields being destroyed in the name of progress. We had to stop frequently as we all got aches and pains. Again, my age showed as I continually got off the bike like a grandpa with arthritis! I started getting cramps in my throttle hand which had me stopping every half hour, as well as becoming more irritable as we approached the city.

The last few miles into town were a mixture of terror and anger as the kids’ GPS didn’t match where we were going and I was following them into intersections, only to have to do a U-turn to catch up! I was shouting at them to slow down and I was only getting grins back at me. Tsk-tsk. 

And the best part? A cool balcony overlooking the street and a cold beer.