I'll start by saying I was not planning to join the next Nambusters trip, mainly due to matters at home concerning money, house, kids, family holidays, needing to change cars and so on. The other lads on NB2 have been underway planning NB3 for a couple of months now, and I'd been steering clear of their plans because it was a bit gutting, knowing that I wouldn't be joining them.
That changed recently when my good lady wife told me it was ok if I went on next year's trip, and that we could change our plans for the family holidays! She really is one in a billion. :)
NAMBUSTERS 3 IS ON!!
So this last week I've been familiarising myself with the plans the lads had already drawn up, and working out costs and suchlike. I've even sold a few things to raise money in a hurry so I can get flights booked and paid for well in advance.
So far the whole crew who went last year have confirmed for NB3, with the possible addition of one more who hasn't been before.
The plan is to do a lot more off-road this time around. The route is reasonably confirmed and goes something like this:
Day 1 - Hanoi to (Dream) Mo Waterfall near Na Hang - 150km
Day 2 - Mo Waterfall to Mai Chau - 200km
Day 3 - Mai Chau to Bac Yen - 130km
Day 4 - Bac Yen to Song Ma - 200km
Day 5 - Song Ma to Dien Bien Phu along Ma river next to Laos border - 160km
Day 6 - Dien Bien Phu to Sin Ho - 160km
Day 7 - Paso to Lai Chau to SaPa to Lao Cai on China border - 180km
We then return from Lao Cai overnight on the sleeper train with the bikes as we did last time.
The majority will be off-road but this is a rough road route...
We have been to some of these locations on the first tour, but that was almost all road. The real beauty of taking the off-road route around Vietnam, as we discovered last year, is that you get to see places that are only accessible by two wheels or four hooves.
I need to start working soon on the third instalment of the video. As I've said before, slicing up GoPro footage and coming up with something watchable for a few minutes is not something that I find easy, so please bear with me. At the rate I'm going, I'll just about have finished the videos from last year as we start next year's trip.
One definite 'take-home' that I've learned from all this is that we really need to make sure we do regular off-the-bike type footage as much as possible so there's something to be sliced in with the GoPro on-bike footage. The struggle for me with that is my tough camera (Olympus TG-820) has one achilles heel - it's not good at video. For some reason it adjusts focus every 5 seconds or so, for no reason. Even if the image in front of it is static, it will adjust the focus. That means you get very little usable footage from it. So I need to sort an alternative out for the next trip just for video purposes. Any suggestions welcome. Perhaps I'll check out the small handheld DV cameras.
More updates soon.
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