There is only one road which runs along the coast and down to Saigon, Highway 1. We were going to see the destruction the Americans had inflicted on the country with their bombing and their Agents Red, White and Orange but we were also going to see a nation of smiling, happy and unresentful people struggling to regain an economic position in the emerging powerhouse of the Far East.
After having our engine numbers, chassis numbers and registration numbers checked and re-checked and entered onto a form which would probably soon be lost we were given our driving licenses and number plates, and set off down a thin, jungle road which made the car bounce.
We thought we had done with bad roads and we had in China but this was Vietnam where the roads were used by heavy lorries and overladen buses and the repair to the war damaged roads has been feeble. We all now agreed this was the worst road to travel. Our shock absorbers did not exist and the road reminded us of this. We had 60 miles of bad roads from the border and then relatively good ones to Hanoi. The Mercedes saloon driven by Stewart and Nan found such a severe pothole that it completely bent its shock absorber like a banana. Their boot floor had been forced up and the petrol capacity severely reduced. We, at one stage shot up in the air and landed on our differential on a great mound in the road. This was witnessed by Andy and Richard following in the back-up vehicle. Close examination revealed no damage, miraculously, although later we were to find the rear brake cluster had sheered from its mounting bracket. Each bridge, of which there are hundreds on this solitary highway1 had been blown-up by the Americans to be replaced after the war by the Russians and East Germans, with at least a 9″ higher step-up from the road: this had to be negotiated very carefully, one front wheel at a time: there are 1,000 rivers bisection highway1 on the way down to Saigon and bridge repair was one of the major hazards of driving this wonderful highway.
We finally arrived in the old French colonial city of Hanoi. This is fascinating in a way that Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore may once have been. It had escaped the bombing and has a charm where you expect to find Joseph Conrad or Somerset Maugham
brooding over a brandy and soda on a hotel verandah. Cyclos, the Vietnam version of the rickshaw
took us around town where we bought fruit, drank ice cold beer and visited Hanoi railway station and saw 27 steam locomotives, mainly French, and one little Japanese W.W.II steam tender. We wanted to stay longer in Hanoi to visit the markets, despite the caged monkeys, dogs and snakes waiting for the pot
to see the flower market again and the vegetable market and the crockery market and to see all the beautiful people and the elegant architecture and the hustle and bustle without the intrusion of the internal combustion engine. Hanoi was acting as ambassador for Vietnam and we were glad to be there.
Six of us were swooped into the most elegant hotel doorway by cyclo and having desiccated our clothing a little in the air-conditioned lobby of the Continental had an excellent lunch in a most elegant dining room. As we finished we met a couple travelling up from Vinh, our next port of call. They told us how a typhoon was running and that the roads were under 3 ft. of water and that Vinh and Hue were cut off. Vinh, they said, was the origin of all serious tropical storms and that we would be better to stay on in Hanoi. But with such fair weather outside we could hardly believe what we were about to experience.
After playing engine drivers with Denis, Jonathan and John we took a cyclo for the rest of the afternoon and then returned to our lakeside hotel to prepare for departure the following morning.
We left Hanoi on reasonable roads with a Vietnamese Volga police car in the vanguard. They would go ahead and remonstrate to lorries in the most serious fashion with their “lollypops”. It often worked and sometimes didn’t and these slow-moving overladen juggernauts would completely block the road belching out industrial revolution quality soot and smuts ‘at all other road users. Water buffalo, cyclists, carts and the new menace to Vietnam of very fast Japanese mopeds kept our speed average pretty low. Fuel in Vietnam was better than China and as the Bentley was now consuming large quantities of oil, on account of severely worn valve guides we took anything that was available, Russian, Chinese and some American manufactured, Regent.
As we approached Vinh through paddy fields worked by water buffaloes we could see the effect of Agent Orange on the once heavily forested hills to our right. The sea would always be to our left as we drove north to south in this enchanting country. The effect of Agent Orange renders the land barren, desert-like and artificial. Where you expect to see dense jungle, stumps stalk the landscape and the occasional malformed weed like growths cluster in hollows. We had been told to be careful when stopping and wandering on the roadside jungle for fear of unexploded bombs and mines which still take account of Vietnamese livestock and children. The other caution we were given proved to be very apposite though we had treated it as a joke at the time. Our American courier, David Camacho, who knew Far East Asia very well told us that Vietnamese mothers encouraged their children to go and play on the highway. This they did as did chickens, dogs, pigs, old people, and even young babies. The hazards of this badly maintained road were compensated by the unspoiled coastline and the happiest people we have ever met in all of our travelling.
