Easy Rider for Buddhists

Riding motorbikes across Vietnam ain't no picnic. But it's also the coolest fucking thing ever.

Leaving Dak To, we paid our hotel bill and were offered tea from the owner. We thought it was tea. We assumed it would be tea. This man, who had been nice enough to hose down our bikes when we arrived, ran to a side room and returned with a large glass conainer of what appeared to be prunes. "Prune juice" Mike said. Okay, kinda weird, but here's to our digestive track! He poured some of the brackish liquid which surrounded what appeared to be prunes into three small tea glasses and prompted us with a hand signal that we should drink the entire glass in one gulp. Ahhh, we then realized, and confirmed with a quick sniff that this was some sort of homemade alcohol. Bottoms up. We drank the prune liquor, concentrated on holding our stomachs tightly, and quickly refused on grounds of not imbibing and driving when he offered us two more glasses.

The drive from Dak To to Chu Se was remarkable mostly for the continuous thread of people all along the road, working, going to and from school, playing volleyball, or driving ox carts or motorbikes who would charmingly smile and wave as we passed by. It was so simple and so amazing. Hello! some people would shout, waving furiously. If we'd pass someone on the road, we look over and exchange smiles and sometimes a wave. Without fail. If we stopped for gas, the neighbors would come over and check us out and smile and say hello. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Like that. We'd say hello to each and every one of them and they'd be stoked and we'd be stoked. Just a hello and a smile. We ride off and wave goodbye to each other like we'd been there for ten years.

These were definitely farming communities. Tiny villages spaced five or ten kilometers apart. The homes were thatch or mud or boarded with thin wooden strips across branch skeletons. The road was riddled with drying something or other. Taro root or nuts, sometimes palm fronds. People modified their Honda Cubs to carry just about anything. Bales of hay. Barrels full of kerosene. Thousands of bananas. Several small pigs or one giant hog. Pigs, cattle, oxen, goats, chickens and ducks were constantly crossing the road at their own pace, oblivious to our horns and stinky, noisy tailpipes. The pace is slow the lives are lived simply and the vibe is friendly and sparkling. That's pretty much it for a hundred and fifty kilometers. I think it's been the highlight of the trip so far.

Somewhere on the way to Chu Se, on a curvy mountain pass, we saw a man being held by a group of friends. He was bleeding from the head and the leg and appeared to be unconscious. His scooter, what was left of it, was smashed and wedged in between a guardrail and a low rock wall. It was so bad that we decided to turn around and offer our first aid kit (which would have been easily overwhelmed by this man's injuries) but his friends had called an ambulance and were more concerned with asking us where we were from.

We stopped at Chu Se for lunch at a small market. Then we doubled back for a bit to a welder we had seen on the way through town. We showed him my rack and where we needed a couple of welds. He only had one hand and he had an apprentice with a lazy eye. His shy curly-haired daughter was in pajamas at three in the afternoon, but appeared fully functional in the eye and limb departments. The Minsk owners manual says to unplug the sparkplug cap when welding anything to the frame. But the welder guy wanted me to keep the engine running while he worked. Nervously I complied. He grounded the bike with a metal brace by wedging one end against the frame and quickly welding the other end to a metal pole holding up an awning. Literally single handedly he held the rack in place, without gloves and without a welding mask and did the two welds in under a minute. As soon as he finished he completely ignored us and went back to his customer who was there before us complaining about the structural truss that the welder had apparently just completed. We asked how much and he waved us away. I was going to give him 100,000 duong nonetheless, but I honestly think that it would've been a little insulting so I thought twice, thanked him and his assistant (who spent the welding time looking for a bolt necessary to hold the rack in place) and his daughter profusely and then left.

On leaving Chu Se we had to make a decision. Continue down Ho Chi Minh Road, and cut across at a larger road like Highway 27, or take Highway 25, which had no major towns until the coast. We discovered on our first day riding that the road less traveled was always more interesting, but after riding so hard for several days we didn't want to break down in the middle of nowhere without a place to stay for 200km. So obviously, being dumbasses, we took 25 and said fuck it. Fifty kilometers later we stopped to pee and Mike's bike wouldn't start up again.

Pushing and jumpstarting and the choke and flooding the carb, or whatever you're supposed to do or not do and the thing still wouldn't start. Both bikes had been leaking for hundreds of kilometers and I was like, well, we should've paid attention because our Minsk manual says that small problems are just the beginnings of big problems and you have to nip them in the bud or else your bike is toast and the whole engine needs to be replaced and oh shit, we're stuck out here in BFE and nobody speaks english and we're going to have to sleep in the bushes and get attacked by mosquitoes and snakes and what, some farmer guy is going to miraculously have a spare Minsk part for us? no way! and my visa is running out in a couple of days so we'll probably get arrested for being spies and now my guts feel rumbly from that weird prune wine so I hope Mike has toilet paper in his bag because... then... VROOM. It started and we were off again happy as clams. Apparently according to mechanic Mike it had just flooded, and after drying the carb out a bit (I'm totally making this up - I have no idea) it started just fine.

