Buying motorbikes in Saigon

Fair warning, this has more detail on the process of buying the bikes than you probably want to know unless you're about to do the same thing.

The bus dropped us in the central backpacker area of Saigon, which was just where we wanted to be to buy bikes. Our plan for the next two months was to buy cheap shitty motorbikes in Saigon and ride them the length of the country, and then sell them to some other random backpackers in Hanoi. This has become a pretty popular way of seeing Vietnam, with plenty of people looking to buy and sell at both ends. 

Of course, this means that the crappy Chinese knockoff bikes have spent their lives racking up miles going up and down the country on bad roads with too much luggage being driven and cared for by people who've probably never ridden a motorbike before. Everything on offer is pretty much a time bomb, it's just a matter of trying to find one where the fuse will last long enough to sell it to the next sucker. There's a mechanic every few hundred metres throughout most of the country though, and they're used to working on similar POS bikes, so it all works out in the end. Going rate is backpacker-backpacker about $300 USD, give or take. 

our 100 & 110 cc "Honda" Wins. Max speed about 70 kmh, downhill. Guess who got stuck carrying all the luggage?

First day we went for a bit of a wander around the city, some pretty nice gardens & so on, but stinking hot on foot. All my photos from today are of "bike for sale" posters for later reference unfortunately: we were here to do a job. When we went out for dinner we came past a couple selling their bikes, and I hopped on for my first test ride in Saigon traffic. At night. 

This was a good exercise in lowering my expectations. Both bikes had dramatically loose swing arm bearings, which effectively created an exciting new joint in the middle of the bike and meant I looked like a kid on their first ride without training wheels as I wobbled my way down the street. I wouldn't have touched this with a ten foot pole in NZ, and we ended up looking at bikes with even more serious problems later on! 

The next day we found an ad from a Dutch couple that had just been down the country two-up, and that ended up being the bike for me. The side luggage racks were pretty rare, and the steering on these things is already dangerously light without also cantilevering all your luggage out past the end of the bike on huge extended rear racks as most people do. It also came with a 12V USB charger already wired in, key for being able to navigate with my shitty phone battery. Not all of the lights worked, but I was sure this would be an easy fix.

With one bike achieved, we celebrated by heading up to a rooftop bar for a drink, and then retreating to more affordable dingy back-alleys for dinner. We saw our smoothies made in front of us, and I finally realised how much sugar was being dumped into the drinks I'd been quaffing nonstop, whoops...

It took a few days to find a bike for Frank. We bargained too hard and lost one decent bike, weren't wiling to pay the extortionate $450 demanded by an Israeli guy for his bike (admittedly a nice one:  the only working speedometer I've seen on one of these bikes, amongst other things.)

We finally picked up a bike for her from a Vietnamese Mechanical Engineer who had allegedly had it for two years and just used for road trips (almost all bikes are automatic or semi-automatic transmission because no self-respecting Vietnamese person wants to have to use a manual clutch in city traffic: it makes it too hard to use your cellphone, or eat your lunch, or hold your extra luggage in place, the Wins are some of the few standard transmission bikes around)

We also checked out the War Remnants Museum (nee "Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression", nee "Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes", as relations with the US steadily improved.) Here we learned that the North Vietnamese were wonderful and never hurt anyone and the only bad things that happened during the war were the West's fault. The name might have changed, but the editorial mission hasn't. I hope western museums don't look this one-eyed to foreign audiences...

Safety Gear

Not Pictured: boots, and NZ motorcross pants

To go with the bikes, we realised we should probably upgrade from the rice-paper-thin fashion accessories the Dutchies had been wearing as helmets and we got with the bike. There were a hell of a lot of places selling lids I wouldn't trust to protect my dog for dirt cheap, and one place selling European helmets for more than we paid for our bikes. We ended up buying moderately higher quality helmets, that looked and felt much safer to my eye, but still open-faced and not western certified. We figured we'd die of heatstroke in full-face helmets, were going to be going not much above bicycle speeds, and were still many times safer than most. (One popular local style is basically rugby headgear, and costs about $2).

I picked up the armoured mesh shirts you see above after an awful, awful drive across the city through rush hour traffic via a couple of closed shops and helpful redirections from bystanders. They're not as hot as a proper motorcycle jacket, but, along with the pants, still hot as hell when you're not moving. Hopefully we're getting some level of protection here, because we're certainly paying a sweat penalty compared to all the other backpackers (let alone locals!) in jandals and shorts.

With bikes and gear acquired, we were finally ready to hit the road!