The Plan

Of all activities in Vietnam, planning is certainly the most frivolous. So here's the plan.

I leave the isle of Phu Quoc on Monday, an endorsement of a mystic suspicion that weekday driving avoids "Sunday" drivers. The trip to Saigon will take two days because of the boat ride to the mainland, so I plan on taking a more rural, less traveled route.

After consulting a trio of touring Germans, a cousin of Sok Meng (remember him?) and a French UN worker living in Cambodia, I've decided to sell the Minsk in Saigon. It should take three days in the big city to deal with my paperwork, sell the Minsk, do a tiny bit of shopping, pick up some books and book my travel to my next destination. I'm on the fence about buying that sexy Lambretta and shipping it back. What do you think, Mike? Jules?

Phnom Penh can be reached by bus or boat, so I'll gather price, duration and enjoyability factors and put them into an Microsoft(tm) Excel(tm) spreadsheet to calculate the tradeoffs.

In Phnom Penh I'll buy a 250cc enduro-style motorcycle and head west to Ankor Wat. This is waaaay out of my way, but everyone practically cries in their beer when they emphatically insist that the sheer sight of the place changed their lives and made them cry and made them buddhist and all that shit. So I'll get to Ankor Wat, take a peek, cry, turn buddhist, probably burn an incense stick or mumble some buddhist rite, and then tear east and north to the Laos border.

Laos is another place that people tend to lose their composure over when they describe it, but strangely no one can effectively put into words what makes them so stupified at its mention. "Ohmagod! You have GOT to go to Laos. It is a-MAY-zing!" "What's so a-MAY-zing about it?" "It's just so... soooo.... Ohmagod, you just have to go there." This happens a lot and has become a rather frustrating pet peeve of mine.

Sok Meng pleaded with me not to travel the road from around Phnom Penh to the Laos border, but he failed to say why. Dangerous he said. That could mean a lot of things, so I've been restlessly emailing him back to explain this flavor of danger to me. Dangerous road conditions won't deter me. Dangerous traffic kinda sucks but again, I think I can deal. Dangerous guerillas aimed with sniper rifles, a buzz from the local rum and a favor for light-skinned targets does give me pause. Of course my tan has reached a point of near camoflauge in those circumstances.

Laos is a pretty tall country and the roads are apparently in disrepair, so it'll take me a while to get up to Vientien. From there I'll probably do a northern loop, returning to the capital and then dropping down into Thailand. From Phnom Penh to this point should take a month on the outside by my ridiculously amateurish calculations. I might stop in Chang Mai for a mountain biking trek, but I imagine by that time that the beach sirens will be singing and I'll be helplessly lured to the southwestern coast. A stop on the way to buy books should satisfy any masochistic urges I have to see Bangkok.

After the sun thirst is quelled I'll return to the stinky city, hopefully sell the bike as quickly as possible, and then jump on a plane and come home. Yay!

This whole stupid plan completely hinges on the possibility that I can move the bike from Cambodia to Laos and then into Thailand, and on that topic I've heard many conflicting opinions. An American in Saigon said no problem from Cambodia to Laos. The Frenchman concurred, but noted that a complete lack of law and infrastructure in both countries would require deft deal-making abilities on my part to minimize expenditures on bribes. The Germans said that they did not believe that getting the bike into Thailand would be easy because it would be treated as a import/export thing since the bike would be nearly undocumented. In addition I don't have an international driver's license, so the Thai government might not want me on their roads.

You see how these plans tend to disintegrate almost immediately? All the ifs, laid out and said one after the other are beginning to sound unintelligible. But this is a theme that I have embraced. Without an if, there is no tension and thus no story. Traveling, I've discovered, is all about finding oneself in a story narrated by fate and penned by luck.