Today I met up with the crew from the Czech Republic and we decided to rent motorbikes and head to Tarm Ton Pass, which Lonely Planet describes "a seriously spectacular ride" up the mountain to the highest mountain pass in Vietnam. It might be spectacular, but we never quite figured that out because the fog remained impenetrable the whole time.
We rented the motorbikes on the main drag in Sapa, where tourists are repeatedly deluged with requests to buy various clothes and jewelry from the local Montagnard tribes, and an equally incessant barrage of offers for "motorbike". We made it down to the end of the street where a crowd of motorbike folks congregate and proceeded to negotiate price. Bizarrely enough, the young Montagnard girls speak near perfect English and often volunteer to translate, which smoothed things along nicely. Iget the impression that most of these girls learned English from talking to tourists. I was a bit nervous about driving a bike. My only previous experience riding a scooter was in Goa, where the scooter had only one gear. But I did a test run and it proved surprisingly easy, as I was driving on the right side and the bike was semi-automatic so even though I had to switch gears, doing so did not involve the use of a clutch, you just had to push down with your foot. So far, so good.
However, some kind of disagreement about who would get to rent our bikes erupted and the dude I just paid 80,000 dong threatened to bash in some dude's head with a shovel. Fortunately, things calmed down fairly quickly and we were on our way. We gassed up and headed out of town on the road that our not-so-trusty map told us would lead us to the pass. The road detiorated quickly into a mess of have paved gravel and the occasional patch of mud, and we flagged down a passing driver to determine if we were on the right track. Indeed we were, despite the decrepit condition of the roadway. Visibility became increasingly worse until I could barely see 20 feet in front of me, although fortunately the two Czech dudes (both of whom were driving their respective girlfriends) took the lead. During the period of worst visibility, huge buses would appear seemingly out of nowhere and we would have to swerve to the right at the last minute to avoid them on the narrow road. It wasn't quite as treachorous as my nighttime ride through Goa, but it definitely felt unsafe at times. We drove along for less than an hour when we ran across Thac Bas, the silver waterfall, over 100 meters tall. After about an hour or so more of driving through pea-soup fog, we passed by the Pass without even realizing it. We drove a bit further, but eventually gave up and turned around. I began to have a blast driving the motorbike at this point, open road and hardly any cars and we could see the road pretty well. I opened up the throttle and entered the zone.
Finally, we made it back to Sapa after around 4 hours of driving and ate lunch. Wild pig and str fried Sapa vegetables with garlic. Then the Czechs decided to check out another village, but I was tired and went home. I may be the laziest tourist in Sapa.
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