As we arrived into Vinh, a city “bombed back into the stone age” during the war, the sky was like lead and it was raining and sticky. The city had been rebuilt by the East German Communists and the nasty Brutalist architecture and cheap construction had already turned the city into a slum. Tropical weather and East European communist architecture do not live well together. Fungus flourished in cracks running up the buildings and bad plumbing overflowed down walls.
We entered our hotel having parked our cars in mud around the back and knew this was not going to be another Hanoi. Dusk was falling with the rain and everything everywhere was wet. Our room was very spartan and the dark green tiled bathroom was home to a giant white skeletal spider. We had seen some insects on our travels, reptiles even, but this spider even frightened Sue. She is better at dealing with these creatures than I am, usually placing a glass over them and then sliding a postcard under the glass and throwing them out of the window. That device would not be possible this time. The spider was too big. It was standing vertical toward the top of the tiles by the ceiling and above the toilet. The toilet pan was too rickety to stand on and there was no way we wanted to squash it as this brought back memories of having squashed a giant albino cockroach years ago in St. Lucia. The resultant stench from its squashed corpse had made us abandon our cottage.
Constipation is not a malady normally suffered on these trips, and so we calculated that under the watchful eye of this gently vibrating monster we would soon be in an out of the bathroom, but more quickly than usual. We showered under its inspection. I shaved with one eye cocked at its reflection in the mirror and as we left the room to take dinner we measured the gap under the door and decided it was imprisoned and therefore unable to get into the bedroom and after all we would be departing early tomorrow morning.
As we arrived for dinner about to launch our spider horror story onto the other challengers the Vietnamese chief of police stole our thunder. The typhoon was running just below Vinh on the way to Hue and there was a one thousand lorry tailback. There was now over 3 ft. of water and we could not proceed, we would have to spend an extra day at Vinh. Strange how these extra days always happen to be in the most miserable places. As it turned out, we went down to the beach some 20 miles away the next morning and played in the heavy swell of the warm South China Seas under heavy skies and intermittent rain on a deserted beach, the extra day was memorable.
When we returned to our room the next night the vibrating but stationary giant had gone and we panicked. It would not have got out of the window which had a fine, mosquito net. It could not have got under the door, we hoped and into bedroom. And then we saw it. It was hiding or trying to the behind the pipework of the washbasin. We resolved a plan. Taking glasses of water we would stand 3 or 4 ft. away with the door firmly shut to the bedroom and wash it down the gully after prizing the cast iron grid open with our Swiss army knife.
It was a battle royal. The spider did not retreat and could move very rapidly and our aim was poor, but it came towards us and we had to go towards it to get more water from the sink. It knew this and we three slithered around this small room, us in panic, him in anger, and then I turned on the shower and he was swept down the grid. We slammed the heavy cast iron grid back into place and soaking wet from excitement, humidity, and shower water we felt mean but knowing most sewers are open contented ourselves with the thought that he would be washed down and out into the open where he really belonged.
We both had a fitful night’s sleep and left Vinh for Hue in appalling rain.
The rain just grew worse and all day it was like dusk. The trees were bent and their foliage glistened and rattled. The locals were all clad in light blue PVC sheeting and bare legs. We could not drive fast. The road, some of it mountainous, was bad and when we hit pot holes great showers of brown water and grit landed on the bonnet and screen. We had to take a ferry at one point and wondered if the raft-like craft could possibly make it to the other side with water lapping up and onto the low deck and the wind tilting it so that it crabbed its way across. Hero seemed impervious to any further problems and soldiered on effortlessly though bottoming out constantly on its suspension buffers. Then we came to a lunch stop where we were marshalled together and warned of the perils to come. We would have to negotiate both unmade and flooded road, and the police from the Volga car were slightly agitated which is unusual as the Vietnamese are a sort of Viking people who fear nothing.
