The ride home is barely worth mentioning. The roads were fast in the beginning and have gone back to a near crawl once we came closer to Hanoi. The driving was also becoming more and more belligerent as the traffic picked up. As we’re participating in this madness it becomes increasingly clear that it’s probably time to stop all of this. I guess we picked up some bad habits in the last few weeks which will probably take at least 5 minutes in Switzerland to get rid of again. And some completely unfounded hate for cars…
We stopped for a quick coffee in Thái Nguyên. We parked the motorbikes and took a seat in a quite large (about 10 tables) road-side coffee. The tables were next to some trees which must have contained hundreds of cicadas. It was deafening. I could not even work a single shift at this restaurant without losing my mind… We quickly finished our coffees and left again.
About an hour of heavy traffic later we arrived at our home base in Hanoi again. We parked the motorbikes in the living room (where else would you put two dirty motorbikes) and started washing our clothes. Since the washing machine doesn’t clean anything we put it on another cycle and left the house for our very final destination: The Tigit Motorbikes store in Hanoi.
We did it! After over 3600 kilometers each, without any breakdowns or accidents, we finally returned the motorbikes. After all of these hours of riding I’m kind of sentimental about it. On one side I’m just happy we didn’t have any problems, on the other side I’m always going to look back at this unforgettable road trip and wish it had gone on forever…
We walked around the old town for the next hours having some beers and food. Nothing to phone home about though, so I’ll leave out the details. The taxi ride home was on the interesting side though. The taxi driver put on some decent music and took a small detour on the way home. We noticed about half way through the detour that the taxi meter was way too fast so I started measuring the distances traveled. We quickly discussed whether we’d just leave right when we noticed but decided against it since it was in the middle of nowhere. After arriving close to our place I threatened to take pictures of his “license” and the meter and go to the police. He suddenly wanted to discuss the price and we agreed to lower it from 140k to 80k, which is a pretty good price for the distance. Lesson learned. We’ll use the Grab App in the future which is similar to Uber but specifically for Vietnam. Let’s hope this will work better in the future.
Tomorrow we’ll go rewash our clothes again (third time’s the charm) in a nearby coin laundry. Maybe this will actually clean them.
