We decided we wanted to motorbike in Vietnam after having such an amazing time riding around the Thakhek loop in Laos. We spent a week in Ho Chi Minh City exploring, eating, drinking, and hunting for bikes. After a little research we decided to buy Honda Wins — the most common (and coolest) motorbike for travellers which change hands every 3–6 weeks as backpackers drive from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi and back again. They are cheap and easily repaired, but not super reliable as they are nearly always Chinese knock offs which have been rebuilt multiple times!

Most of the buying and selling goes on via Facebook groups so I joined several and for the next five days messaged anyone that posted a bike for sale. We’d never ridden a manual motorbike before, but all the adverts offered a free lesson — how hard could it be?! Each one claimed to have had no breakdowns (yeah right!) and promised we were getting a very reliable, real Honda (hahahaha) at a killer price. We quickly learnt that all of the Honda Win bikes were, essentially, shit. What was important now was choosing the best shit one to get us to Hanoi!

I bought the first bike I viewed from the most lovely French girl. Unfortunately, despite speaking excellent English, she did not have the vocabulary for a lot of the words like ‘neutral’, ‘clutch’, ‘throttle’, etc so it took a little while for me to grasp manual riding. My first lesson was also hampered by the crazy busy roads in HCMC, but we got there and I managed a few circles of some back streets without incident. This is when I decided to name my motorbike Millie! James picked up riding much more quickly but he ended up test driving seven bikes before purchasing his!

Now we both had bikes it was time to test them out by driving to the Cu Chi tunnels. The drive took us a lot longer than we anticipated but we managed to get out of HCMC alive which was an achievement in itself!

The Cu Chi tunnels are an elaborate network of underground tunnels used by Viet Cong soldiers for hiding and ferrying supplies, food, etc during the Vietnam War — or American War as they call it. We followed our guide through several of the pitch black tunnels and got very hot, sweaty, and dirty. I recently learned that the portions of the tunnels we took have been made wider and taller to accommodate tourists — I can’t imagine how tiny they must have been before.

Before leaving we found there was a shooting range and were definitely tempted until we saw that it was stupidly expensive — $2 a bullet!