Do I need a motorbike license in Vietnam? (Packing Guide)
In case you’re not able to watch the video, we have the transcript here for you below :)
Tim: 00:00 We just finished putting out two months of our Vietnam road trip and we figured to cap that off, we's put out a little video about ten essentials you're going to want to make sure that you bring along for that long ride from Saigon to Hanoi.
Fin: 00:13 Or wherever your destination lies.
Fin: 00:18 Great intro, Tim.
Tim: 00:21 Oh, you meant that honestly.
Fin: 00:22 Yeah. Hey, we're Tim and Fin, and we make travel videos here on YouTube.
Top 10 Vietnam Motorbike Packing List
Helmet
Tim: 00:29 So the most important thing you want to get for your drive North or South is a good helmet. And because it's Vietnam, it's going to be a little bit of a challenge if you're a westerner. A lot of - we have bigger heads- a lot of rental places will throw in a helmet for you to use, but you don't know where it's beenor how many times it's been dropped. This is a three quarter. There you go. There's a lot of helmets that are going to just be like top, this is three quarter. It's really hard to find a full face helmet while you're in Vietnam. In fact, I don't think I saw
Fin: 01:03 For those of us that maybe doesn't, don't know what that is.
Tim: 01:06 That's like the kind with the built-in hard chin and a visor that would come down to it. You're not gonna really find one of those. Yeah.
Fin: 01:15 A feature that I had on my helmet that we don't have here was just a plastic visor that came down. Did you ever say that? No. the plastic visor I feel like made a huge difference. There's so many shots of Tim wearing this helmet with goggles that just weren't cutting it through the rain. Even light drizzle - and the visor that was coming down for me made all the difference in visibility and wind and you know, even just like bugs hitting the windshield
Tim: 01:42 Dust and gravel and you'll be behind trucks and stuff like that.
Fin: 01:46 Yeah. So definitely look for one with a visor that comes down. Tim just really cared about orange.
Tim: 01:52 It's a sick helmet.
Fin: 01:53 If you're leaving home and going straight to Vietnam for the Vietnam motorbike trip, if you have a helmet at home, just bring your helmet from home. If you are doing the Vietnam motorcycle trip as part of a larger trip, don't feel like you have to lug your helmet around all these other countries where you're not driving a motorbike necessarily. You can definitely find one in Vietnam, but the quality that you have from home is probably more reliable than something you would find.
2. Visor
Tim: 02:19 Definitely. And if you do buy a helmet there, you can always sell it when you're done. Like you can sell everything when you're done -it's easy. If you don't have goggles, some full coverage sunglasses also work, but the amount of shit that gets thrown at you while you're driving is crazy. Once again, all those bugs, rocks, dust, all that stuff like, and especially that famous Vietnam rain. I had these bad boys on most of the time. As you can see in all those videos, like I should have gone functionality over aesthetic with that awesome helmet. I wish I had that visor that she had the entire time. But if you're going to skip divisor get some or bring some great sunglasses.
Fin: 03:01 I was okay with sunglasses and the visor the whole time. But remember, then you're wearing sunglasses inside the helmet, inside the visor, so it sometimes gets a little cramped.
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3. Neck Buff
Tim: 03:16 This smells terrible. Definitely not washed. I'm sure it's been washed once more recently. So we already mentioned twice in the short video, the dust, the mud, the rain rocks coming at your face. You're going to wear a buff so much. I'm going to take this off and yeah, just that beating sun. If all the conditions are great, nothing's hitting you in the face, you're still going to be getting your face burnt off by the sun. You need to bring a Buff with you. The smart thing to do would be to buy these on Amazon. They're like a buck. If you do them there, you can get them in country for really cheap too. If you want to get crazy and spend money for the buff name, like go ahead and spend $20 on a little piece of cloth. That's totally cool.
Fin: 04:01 You know what I just thought of too? We went in the height of winter, which is not the best idea. If you're going into summer, like most people, this might be really hot around your neck. All the locals of Vietnam were all wearing hospital masks that just go around your ears so you need something. Nothing is not an option, so this is a great thing to find at home. Or you can find a cute local one, like maybe with hello kitty on the front or we saw some with Disney princesses, like I feel like those options would be hard to find at home, but readily available in Vietnam, as unbelievable as it may seem, it can be cold in Vietnam. As we started getting North, we had to pull over to some nice lady on the side of the road and by, it was essentially like ski gloves because it was so cold. Even if you're going in the summer, it can be really cold up in the mountains if you're going up to Sapa or somewhere in Northern Vietnam, definitely consider having gloves. If you're in the summer, you probably don't need the ski gloves, but you need something. Oh, here's another reason why you need gloves at 60 kilometers an hour. I ran into some like Asian bee and its stinger was stuck in my thumb and it was crying and probably could have died but my gloves saved my life.
4. Durable Shoes
Tim: 05:28 Wear some shoes. It gets slippery there. You're going to have to make quick stops where some full covered shoes so you just keep yourself that extra bit safe
Fin: 05:37 Unless you're Jamie,
Tim: 05:39 Unless you're Jamie who doesn't care. The other thing with the constant rain in Vietnam, like you want to have dry feet. It's not cool to have sopping wet feed for a six hour drive. That doesn't make for a happy ride.
