It had been a while since I last went on an adventure riding trip. I was overdue for some motorcycling around. Going to Greece was an excellent opportunity to get my fix. I knew the countryside was full of beauty and there was no better way to check them out than with my own set of wheels and at my own pace. Greece is famous for its islands and apparently they are a must see, but they’ll still be there for the several decades older version of me to enjoy. For that matter, most travellers I encountered were heading there, which further motivated me not to follow them and go my own way.
The plan almost fell through. In a great spur of wisdom, I had decided not to book the bike in advance in spite of now being the high season. The result was that I was left hanging in Athens. There was only one rental agency for motorcycles there and all they were offering me was a large bike at 80 Euros a day with a 250 km daily cap on distance. As experience has shown me, that is not nearly enough, but more importantly, if I’m going to be paying this much money for a bike, I’ll ride it until I can no longer feel my ass.
Luckily, Thessaloniki, the country’s second largest city had an agency and through them I managed to book an Honda Varadero 125. Not a powerful bike by any standard, but roomy and comfortable. Also a machine I was extremely familiar with, since I used to own one.
A look at Google maps back home had indicated that Greece was very mountainous. On closer inspection of a map I had bought in Athens for the trip, I confirmed that this was indeed the case. Some section of roads that the makers had deemed worth driving through were highlighted on the map and most of them were north and west of the country.
That’s the direction where I decided to head. With a full week of riding ahead of me, I’ll have time to improvise the rest.
I had not reserved any hostel but had some marked on a map I printed off the web. Option A was full, so I had to resort to a 45 minute walk to option B with all my gear right in the middle of an Athenian summer day, which in the process forced me to revise my previous definition of “hot”. Luckily, they had a dorm bed for me, with A/C. After a massive nap to ward off the effects of a sleepless night aboard a plane, I set out on foot to explore the city, first climbing mount Lycabeus to get a nighttime view of the city while sipping on a Greek beer: life is not so bad…
The stadium where the first Olympic games where held
Walking around is pretty much all I did during my time in Athens, in the day and at night with a beer in hand. There is loads to see and learn about, but it was high season and everything was seriously crowded. Athens, in the likes of Rome, has the vast majority of its attraction and tourist districts concentrated within a square kilometer or so. Other city in the world will get more visitors, but here, the concentration of selfie stick and sun umbrella weaving individuals gets to extreme levels. I’ll gladly spend an afternoon looking at rows and rows of Greek vases, but not if I have to wait one hour in queue and not with masses of tour groups clogging every passage.
The Acropolis, under never ending restoration
I did see the acropolis, because I had to and for the occasion got up extra early to get a headstart on the swarms but otherwise all I did was roaming around in the cooking heat of the city, checking out the Athenians living their lives and drinking extreme amounts of water while barely going to toilet.
Abandoned and foreclosed buildings were abundant in the capital so I absolutely had to do a bit of urban exploration. My visit to the derelict “Peace and Frienship Stadium“, home of the Olympiacos basketball club, turned out to be the highlight of my stay. That day, I had visited the Acropolis in the morning and had taken the metro to Piraeus to walk around the famous port, which was nothing like I had hoped it to be and overall a huge disappointment. On my way back to the metro station, I decided to cut trough was appeared to be a park, but was in reality leftover sport facilities from the 2004 summer Olympics that the Greek could just no longer afford to maintain. I like a bit of urban exploration. There in the background the stadium was standing and I thought it must have suffered the same fate at its neighboring buildings, which made it a prime candidate for a bit of trespassing. It looked abandoned alright, doors were bolted shut, every surface had a graffiti, in the stadium were soda machines displaying advertisements from the mid 2000’s and a group of homeless had set up camp in the stadium’s bar, which looked like it had been the scene of a recent terror attack.
I tried every spectator entrance but no luck, they were all padlocked from the inside. After a while, I had given up and started my walk to the metro station when I noticed an inordinate amount of cars were parked in front of a service entrance and people were going in an out. Maybe they were just providing minimal staffing to the facility before it finally gets demolished? The entrance was guarded by a couple of dudes to which I had originally planned to politely ask if I could see the inside but the quick glance they gave me was enough to convince me that they did not give a gyros about my presence.