We had been driving on badly tarmaced road with deep water on both sides for some time, but now things looked different. The rain was travelling horizontally, the water on both sides of the narrow road was choppy and the palm trees were bent and their leaves were blown like an inside-out umbrella which had been broken. Further on the tarmac had gone and we were driving on a yellowy brown clay. This would have been serious for the Bentley had it been ‘a sunny day but it was wet and soft and where we touched our underbelly we just bulldozed our way through with a slithering and sliding.
Had it not been so far from home it might have been fun.
We then came to the lorries and following the police car and its flashing blue lamp we had to weave in and out of countless stationary vehicles. At one point it was decided that Hero could not get through, as the ruts were so deep and the surface clay so slippery, but we did, though not unscathed as a rock below the mud smashed our petrol pumps bringing us to a halt, but mercifully not until we had passed that crisis point.
We then switched to our auxiliary tank which we had fitted for the 1990 trip, it had its own separate petrol pump. We were so wet now inside the car from getting in and out that we gave up worrying about it. Our sheepskin seat covers were saturated, the boot was full of water, having entered through the battery box which had been ripped apart earlier in the Taklamakan and now acted like a scoop jetting water upwards and into the confines of our boot and our belongings. But pretty soon as dusk fell, we were trapped on this causeway with stationary lorries as far as the eye could see in both directions.
Buses full of people had been waiting without turning their wheels for over a week. Lorry drivers were making dinner by the side of the road and an endless procession of traders walked up and down the phalanx of vehicles and the rain poured incessantly. Fortunately it was not cold. We conferred with our other challengers by walking up and down the line and decided we would be stationary until the following morning at least, after all it would be madness to drive in the dark.
With this in mind we opened our last tins of roast pheasant from Fortnums, and Wild Boar with Apple Sauce which we shared with Ed and Carolyn in front and Denis and Ann Behind. Ed broke out his last bottle of Bordeaux and with some biscuits and coffee to finish we relaxed in the privacy offered by the heavily steamed up windows against the continually prying eyes and outstretched hands of the itinerant Vietnamese hawkers.
Without any let up of the rain pitch black night came and we fell asleep. The shattering noise of a large crude diesel engine starting awoke us from a damp and uncomfortable sleep. A policeman banged his torch on our window and garbled something in Vietnamese. We were going. Starting up after 7 hrs on our muddy causeway where we had been trapped among lorries in one of Vietnam’s worst typhoons.
Hero started well and its lights were bright and we were quickly going and driving fast and then we saw “Woody” ahead. We lost Ed in his Range Rover and then we seemed to be passing miles of stationary lorries which had been heading south. The police somewhere above Hue had stopped north bound lorries and had somehow cleared the road of north bound traffic. After about 30 minutes of this driving and worrying about the capacity of our reserve tank we suddenly lost sight of “Woody” in the inky blackness ahead. When without warning a great bow wave came over our bonnet and everything in front turned white. We had hit a seriously flooded section of the road and our lights lit up the foaming water blinding us. Luckily I had discussed such an occurrence with Ed, who had been on the Range Rover course before the start of this challenge. He told me that in circumstances such as these just keep going at all costs. I put the car into second held the wheel straight and for about 30 seconds drove with the accelerator floored and the water rushing like white foam up to our wind screen. I could see nothing. Then we were on to higher ground and visibility returned and there was “Woody” parked up with Steve in the Shogun and the police in the Volga. Our brakes were useless but we stopped and left the engine ticking over while we relieved ourselves, a very necessary function at this stage, in the dark night oblivious of the spiders or snakes with just the sound of whistling tree frogs. The storm was abating and it was warm.
It would now not be far to Hue and Steve replenished our auxiliary tank from one of his jerry cans and while waiting for the others to arrive we felt a little heroic.
The run down to Hue brought a few more difficulties and more rain. The original pumps which had been smashed were holding back about 10 gallons, the auxiliary tank held only 5 and in the low gears consumption was heavy. Ed later came up and gave us one of his jerry cans and with some fiddling on the side of the road with the petrol pump wiring, we were able to use the main tank, Andy and I got soaked all over again. We arrived at the hotel in Hue exhausted at 4 a.m.
