At the End of a 1,000-Mile Journey, This Couple Did Something With Their Motorbike That Might Bring a Tear to Your Eye

Call it a love story: one man, one woman and one $280 motorbike called "Red Rocket."

The journey they share is incredible, but it's the way they part that will tug on your heartstrings.

Photographer Dylan Ozanich and his girlfriend recently traveled through Southeast Asia, documenting their "Adventure of Two" online.

Their trip through Vietnam into Cambodia was made possible by a decades-old motorbike their picked up on the cheap.

Image via Vimeo

"This thing was a piece of work let me tell you what," Ozanich wrote on his blog. "No tail light, no blinkers, no speedometer, no gas gauge, an oil leak, 1 mirror, no horn (which is a drivers entire form communication in Vietnam), no battery, kick start only, loud and clanky as h***, smashed seat cushion from years of riding, and every screw or bolt has been replaced with some random one of some random size that happened to fit the hole when the original had rattled out."

But the bike started and moved, so the duo decided to take it.

"With no second thought on the matter we are now the proud owners of a rattle case Vietnamese scooter known as 'Red Rocket,'" Ozanich wrote.

Ozanich put some work into the bike, rewiring the horn, swapping luggage baskets and even rigging up a new seat by attaching two child-sized life jackets to serve as cushions.

Image via Vimeo

It was a rickety ride, but Ozanich said they drove the bike for 1,800 kilometers, or more than 1,100 miles, with stops in Da Lat and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon).

Image via Google Maps

The pair traversed empty mountains...

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...and crowded cities.

Image via Vimeo

While the journey was beautiful, it's what Ozanich and his girlfriend decided to do with their bike at journey's end that makes the whole story remarkable: They gave 'Red Rocket' to a young boy.

Ozanich wrote:

[A]fter a few days in Phnom Penh [Cambodia] and still a few hours before our much awaited bus ride to the next city we knew we needed to do something special with this bike. After riding around for a while we saw a teenage boy pushing a coconut cart and we just knew. As we rode past he stared at us as we stared back, his clothes were slightly torn and dirty, his cart wobbled as he pushed it along, and right then we knew he was the one who we would give the scooter to. We pulled up next to his cart and tried to explain to him that we wanted him to have this bike as a gift. I had used a translator before we left the hostel to convert a sentence into Cambodian.

“We rode this bike all the way from Vietnam, but now we are leaving for Siem Reap and would like to give it to you as a gift. Hopefully it helps you as much as it has helped us.”

He didn’t understand at first and with him being the kind kid he was he started trying to give us directions to Siem Reap. We took the keys out of the ignition and handed them to him. A look of complete surprise and happiness came over his face and we said “For you, a gift, no money.” ...we walked away sipping our two coconuts with warmth in our hearts knowing how this bike could help this young boy in his life. As we walked away he stood behind us keys in hand waving with a smile so big it made every rough moment with this bike worth it.

Image via Vimeo

Watch the video documenting the journey below:

See more from Ozanich's "Adventure of Two" journey here.

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Follow Zach Noble (@thezachnoble) on Twitter