Holiday Update

Whew! It's been another crazy couple of months. Good times continued with our friends Amy and Anthony through November. We spent Veteran's Day weekend riding Vespas along the coast from Ho Chi Minh City to the town of Mui Ne, stopping off to check out rice fields, fishing villages, and slide down sand dunes. Next we took a week off to travel to Borneo, but not before spending a couple days in Singapore. We splurged for rooms at the swanky Marina Bay Sands Hotel, mostly so we could hang out at their awesome rooftop pool overlooking the city. Sufficiently pampered, we hopped on a plane to Kuching, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo. We spent the week doing crazy hikes, kayaking, and checking out wildlife, from proboscis monkeys, to carnivorous pitcher plants, to orangutans. The food was also delicious…mmm, roti canai….

After bidding adieu to Amy and Ant, we rushed back to Saigon in time to meet up with my mom, dad, and brother who came to visit for 2 weeks. In typical Fox fashion, we packed the itinerary, touring Hoi An, Hue, Dalat, Nha Trang, and of course Ho Chi Minh City. We also fit in time for riding Minsk motorcycles through Central Vietnam, rappelling the Marble Mountains, and riding bicycles from the mountains to the coast. But wait…there's more! We flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia as well, so my family could see Angkor Wat. We also made time to run the Angkor Wat Half Marathon, where I was runner-up for the second year in a row.

Nikki and I have kept up our rigorous travel schedule since my family left. Nikki had a week-long training course in Thailand in early December, while I ran a marine spatial planning training in northern Vietnam. We were able to meet up in Bangkok for the weekend, taking a dinner cruise and touring a floating market. For Christmas we returned to Singapore where we enjoyed all the Christmas decorations on Orchard Row and saw the musical "Wicked" on Christmas Eve. We spent Christmas day riding roller coasters on Sentosa Island and stuffed ourselves on a self-designed food-tour of Chinatown.

The adventures continue with a trip to Langkawi, Malaysia for New Years and then a month of travel for Nikki's R&R break. Happy Holidays everyone!

Vertical Run and Dalat

It's been super fun having our friends Amy and Anthony visiting us in Ho Chi Minh City. First of all, it's a great excuse to try all the restaurants and bars around town that we've had on our list for a while. We've also got to take couple fun trips and have a few more coming up.

The first weekend Amy and Ant were here, Nikki and I had signed up for the Bitexco "Vertical Challenge." It's a race to the observation deck of the tallest building in Vietnam (at least for now). It was 49 floors in all, which Nikki covered in 14 minutes (good for 10th in her age group) and I did in about 6 minutes (3rd in my age group, 8th overall). I had been training with my buddy Jordan a little bit (Jordan was just a couple seconds behind me), but we weren't quite prepared for the extreme leg burn of the last 10 stories! We celebrated our survival with a BBQ on the roof of our apartment building and by drinking "Foxy-Jorge" beer, which Jordan and I had just finished brewing. Jordan returned to Europe – sad to see my buddy, training partner, and fellow brewer leave!

Last weekend Nikki, Anthony, Amy, Amy's mom, and I headed to Dalat, which is a former French hillstation in Central Vietnam. These days, it's famous among Vietnamese people as a honeymoon spot, and on our first day we rode motorbikes to check out the "Valley of Love." It was everything we hoped for – tons of photo opportunities with random sculptures, flower-covered hillsides, two-person bikes, etc. The next day, we went canyoning in a nearby river. This involved rappelling, rock slides, jumping off cliffs, and swimming. The biggest attraction was rappelling down the face of an enormous waterfall. Sunday also happened to be my 30th birthday – can't imagine a better way to celebrate!

Plenty more adventures to come – next up is a coastal motorbike ride and then Borneo!

Central Vietnam Motorbike Adventure

Definitely one of the best things we have done since we arrived in Vietnam is take a 3 day motorbike tour of Central Vietnam. There just isn't a better way to really get a feel for the remote central highlands than braving the twisting roads on two wheels. So two weekends ago Nikki and I hit the road with our friends Cash and Emily – starting in Hoi An, spending the night in the tiny town of Prao, continuing on to Hue, and finally completing the circuit to Hoi An.

We went with an outfit called Hoi An Motorbike Adventures, which allows you to rent the ever-charismatic "Minsk," a 2 stroke, 125cc, soviet-made beast of a machine mass-produced in Belarus. They were loud, break-down prone, and spewed huge clouds of foul-smelling smoke, but fun to ride and handled all manner of pitted, washed out roads with no problem. So what if occasionally the clutch went out or the brakes stopped working? Right? Luckily, our guide Joe and mechanic Diu were around to help us out with our (fairly numerous) mechanical failures.

Once we got out of traffic near Hoi An, we had a blast cruising down mostly empty roads, high-fiving kids in tiny villages, and zipping across causeways dividing rice fields filled with water buffalo and farmers with conical hats. There was even a rickety old suspension bridge that we all had to navigate. The road and views only got better from there though. After spending the night in a questionable hotel near the border with Laos, we hit the Ho Chi Minh Highway surrounded by mist-shrouded green mountains. At some point, the rain started falling pretty heavily. No problem. We tossed on some rain gear (and awesomely stylish ponchos) and soldiered on, barely able to see the slick road in front of us. When we hit Hue, the roads were inundated with several feet of water. It was total chaos and I can't believe we made it to our hotel (and more importantly the bar!) in one piece. Motorbikes were going in every direction and wave after wave of hip-deep water washed over our bikes (and clothes-filled saddle bags!). Troi oi – I felt like a true Vietnamese person from the Central Region. Wish I had it on tape.

The adventure continued the next morning as we skirted the huge, scenic coastal estuaries near Hue. Around lunchtime we hit Hai Van pass, with its many twists and turns and scenic viewpoints around every dangerous corner. We paused for sandwiches near the French and US fortifications at the top and made friends with a Thai group making a multi-week tour motorbike tour of Southeast Asia. From there it was a very windy ride past Nam O Beach (where US marines landed in 1965), Danang, and China Beach before completing the circuit and heading home.

Excellent trip overall and I'd highly recommend it, despite various issues we encountered along the way. I tried to select some of our best pictures here, and have posted more on Picasa at: https://picasaweb.google.com/115993796619952960910/CentralVietnamMotorbikeTrip#