The Peace and Friendship stadium
Awesome. I walked around until I found the staircase to the stadium itself and spent a good amount of time just walking in this very large enclosed space. It’s a weird feeling to be alone in a place that is normally crowded with other humans. Sounds like the wind, the birds knocking on the windows, the structure creaking, all echoing in this massive room for only my ears to ear. On the way out, a man gave me a suspicious look but on noting that I was heading for the exit, he did not bother to question me. The men at the entrance were still busy watching YouTube. Upon taking not the of ads promoting the team’s Facebook fan page, I rightly came to the conclusion that in spite of looking like it was bound to imminent demolition, the stadium was very much in operation, just under staffed and under maintained.
Inside the Peace and Friendship stadium
That night, nothing was going on at the hostel’s bar so I picked up my book, went to Syntagma square (where the protests usually happen) and read about astronomy (black holes) for a while, with a sense of having had a fulfilling time in this city. Athens was sort of how I expected it to be. Very much a European capital but with a more chaotic and messy touch. The price of everything I had to purchase (especially food) made me wonder how the Greeks could actually afford to live in their own capital but satisfied with my time there, I was nonetheless eager to leave it for something different. Next destination: Thessaloniki, where I will start my Greek adventure on two motorized wheels.
Note to reader: this is a piece that has been sitting in my drafts folder for about a year. I no longer remember why I did not publish it back then. It could have been the transpiring pretentiousness. However, now that I have hung up my backpack for a while, I have found it to resonate very well with the new life that I am living.
Nick from Utila told me particularly insightful story he had heard many years ago back in Belgium. It was a rich old man giving a piece of wisdom to a journalist on TV and it went like this:
True adventure has three requirements: energy, time and money. As a young person, you have plenty of time, loads of energy but no money. As you progress into adulthood, you start earning money and still retain most of that youthful energy you had but for many reasons such as family or professional obligations, the clock eludes you.. You age further, you eventually reach retirement, which affords you with much freedom and richness you gathered during your productive life but sadly, the energy has disappeared.
It sounds like a fatality, but upon careful inspection, there is a moment, even a brief one, where the conditions for adventures are fulfilled: the twenties (or more generally celibacy). You have no (real) responsibilities so time and energy are plentiful. You most likely have studied and held a well paying job for a while so money is not an issue. Go.
I’m not saying that there cannot be anything afterwards, quite the contrary, at least I wish that for myself, but as life progresses, it becomes less likely that you will embark on a crazy trip across the globe. For the lack of energy perhaps, but chiefly because you have lost the interest, you’ve “grown’up” to other things; so many decades spent sleeping on a comfortable bed have made you soft. Fear not though, there is plenty left to do and many more experiences to enjoy, the richness of life is infinite, but there are certain things you wish you would have done when you were younger. Playing your cards well is not putting yourself in dangerous situations just for the sake of it, its more like making sure you’ll live on without regrets.
At all stages or life, adventure is exposure, to new things, to hardships, to solitude. Humans do not like change, but it is change that made us humans. The brain only adapts and thinks if there is pressure on it to do so and putting yourself in new environments does just that. La meilleure école, c’est le voyage (the best school is travelling), but on those benches, nothing you learn could ever be summarized in a textbook, it is not discrete knowledge, it’s experience in it’s purest form. It makes you a better person, but more so it gives you an opportunity for introspection and growth not found elsewhere.
Not much happened during those two days that I had to kill in Ha Noi before my flight. My hostel, shitty; the city, visited for the most part; the weather, rainy and my overall motivation level, low. I did check out the museum of fine arts, the Temple of Literature and the botanical garden but otherwise, my days were spend wandering aimlessly around the city and working in front of my computer. My thoughts were occupied with the coming med school interviews and planning for a life that would potentially change drastically in the near future. It seemed all the accumulated fatigue of the last couple of months had now all came down on my body and mind, this trip was over.
I had a few interesting encounters but not of them led to friendships that would endure past an hour or two. One of those was at a nearby bar, where for the better part of the night I conversed with a Vietnamese barmaid with the aim of improving her English. Another one was with Antoine, the French motorcycle enthusiast I met back in Sa Pa, but sadly, we only had a few minutes to catch up, he was on his way to the bus. Turns out he did not go to the north, the day after he had left, the seemingly unending flow of trucks got the best of him and he turned around.