We awoke about 7 a.m. and despite the short sleep we felt refreshed. While I was making tea Sue looked out and declared the rain was coming down like chainmail. I looked down through the rain to the car park below and Andy was already working on Hero’s petrol pumps. We had brought a spare pair. Our clothes were still not dry and after showering we went down and joined others to take breakfast in the restaurant which overlooked the wide brown river. The sky was grey and the deep slow moving river had jungle foliage running down to its banks. Its surface was finely stippled by the falling rain and a lone, long motorised canoe cut up against the current very steadily. After breakfast we went sightseeing to the old Imperial Palace of Hue. This had special meaning to me as I remember the T.V. newsreel footage of the fighting and collapse of American held Hue to the Vietcong.
Hue was the ancient capital and had been the centre of the puppet regime under the French colonists.
With the arrival of the Japanese in W.W.11 the Vietnamese had realised that they did not need to tolerate more Imperialism after that war and so the struggle for independence really began. Hue was a psychologically important city to capture during the Vietcong American war. Our arrival at the moated citadel, or what was left of it, reminded me of that footage and little had changed with old tanks both American and Chinese rotting outside the parapets.
We left Hue still in rain for the short run to Da Nang. Wewere now running on our main fuel tank and it was working perfectly. We were directly behind the police Volga and he kept up a cracking speed. The road was good and we were averaging 50 mph but the rain continued, though it was becoming perceptively lighter. Crossing a high mountain range and pausing we were joined by six mounted police motor cycles each with pillion riders. They led our police car down the mountain, which had some severe pot holes on the bends and through the town to our waterfront hotel.
A great reception was held with the noisiest Chinese fire crackers we have ever heard. After parking our cars we were encouraged to drink as much iced beer, compliments of the hotel, as we could. We were all very partial to the beer because although it was raining, it was very hot and the beer was canned Japanese Kirin and Sapporo. When we had all relaxed sufficiently and were about to go to our rooms to change for dinner it was announced that we had to drive to the other side of town unescorted, to refuel. The minds were boggling.
The next morning we were free, without the attention of the police patrol, to head on down to Nha Trang and, wonder of wonders, the rain had gone and the sky was deep blue. We opened the sunroof, the back windows and the front quarter lights and stretched our wet clothing out to dry. We felt free and knew that we were over the worst weather.
The road to Nha Trang was a long one, about 360 miles, and this would be the best driving to be had in Vietnam. The road was well surfaced and picked its way close to the sea going inland only over mountains and river estuaries. The old hazards were still with us, but a blue sky makes even these acceptable. The surface was so good that we were able to exceed 90 mph on occasion and once committed a triple overtaking which even surprised the Saab driver, Roger Coote. There was jungle on all sides except where it was broken up for farming and the strange Chinese system prevailed on this road whereby the tarmac finished just before a village or town and so you entered a potholed dust bowl. Whether these stretches are left unmetalled to slow the traffic down We never found out.
Driving fast but stopping to take photographs or make coffee sapped our time. Everywhere was so interesting, so picturesque and so unspoiled by tourism that we couldn’t resist it. About lunch time we stopped by a bay and having had a swim were joined by, Nikki and Susanne and then Jonathan. We had been given packed lunches at the hotel and now made tea.
The sea was warm and the sun was hot and it was so quiet that we felt as if we were on a desert island. The Vietnamese do not sunbathe nor do they frolic in the sea and the few that strolled by, probably fishermen, were quite amused by our white bodies and eccentric behaviour.
All along the road farmers were drying their crops, this took half of the tarmac surface and we had to be very careful when overtaking the overladen buses as they never looked in their mirrors and with their straight through exhaust pipes could not hear our approach. Each of these buses was overloaded with people and their luggage which was placed, along with cargo, on a giant roof rack. They employ a conductor to fend off people desperate to get aboard while the bus is moving slowly through towns and villages. One little chap we followed for some miles seemed to take a pleasure in smacking only the pretty young women as the bus crept by.
Looking for our hotel became a major problem as darkness fell quickly and the road had worsened. In a crowded village a four-up moped tried to overtake us on the inside and ran headlong into a stall selling peanuts and sweets under the glow of a Tilly Lamp. We did not stop and after about an hour of driving we found our hotel by the expedient of shanghaiing a local peasant whom we had stopped to ask the way, and when it seemed he knew, we bundled him into Jonathan’s G-Wagon. Susanne and Nikki followed in the big Chevvy.
