Motorbike Adventures

Yesterday Andrew and I rented a motorbike to go cruise up the coast of Mui Ne. We wanted to rent motorbikes to check out the coast and also in preparation to our visit to Hanoi in the North. Our friend Eloise recommended renting one there but we did not want to do that without first getting our bearings in a less-crazy motorbike town. Vietnam is crazy about motorbikes. In Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) where we flew in, I have never seen so many motorbikes in my life. There are about 8-9 million people who live in that city and 4 million motorbikes. There are so many that when you drive in a car next to them you feel like you are in the middle of a parade. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to the way the traffic moves either. There is a flow similar to how a school of fish swims in the sea, but its something that is unexplainable: organized chaos, perhaps?
On our motorbike trip around the Mui Ne area, there were two things on our list to see: the red sand dunes and the fish sauce factory. We are happy to report that all of our goals were completed.
We took a nice 30 minute ride up the coast to the red sand dunes. Upon parking our motorbike on the side of the road by some souvenir stands and restaurants, we were bombarded by a horde of Vietnamese children who demanded that we pay to go sandsledding with them. This experience was so unpleasant that Andrew and I immediately went into teacher mode and demanded that they be quiet. We had thought about going sandsledding on the dunes earlier, but now there was no way we were going if the yelling children had to join us. As soon as the kids, learned we weren't going to sandsled with them, the children told us to fuck off and gave us the finger. Yikes....where did they learn that friendly goodbye from. Oh well, you can't win them all.
After that we continued up the coast to see more sanddunes and a great harbor with 100s of multicolored fishing boats and some old above ground cemetaries. Our friend Caleb thought the cemetaries were Hindu? because they had the backwards sign of the swastika on them, which means death. I guess the Nazis took the hindu symbol of life and reversed it to mean death. Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but its worth looking into.
We finished our motorbike adventure by stopping at the fish sauce factory and store. I persuaded Andrew to get the half-liter of fish sauce versus the gallon. My key convincing point was the fact that we would be over our airline weight limit if we brought the gallon jug back to Yangon.
And so that concluded the motorbike adventure. With the helmets and Andrew's driving skill, we will be ready to tackle the streets of Hanoi.