Day 7 Motorbike Madness

11/03/13
We went out for breakfast this morning and were trying to find something cheap, we didn't have to walk far before we found a small shop selling things a bit like pizza, we bought 3 of them and paid a little under a quid, they also tasted good, which I guess is a bonus. Back at the hotel we picked up our bikes for the day, George and Rob had automatics (George had never ridden a bike before) and I had a 'manual' which was actually a semi-automatic because there was no clutch but you still had to manually change the gears. We then filled the bikes up, costing 1 pound 50, it is roughly $1 per litre, a lot cheaper than the UK. We left the city and headed towards Cuc Phuong National Park (NP), we wound our way through rocky outcrops, weaved our way through villages and shot between paddy fields, reaching speeds of 100kmph. After half an hour we reached Chua Bai Dinh, a huge Buddhist complex, it consisted of many temples and a long walkway up the hill lined by 500 enlightened Buddhists. In one of the temples stood, rather sat, a 100-tonne bronze Buddha and in another a 36-tonne bell, which is the largest in Vietnam. It was so busy that if you were looking for it you certainly wouldn't have found any peace there. They claim that it is ancient but most of the construction has been done in the last 5 years, in fact they still haven't finished constructing the 13 story pagoda which stands prominently on the hill. We then rode on from here to Cuc Phoung NP (which is 45km from Ninh Binh). We were shown around the monkey sanctuary (where they look after trafficked monkeys and prepare them for re-release back into the wild). They also had a turtle sanctuary that we were shown around. We were allowed to ride our bikes in the park, so we went to a prehistoric cave, it was really big and it had a whole network of smaller caves coming off the main chamber, it would be awesome to explore it properly with a torch. The ride to and from the park there was light drizzle  not enough to soak us but enough to wet our faces and put a dampener on the mood, it cleared up about half-way back though which was good. We probably won't be getting bikes the whole way down the coast, mainly because the cost, but we will hopefully be using them as our main form of transport to places once we have arrived in a new town.

The 13 story pagoda