Driving The Most Remarkable Road In The World: The Ho Chi Minh Trail

Take the battle of Dien Bien Phu in ’53. The French, tired and depleted by the Vietnamese insurrection decided to draw them into a final, decisive clash at a remote crossroads and a key Vietnamese supply route from China. The French dropped 19,000 soldiers, certain the Vietnamese couldn’t move sufficient men, supplies and artillery to somewhere that isolated. The Vietnamese simply loaded up specially modified bicycles – 60,000 of them – with guns, bits of heavy artillery, food, ammunition and pushed them along tracks carved into the jungle floor to encircle the French with 50,000 troops, pound them into submission and vanquish them for good.

Those pack bikes or xe tho were specially modified Peugeots sold to them, in a poetic twist of fate, by their French overlords. Handlebars were reinforced, seats were removed and replaced with bamboo racks, the forks, wheels and frame beefed up, and a bamboo stick attached to the handlebars to steer the thing. Thusly equipped a ‘steel horse’ could shoulder up to 300kg, and cover around 25 miles a day, mostly at night, camouflaged with leaves and branches. Between 1955 and 1973, the period when the US decided to support the South Vietnamese government in squashing the communists in the North, the bicycle once again had a crucial role to play. 

By the mid Sixties, thousands of North Vietnamese were assigned to maintaining and expanding the trail, as well as reinforcing bridges to allow trucks – which were faster and more efficient than the bikes, but couldn’t be hidden by the jungle canopy as effectively – to carry the bulk of supplies and soldiers south. If the US B-52s or helicopters spotted one and blew a crater in the trail, it was often rerouted within a matter of hours, or the truck’s cargo unloaded onto bikes and porters to keep the provisions moving. As one American pilot put it, bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to a standstill was like trying to put socks on an octopus, because it wasn’t just one road, but a living, breathing, ever-evolving network of tracks and trails that, stuck end-to-end, stretched over 12,000 miles and criss-crossed over into neighbouring countries Cambodia and Laos – neutral territory, so off-limits for US ground troops. 

Our truck is the decidedly un-military grade, front-wheel-drive Peugeot 3008, but with some choice modifications to make our exploration of the trail possible. Cooper Discoverer AT3 tyres toughen the stance and make the most of what traction there is, an LED bar allows us to be seen from space and attract every angry bug within a square mile, while the roof tent… is a roof tent, and the stripes aren’t strictly necessary. The bike on the back is 100 per cent original, and a thing of beauty – a perfect example of a pre-conversion pack bike. I’m told by the seller the dynamo-powered front headlamp would have been used to illuminate ad hoc surgeries on the battlefield.

In the last 15 years, a Ho Chi Minh Highway has been pieced together by paving over old sections of the trail, giving an uninterrupted, 1,000-mile straight road from Hanoi to Saigon without leaving Vietnam, or the safety of Tarmac. Too monotonous for us, so we’re concentrating on a section just inland from Dong Hoi in the north central area of Vietnam, where the country sucks in its stomach between Laos and the South China Sea. Just north of what was the demilitarised zone (DMZ), it’s home to the Phong Nha Ke Bang national park and packed with every terrain possible: lush jungle, deep ravines, muddy trails, postcard paddy fields and villages, paved highways and secret landing strips all huddled together in a cluster of breathtaking beauty that lifts the Vietnam War from the pages of books and renders it into a sobering reality.