Monday night I arrived at the airport quite early to find it already overcrowded with hordes of travelers but I managed to find a quiet spot to sit down and read in the arrivals area. A flight to Tokyo, a couple of hours spent waiting at the airport; across the Pacific to New York, more waiting and then I landed in Burlington, Vermont, where a friend picked me up with my car to drive me to Montreal. It was a long journey, but thankfully I was flying with Japan Airlines and got the exemplary service that is to be expected of anything Japanese plus a pretty nice in-flight entertainment system aboard a recently refurbished plane.
Thoughts on Vietnam
I have not seen all of South-East Asia, but so far I can confidently say that Vietnam is my favorite place of them all, You buy something?, motorbike?, traveling around can a serious pain in the butt on occasions, but everywhere in between, you come across genuinely nice encounters. Then again, you have to realize where the Vietnamese come from as a nation and instantly you become more tolerant towards the constant harassment. Landscapes are sort of the same story, the cities and the countryside can be downright ugly, Vietnam remains a poorer Asian country, but not far out lies absolutely spectacular sights of rice paddies surrounded by mountains and ethnic villages of wooden houses and water buffaloes herds. The still omnipresent communist architecture and propaganda get an honorable mention as well and so does the cultural variety of its people.
It’s exhausting to visit, but it’s well worth the effort, but be quick if you want to go, Vietnam has embraced modernity with both arms and like its neighbors, it’s increasingly capitalizing on tourism of the more destructive type a great deal to boost its economy. For that matter, the country’s principal tourism circuit, already quite limited, is starting to feel bland and denatured. There is still plenty to see and do not very far outside of it, get your own set of wheels and adventure will await around the corner. However, I suspect its only a question of time before the hordes of resort goers get there too.
Safe and sound in Ha Noi, its time to reflect back on this exhilarating experience. To put it in short terms, it’s now the benchmark by which I will judge my future travels. I had done other motorcycle adventures in the past, but through this one, it has really dawned on me that this is where I get my adrenaline (and though diving too of course) and truly is one of the best ways to enjoy a country and see it more for what it really is. There will surely be more backpacking in the future for me, but I’ve realized that I’m thoroughly tired of public transportation and hoping from hostel to hostel so I’ll definitely attempt to make my future visits to foreign countries more adventure motorcycling oriented. I never came across any close calls. Yes, I brushed on oncoming vehicles countless times and had to swerve to avoid all sorts of animals and obstacles, but that is what driving is like in Vietnam. Otherwise, I was in control of my machine to whole time. It was not for the inexperienced driver and got quite painful and tiring on occasions, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Especially in the Ha Giang province, which presented me some of the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen in my entire life.
The route that I took
The Honda Win 100
Really a 107cc, but that does not matter very much because with compression issues, it had trouble moving its own weight on steep hills so I’ll avoid commenting on power. Otherwise, to make things more simple and visual, here is a breakdown of my appreciation of the bike:
Plusses
light
easy on gas
easy to fix
inexpensive
handles well (when the frame is straight)
fun to drive
Minuses
very unreliable (the Chinese versions at least)
vibrates like crazy at high speeds
treacherous in emergency breaking
parts not that widely available
very uncomfortable
This being said, if I ever need another ride in Vietnam, I will stay away from the Honda Wins. The vast majority of those that are on the market around hostels are tourist bikes. They have been up and down the country countless times, were treated badly by their owners and have for sure crashed in their past, at least mine had. 99 % of the people I’ve met while traveling have had breakdowns. There is always a garage nearby, but it remains that the bill adds up to quite a bit over time. Plus, the Vietnamese rarely do a good job at fixing things, they’ll simply mend it so it will run fine for a couple more hundred kilometers and will break again but by this time, you’ll be too far to come back to complain about a repair poorly done. While the Vietnamese themselves used to rely on them a lot and still do so up north, they are moving away towards semi-automatic Honda Dreams, which are much much more reliable, perform better and are more comfortable. They might not be as fun to drive, but they are the workhorses of this country and can take quite a severe beating. Parts will also be readily available even at the smallest most remote garage out there. So if I do come back in this region to bike through Laos and Cambodia, I’ll get a Honda Dream.
