So far this road trip has been setback after setback, and we haven't even left yet! I'm sitting here at school when I should be on a train halfway to Da Nang by now, doing monthly student reports while eating cheesecake with chopsticks.

We went back to the station this morning (and in the rain - it hardly ever rains in the morning here!!) to try and catch a train that was leaving at ten. Now they were saying we had to put our bikes on a service train which was leaving in the afternoon, which we did - at like 100 times the price of taking them the normal way.

Oh, and that 10am train turned out to be a hard seat. There's no way we wanted to be sitting on uncomfortable seats in a packed train for the next 15 hours. So we're going up at seven tonight on a soft sleeper with bunk beds and aircon.

Provided there're no more delays, we will pull into Da Nang at midday tomorrow to begin our journey.

Da Nang is in the centre of Vietnam, a coastal city just south of the DMZ. There was a lot of heavy fighting around that area during the war. Lots of places to see, such as the ancient capital Hue, the old trading port city of Hoi An (unfortunately full of tourists), the ruins of My Son, a few beautiful beach cities off the tourist trail and the site of the My Lai massacre where about 500 civilians, mostly women and children, were massacred by US soldiers.

The length of the journey is equivalent to say, Canberra to Brisbane, or Sydney to Hobart. It's around 1,000km. That's a lot of driving, especially since you really can't get much past 70km/h on Vietnamese roads, with the pot holes, chickens, children and random things falling off the backs of trucks like sacks of flour and fruit and whatnot. It's a circus out there.

There's an awful lot of things that can go wrong on this trip, and I'm totally expecting them to, but that's what makes this kind of thing so exciting. We have no travel insurance, no license or motorbike ownership papers, no maps, nothing. Just three people, three bikes, a general idea of where we're going (thanks Google Earth) and the open road. This is exactly the kind of adventure I moved here for.

Updates to come on the road.


PS, someone should totally make a TV series for this, the 'Half Way Down'.