Now for a big aside. So my guts were feeling rumbly, and you know how it goes when you're in a foreign country and you're eating and drinking recklessly, things sometimes go a bit south down south. Are you picking up what I'm dropping? Actually don't pick it up. Not that you could if you wanted to. Anyway, I could tell that I was going to need a bathroom break of the second order and quite soon. I wouldn't have gladly stopped by the side of the road, but I didn't see any areas that weren't explicitly fronted by a farm house or being toiled on by a farmer or a herder of some sort. And quite modestly, I didn't want to be caught by surprise by a group of kids playing hide and seek behind the school. So I concentrated very strongly and held it. I concentrated very very strongly on a bumpy road for many kilometers until we finally got to a town. This may be one of the most physically challenging things I've done in quite some time. So at the gas station I asked the location of the WC and the girl working there (do any of the men work in Vietnam?) pointed. I walked through a room with a bed and through the last remaining door to the back yard. Now for an aside to the aside. The last strange place that I went to the bathroom was in Dak To. At the bia hoi, the dude pointed me to the back and after walking the entire length of the house I found the back yard. He came back a moment later and turned the light on for me and ambiguously pointed further afield. There were several small enclosures in this yard along with a scrubby "lawn" and a small pen that looked like it might hold chickens. Enclosures one and two were nearest and appeared to be a pig sty and yet another pig sty. The last and furthest enclosure was a small (but not WC small) room with, squinting my eyes in the darkness, wide boards crisscrossing the floor. At several points there were small six inch gaps in the floor boards. I'm no prude. I'll pee anywhere. BUT, I don't want to pee in the wrong place. Now I'm not sure if he pointed to the dirt patch or the last enclosure. Or maybe, shit, I don't know, maybe I'm supposed to pee in the pig pen. Of the three choices, the floor boards I'm staring at most closely resemble a squat-style Vietnamese toilet. So I attempt to aim, and I pee. It sounds like I'm peeing on a large sack of rice. Now, I'm really bummed because I think, first of all I'm not even able to aim directly into the hole because it's so dark, so I'm peeing by hearing. And secondly, what I'm hearing is me peeing on this family's rice storeroom. End of aside aside. Now I'm looking at the back yard of the gas station. After peeking under a couple of metal covers I assume that I'm supposed to just go the the bathroom in the dirt somewhere. Fine for number one, but not for number two - especially with the two ladies from the restaurant next door staring at me. Concentrate. Concentrate. So I leave the gas station and go to the restaurant hoping the ladies will understand my plight. Nope. I can't use their bathroom. Wise women if you ask me. Finally, I run (and run is a nice way to say that I awkwardly run-walk, trying to look casual but in fact concentrating harder than that time on the math section of the SATs) across the street to a pool hall with a modern facade. There I am greeted by a host of amiable pool playing men (not working) who point me to the back. Here we go again. But alas, a full on western style bathroom lay at the end of the kitchen, separated by a thick wall and it's very own door. When you've set your expectations so low that a normal bathroom seems like nirvana, then you are one step closer to happiness. End of aside.

We knew the forcast was for rain so we bought some XL sized rain suits at a local store. XL in Vietnam equals M in the United States. My logic was that if we bought rain suits, then it wouldn't rain. And this was the case for many kilometers. But then it began to rain. And then it got dark. Here are the problems: 1. At night, drivers only use their brights. 2. Except those drivers that do not have lights at all. Those drivers do not use lights at all. 3. There are many things on the side of the road that are hard to see but easy to hit, like ox carts and bicycles and people walking (what are they thinking??) along the shoulder. 4. When it's raining it's hard to see. 5. When it's raining it's slippery. So for about forty-five minutes I shit bricks. Then, when it really was pouring we pulled over and put our rain suits on. Then it stopped raining. Should have thought of that earlier I guess. Just before we got to Tuy Hua (the last city not in the guidebook) we saw another accident. This one had just occurred and two men were dragging a third, limp bodied, across oncoming traffic. They left his scooter sitting landmine-like in the middle of the road.

In Tuy Hua we learned that no matter how hard we tried we couldn't pronounce Tuy Hua. Then we found a hotel and a place to eat. At the restaurant we chatted with a 10 and a 12 year-old while their parents looked on approvingly. They wouldn't let our bowl of kim chee become empty and kept bringing out food that we didn't order, just to be obliging. In Saigon you get charged for napkins. We chatted with the kids who had learned several key phrases in school and tried to teach them some new ones, but they were too shy or embarrassed to give it a go. It was very cute.

That night we slept like stones at the bottom of a lake.