5. Sunscreen
Fin: 05:54 This is Allison your favorite sunscreen fairy here, sunscreen is very important to wear no matter what time of year
Tim: 06:02 You're out in the middle of the road, you're exposed to the sun the whole time. If you're not getting rained on, you're going to be getting third degree burns from the sun.
Fin: 06:10 Are you on the sunscreen train? I'm On the sunscreen train. We're both sunscreen fairys.
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6. Rain Poncho
Tim: 06:18 And if the sun is not shining, it's going to be raining. We each brought rain jackets with us because that's just something you pack anyways. But in Vietnam they have these sick ponchos that are actually made for your motor bike. Like they had this little clear window on the front of them that goes over your headlamp unless you're six feet tall. And then it gets pulled up further over your instrument panel. And we didn't buy them until like halfway through the trip and it was the dumbest thing. I think they were what? 60,000 VND? Like $3 USD or something. And I don't know why we didn't buy them. I thought that I was also worried that the back of them was going to get like sucked into the tire and I thought it was stupid. No, just buy one. They're awesome. They'll change your life. You need it for the beginning of the ride.
7. Waterproof bag cover
Tim: 07:08 The other thing that you want is a big waterproof bag for all your shit on the back of the bike. Now you can just buy a clear like vinyl one. I mean that's gonna cost like 10 cents somewhere. But they're going to take a beating too, as they're moving around on the rebar racks and everything on the back. We actually bought these little camouflage covers that we could just stretch over our bags on the back. But once again, with all that rain, you want to keep your stuff dry and it's going to rain on you. So think ahead and buy those at the beginning of the trip
8. Water Resistant Daypack
Fin: 07:37 And think too how you're going to be storing your gear on your bike. So we had one big backpack on the back, on the rebar racks, and then we had our small day pack in front of us. You might be thinking before you go on the trip, Oh, I'll just, you know, put both under the one bag in the back. But then every time you stop, if you need your food or your camera or your phone or your map out of the bag, then you'd have to be in the rain even getting all that out. So if you have one of the local ponchos over you, then you can still have your safe. Here's a great plug for our waterproof day bag that we will link. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Waterproof would be like a full, yeah. This is not like a LifeProof iPhone case type thing. This is just a water resistant day bag, but it's in our Amazon store. Linked below. Anyways. If you had a waterproof day bag down below, then you could quickly access all those things that you need throughout the actual time that you're driving, like your wallet and all those things instead of tucked under some harder reach places.
9. Bungee cord
Tim: 08:44 This little spider web was a bungee that we bought early in the trip because it's such a hassle to bungee and un-bungee and we saw a lot of on motorbikes who were using like ropes and tape to keep their stuff on their bike and they had to unknot and not everything. Each time. Having a bungee makes it that much faster and once again, you're going to be getting on and off your bike and strapping things on so often just to make it easy on yourself. Spend the dollar.
10. Do I Need an International Driver’s License to Ride a Motorbike in Vietnam?
Fin: 09:14 We've seen and heard a lot of different answers for if the international driver's license is even accepted in Vietnam, at the end of the day, it's really only 10 minutes of your time and it's $15 at a AAA in the United States to go get an international driver's license. So it's always just better on the safe side to have one. We needed an international driver's license for a car rental in Europe and in New Zealand, and we, I mean, we've used it, we used it throughout the whole year. So we had one for other reasons. If you're only going to Vietnam, why not get one? If you have access to one, that's our take on the subject and think about it. We're talking about Vietnam as singular. Then that doesn't take into account the variation of all of the different policemen who might be pulling you over. So is it important to person a or person B or person C that doesn't include all the variables.
Tim: 10:11 I'm glad I had one.
Fin: 10:12 In fact, the only time that either of us got pulled over, it was me in Northern Vietnam and I don't speak much Vietnamese and he doesn't speak much English and we kind of looked at each other for a little bit. And then I was on my way.
Tim: 10:24 Something that I really liked about Vietnam and isn't accepted everywhere else in the world is the fact that you can bribe policemen. And in fact they really expect it if they pull you over, especially around my knee. So a little traveler tip there is to have a fake wallet filled with "Dongers" about $10 USD worth of Dong will work. You keep that in a pocket. So when you get pulled over by the police, you say, this is all the money I have. This is all the money I have. It's going to expedite the process they want to bribe anyways. In that way you're not pulling out a big old wad of cash and paying more than you have to.
Fin: 11:04 So if you're in a touristy area, expect that the police officers can speak English and will expect something from you. Maybe this is where the international driver's license can be handy, where you can try to use that like you're a valid driver. You might need to show the documentation that you own the bike that you're on which maybe you have or you don't have, be careful with this because anything that you tangibly have that you hand over then to a police officer by B - what is it called, where they would have it and then you would have to pay for it? There's a word... Screwed. If you have other suggestions on how to handle this situation, maybe you are a Vietnamese viewer, please feel free to share it with us clueless tourists down in the comments section.
Tim: 12:01 So that's everything. So these were just actual things to get to make your trip easier if you're still looking for information on an itinerary, Fin made an exhaustive list of how to drive a specific roads, places to stay, towns, all that background information.
Fin: 12:19 You are looking for more of a vlog style and what all these locations look like. Join us in our YouTube series Triped where we navigate through. We have 10 I believe, full episodes through Vietnam. So come join us on our journey.
Tim: 12:34 I think we got it. Yeah. Yeah.