The Minsk Shame: How a Train Platform Ended Our Vietnam Motorbike Adventure

I was standing on a train platform in Hanoi with three motorbikes I couldn’t start and an angry police officer telling me I had ten minutes before they were confiscated. It wasn’t how I imagined my Vietnam adventure ending.

The Ghost of India

There is a specific kind of romanticism attached to motorbikes. At eighteen, that idea is intoxicating. You imagine freedom. You imagine adventure. Mostly, you imagine you won't fall off.

If only I knew better.

A few weeks earlier in India, I’d had a reality check at 20 mph. My shoulder camera bag caught on the frame during a turn; in a split second, the handlebars wrenched, and I was sliding across the tarmac in a T-shirt and jeans. Tarmac really is a brutal exfoliator. I walked away with raw cuts, a bruised ego, and a light scar to remember it by.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but that moment in India would set the tone for the rest of my relationship with motorbikes on that trip: always slightly out of my depth, always one small mistake away from chaos.

So when we arrived in Hanoi and my friends insisted we buy bikes to traverse the North, I was haunted. My friends cared far less about falling off than I did; they had the bug, and I had the memory of the road taking my skin. In the end, it became a heavy compromise. The fear of being ditched by my best mates was stronger than the fear of another crash. I must admit there was also a part of me that really enjoyed the freedom and exhilaration of driving another motorbike. 

Surviving the North

We wanted the “unseen” Vietnam, so we pointed our bikes north toward the Chinese border. We navigated by the sun and a vague sense of direction, riding through mist-covered mountains and villages where wooden houses stood on stilts above the fields. 

At one point the road simply stopped existing, turning into a deep red mud track. We reached a steep hill where our front tyres sank straight into the clay. Half-submerged motorbikes are as inconvenient as they are amusing. We pushed. We slipped. Boots filled with mud. Engines stalled. By the time we reached the top, we were caked head to toe in red clay, looking less like adventurous travellers and more like people who had fallen into a ditch.

I even survived my bike’s “death quirk.” If I floored the accelerator too hard, the engine would cut out. I discovered this while overtaking a bus on a narrow mountain pass. As I pulled out to pass it, another bus appeared coming straight toward me from the opposite direction.

I twisted the throttle to clear the gap. The engine died. Silence.

By some miracle, I eased the throttle back, the engine kicked in again, and I swerved back into my lane just in time. Later a mechanic discovered the problem: water in the petrol tank. A simple fix. It had nearly killed me. I thought that was the hardest part of the trip. I was wrong.

The Pickle on the Platform

After finishing our beautiful loop through the North, we booked a night train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. We were told the bikes had to go into the cargo section, and that someone needed to stay with them while they were loaded.

Because we were on two separate trains, I was truly on my own. My friends headed off to their comfortable second-class cabin on their service, while I, the most inexperienced rider drew the short straw and stayed behind to wait for the cargo loading on mine.

I was already pretty stressed, trying to take care of three heavy bikes without taking my eyes off any of them, when a police officer appeared. He was, shall we say, unhappy. He pointed at the bikes and told me they needed to move immediately. Now.

The message was clear: move them or they would be confiscated. I had ten minutes.

The Minsk Shame

I’ll be honest. I did not know how to start those Minsk bikes. I had watched my friends do it, but watching and doing are very different things.

I tried. I kicked the starter. Nothing.

I tried again.

Nothing.

The police officer grew increasingly agitated. I even suggested he could help start them, but he’d never used a Minsk either, and his attitude made it clear this was absolutely not his problem.

I briefly considered wheeling them. Three old heavy bikes are difficult enough when they run, let alone when you're trying to move them alone while keeping an eye on all of them at once. Worse still, it wasn’t entirely clear where the loading bay actually was. When I asked the officer if I could leave the bikes for a moment while I found out, he made it very clear that if I walked away from them they would be impounded.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I called our hostel and asked for help. 

A worker came out to help translate, and not to my surprise the officer didn’t care about the logistics. He wanted the bikes gone. Meanwhile, my friends were already on their train, probably settling into their beds, completely unaware that the entire trip was now collapsing on a train platform.

The hostel worker eventually suggested the only solution she could think of: we had to take the bikes back to the hostel.

I remember standing there for a moment, looking at the bikes, looking at the policeman, and realising the train was already gone.

The entire trip, the bikes, the plan and it had all somehow ended up resting on the one person who knew the least about motorbikes.

It was one of those moments in life where you feel very small and an utter failure.

I called my friends with a mixture of dread and embarrassment, trying to explain what was happening while the connection cut in and out. From their side of the line it sounded simple. Load the bikes onto the train. From mine, I was standing next to three motorbikes I couldn’t start with a policeman threatening to confiscate them.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, they agreed to get off at the next stop and come back.

The Uncertainty

Meanwhile, the hostel worker flagged down two motorbike taxis. To my relief, disappointment, and absolute joy, they started the bikes almost immediately.

Which somehow made everything worse.

Before I could even process what was happening, they jumped on the bikes and drove off into the Hanoi traffic.

With the keys.

I hadn’t written down the names, the numbers, or even the number plates.

For the next twenty minutes I stood outside the hostel staring down the street, convinced I had just lost everything.

Every minute felt like an hour. I was already rehearsing how I would explain to my friends that the bikes were gone.

The hostel worker tried to reassure me the drivers would come back. They said it with a calm smile, but there was a small pause before the words that made me suspect they weren’t completely sure either.

Then, finally, two riders appeared around the corner.

They were grinning from ear to ear.

They had clearly had the time of their lives racing those old Russian bikes through Hanoi.

My relief was enormous.

Unfortunately, it was short-lived.

My friends arrived ten minutes later.

They really couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been able to start the bikes.

Which is hard to explain, because it was probably very simple if you actually knew what you were doing.

Because of my “failure,” we had to sell the bikes quickly and leave the country before our visas expired. From my perspective, I had done everything I possibly could. From theirs, I had managed to ruin the final leg of our Vietnam adventure. Both views probably made sense at the time. Perspective is an interesting thing.

Vietnam remains one of the most unforgettable places I have ever travelled. I wouldn’t trade those “lovely awful” roads for anything. It was all there in the dust, the fear, and the kindness of strangers who helped me start a bike I never should have been riding in the first place.

At eighteen, the idea of motorbikes is intoxicating. You imagine freedom. You imagine adventure. Mostly, you imagine you’ll know what you’re doing.

Vietnam gave me the adventure of a lifetime.

Leaping Fox. Exploring the unseen.