The hotel was good and the food was excellent even offering French wines. A local worthy bought everybody drinks and we toasted France, England and America. We felt we knew his political persuasion.
After dinner we all went down to the beach and lay on the sand, some swam. It was warm and restful. Nha Trang, where we should have staved two days but the typhoon had converted that to Vinh, made us regretful that the challenge was coming to an end. Tomorrow we Would be in Saigon.
The drive down to Saigon started in lovely weather and mid morning we stopped and bathed, in clear blue sea on a white beach. Denis offered the last of his Bath Olivers and Marmite while we made copious amounts of Twinings Tea.
We briefly stopped for lunch and then under a gathering sky set off on the final leg, the road to Saigon.
Nobody including the locals referred to it as Ho Chi Mihn City. We were to rendezvous outside the city and drive in in order of arrival. By a combination of hard driving and luck Hero was the first to arrive. Actually, David Inns had been so zealous he had arrived so far in advance that nobody was there to greet him and went straight into the centre as did Roger in the Land Rover.
It was somehow fitting that through all its trials and tribulations Hero had been the first to leave London, the first to leave China and the first to finish in Saigon, and the oldest car to complete every stage of the journey.
We were garlanded by a reception of beautiful girls and masses of photographers. The local TV network filmed us, Hero, its dashboard and engine: they were incredulous that the car was 38 years old.
When everybody had arrived we set off in a convoy with outriders each carrying a pretty pillion passenger holding a flag. A white military jeep with high ranking officials went ahead and film cameramen wafted in and out on the back of powerful Japanese motor cycles. Crowds lined the streets and after completing a lap of honour around the city we stopped at the town hall where being first I was asked to make a speech.
We parked our cars in the old palace gardens and went to our hotel which was opulent and civilised in the extreme. Flopping on the bed we could hardly believe that it was all over. 12,337 miles.
Originally we had intended to have driven from Saigon to Phnom Penh and then up to Bangkok and from there down through Thailand and Malaya to Singapore. We would then have put the cars on freighters to Australia finishing ultimately in Alice Springs. This plan went wrong with too few people in the main body of the motor challenge and of course the few wishing to go now made it an administrative impossibility. As it turned out the Cambodians would not grant us entry and the other plan to drive back up above Hue to Quang Tri to cross Laos was not well received either though we heard that the Land Rover manned by Roger and Ian did make this journey after cunningly obtaining entry visas into Laos.
Hero was to suffer a final indignity. Queuing within the old palace grounds and waiting to drive in convoy to the docks where we would put our cars into containers for onward passage home, a jolt and a crashing came from the back of the car, it felt as if we had ridden over a large glass bottle which had then shattered under the stationary weight of the rear wheel. I could imagine nothing else until Sue cried out that the Suburban had crashed into our rear.
With all the cars stationary and perhaps 6 ft. apart the diminutive aging blond American, Susanne Konigsberg, had stooped for something she had dropped on the floor of the Suburban (her cigarette lighter) and in doing so had pressed the accelerator having forgotten that she had left the car in Drive. The resulting damage was a smashed right hand rear wing, lamp cluster and a buckled chassis leg with some damage to the over-rider and quarter bumper. Suzanne Konigsberg though promising to pay for the damage tried to wriggle out of paying when she was safely at home: one of the good things about American law is “kill or cure” and I found a lawyer in her home town who would charge 50% of the recoverable monies, I therefore doubled the price and both the lawyer and I was satisfied.
Hero went into its container and we were left free to explore Saigon before flying home.
Close inspection by me in preparation for this year’s Monte Carlo revealed pistons and valves badly worn, shock absorbers worn out, chassis cross member fractured badly, one shot oil piping broken in many places, hooters and gearbox oil cooler missing, damage to four areas of the main chassis, rear handbrake cluster hanging bracket smashed, various chassis cross members split or badly dented. Despite all this Hero started well at Felixstowe Dock on a cold November morning and drove silently down the Al2 finding it difficult to keep below British speed limits.
A GREAT AND MOST UNDERRATED BRITISH MOTOR CAR