Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story about the legendary Minsk motorcycles — and the expats in Vietnam who love the Soviet-era bikes. The piece focuses on the Minsk Olympics, an event in which devotees gather outside Hanoi to perform Minsk-releated feats. There’s a slideshow, too. I love the fourth image.
Thanks to the eagle-eyed KB for discovering that a photo I took here in Bangkok in October, 2006 has made its way into an Internet meme featuring funny photos of motorcycles and motorcyclists.
Above is the image. Someone grabbed it from my Flickr photostream and added it to this collection of photos purporting to document silly scenes in Vietnam. (Many of the images in this Web collection are from other parts of Asia, it appears.) Someone in KB’s master’s degree program at a Bangkok university forwarded her the email and the images, and KB recognized my pic among the others.
While I’m no stranger to Vietnam, I actually snapped the image above — hat tip to A for spotting the guy that day — in the Bang Na area of Bangkok on a Saturday afternoon. The driver seemed to be transporting the bucket on his head since he had no other way to carry it.
But I like the appended caption better: “No helmet – no problem. I got what I need.”
Followers of my dispatches on Twitter will know that my brother C and I have been in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and the surrounding area all of this week. I have many things to say about this great city. I really love it. And I shall be sharing some images of people, sights, and (most of all) food next week.
We return to Bangkok tomorrow (Fri.) afternoon local time, so if there are any of you in this neck of the woods who’d like to meet up, please email me: newley [at] gmail.com
I have an article in the April issue of Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia magazine about a recent six-day trip I took through the northeast of Vietnam on a Soviet-era motorbike. The issue isn’t online, but if you’re in the region you can find the magazine on newsstands. If you’re in Bangkok, look for it in bookstores and at BTS stations. The article is called “Riding High” and it starts on page 91. Here’s more info about T+L Southeast Asia.
The image above is a pic of me and a friend I met during the trip.
![Vespa [Not My Image]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/414608710_cd96eeb024_m.jpg)
Great story — and images — from New Mandala (which, by the way, is an excellent blog about Southeast Asia):
The Vientiane Scooter Club recently conducted its annual rally from Laos to Vietnam, a journey which saw many of its members rediscover their origins. A group of urban middle class Lao nationals of Vietnamese and Chinese descent, the club members are driven by a desire to find their own authentic place in Lao society.
The club is one of a few new social groups to have emerged in recent years along with greater economic and cultural liberalization in Laos. On their rallies through the countryside they spread a road safety message and donate equipment to rural schools on a painstakingly restored fleet of forty-year-old Italian Piaggio Vespa motor scooters.
(Emphasis mine.)
(Related: the Vespa rickshaw.)
Phnomenon is an excellent new food/drink-centric Cambodia blog. It is for the Kingdom what Noodlepie is to Vietnam.
Don’t miss Matt Gross’s fascinating piece in today’s New York Times detailing the rise in luxury tourism in Cambodia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia:
In almost every part of the country, you can find a conceptually and architecturally ambitious hotel: In mountainous Ratanakiri, there’s the Terres Rouges Lodge, a former provincial governor’s lakeside residence that has, Time Asia said last July, “the best bar in the middle of nowhere.” On the Sanker River in Battambang, Cambodia’s second-largest city, there’s La Villa, a 1930 house that in October opened as a six-room hotel filled with Art Deco antiques. And sometime this summer, you should be able to head south to Kep and stay at La Villa de Monsieur Thomas, a 1908 oceanfront mansion that’s being transformed into a French restaurant ringed with bungalows.
And then there is Angkor Wat. Foreign visitors are flooding in – 690,987 paid entrance fees last year, up from 451,046 in 2004. And while there are no official figures as to how much each spends in Siem Reap, the town’s dizzying array of luxury hotels – at least 10 by my count, ranging from the Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor to quirky boutiques like Hôtel de la Paix – testifies to the emergence of a new generation of high-end travelers, who not only demand round-the-clock Khmer massage but are also willing to pay $400 a day to hire a BMW L7 or $1,375 an hour for a helicopter tour.
Cambodia is not alone in its luxury revolution. Since the mid-1990′s, the former French colonies of Southeast Asia have made enormous leaps in catering to tourists who prefer plunge pools to bucket showers. From the forests of Laos to the beaches of Vietnam to the ruins of Cambodia, you can find well-conceived, well-outfitted, well-run hotels that will sleep you in style for hundreds of dollars a night.
Cambodia
Today’s Washington Post travel section has a great article on motorbiking in Northern Vietnam — and doing so on fabled Minsk bikes, no less.
Dustin Roasa describes the two-week journey he took with his girlfriend; he does an excellent job of conveying both the cultural and historical details of the trip along with the unique sensations of this incredible part of the world.
Interestingly, Jill and I took nearly the same route last year; my buddy Chris and I also undertook a similar sojourn back in 2002.
(Chris has recently unearthed some pics from our trip, by the way, that are worth a look. I especially like this shot of a precarious “bridge” we navigated. I’m proud to say that I made it across the thing during what was the first full day I’d driven a motorcycle in my life; I was too young and dumb to know any better, I suppose…)
I'm Newley Purnell, an American journalist in Bangkok. I report for Bloomberg BNA, ABC News Radio, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and more.
