When Wild Buses Attack!

Drive drive drive drive. Our next destination was Mui Ne, whose low-key vibe and goat-ball rice muffins made it worth all the bus dodging required to get there.

This was to be our longest day of riding so we left Mui Ne relatively early. That would be like 10:30am. We bought some pastries and took them to a place that we believed to be a coffee shop but may just as well have been some family's living room. But they made us some coffee and let us sit at their table and they took our money, so I'd put the odds at fifty-fifty.

The road from Mui Ne offered more amazing scenery. It's like this: Flat, segregated green fields (apparently the government gives every rural family 200 square meters of land to grow crops) which run up to bouldered, sparsely forested hills. A white crane flies down and lands gently in a small thicket of bamboo, tracing the path of a hand-dug irrigation canal. The small fields abut like vaguely rectangular patches of a quilt stitched by a blind woman. As we have moved south the rice has gotten taller and taller. Now we're seeing yellow fields mixed with green, ready to harvest, and populated with women (do the men in Vietnam ever work?) in those conical straw hats bending low at the waist, calves sunk into the muddy water. Along the road is a large irrigation ditch and every 100 meters or so is a contraption that looks like a toddler's playground swing made of bamboo. Affixed to the axle is a scoop that swings down into the ditch, grabbing a pail of water, then swings up into the smaller, perpindicular canals, which deliver water to the individual fields. Often someone will be standing there, scooping and pouring, in large body movements, heaving and hoeing.

Past the fields the road changed and from here on out resembled the road from Big Sur to Monterey. Except instead of RVs there were big Greyhound-like buses and 18 wheelers. After a while I began to imagine how a bus driver prepares for his journey. He gets everyone and their luggage onto the bus. This is no simple task - on the roofs of various buses I saw motorcycles, giant crates, full size appliances, numerous livestock, etc. If it will fit on top of the bus, they will put it on top of the bus. So once the cargo and passengers are on board the driver puts a brick on the gas pedal, leans his forehead on the horn, and falls asleep. Eleven hours later the bus arrives at its destination with trail of carnage and ill tempers in its wake.

If you've driven around Big Sur you know that the RVs are plodding beasts that tend to keep the overall pace of the road slow. This is not the case in Vietnam. Descending one of the twisty passes, rock and mountain on the right, sea-facing cliffs on the left, Mike was rudely introduced to, but narrowly, narrowly avoided the grill of a bus which was passing another bus, blindly, around a sharp curve. The road here has two facing lanes, each with a small shoulder. It was not uncommon for both lanes and one shoulder to be occupied by traffic moving in the opposite direction. This leaves only the shoulder for us, and sometimes not even that. If Mike had been a bus, there would have been a monsterous head on collision at that moment. We had to pull over shortly after that for Mike to regain his composure. The view offered a thousand small fishing boats docked inside the tiny bay below like ants attacking a watermelon rind.

Here we stopped for lunch at a small roadside restaurant offering local seafood. We sat down and immediately became nervous upon noticing the table full of traffic police staring at us from across the aisle. Besides a marginally legal second-generation registration strip (that we had to re-laminate do to advance age) we have no legal right to own or operate our bikes. Everyone's been telling us no problem, but a cop on the side of the road still makes us nervous. A table-full of cops made us very nervous. At least until one of them, clearly inebriated, offered us a shot of rice wine. We refused, thinking it might be a trap and not being the least bit interested in drinking after several close calls with vehicles fifty-times our weight. Turns out they had all been eating and drinking, having a liquor and squid fueled power-lunch that only local law enforcement officals can drive away from with impunity. Which they did.

We stopped briefly in Nha Trang but didn't enjoy the touristy, over-developed vibe, so after some boiled peanuts and a Tiger beer we set out again, hoping to make Mui Ne before it got too late to find a room.

We stopped in Ca Na for gas, which is only noteworthy because it is famous for producing the bulk of the nation's fish sauce. Fish sauce is a bit stinky and so was Ca Na.

Driving at night is such an adventure. It's a lot like a video game where stuff jumps out at you and you have to be paying attention to ten things at once. Everyone drives with their brights and many buses and trucks have upwards of six headlights. There are no streetlights, many small scooters don't have tail lights, large vehicles pass other large vehicles without regard for anything smaller than a car in the opposite lane, and the shoulders of the road are filled with pedestrians, bicycles, dogs and livestock. I find to it to be very intense. In the middle of this, we stopped to pee (the side of the road being the preferred venue for such activity) and we were awestruck by the enormous field of stars above us and the orchestra of fauna below us. Crickets, frogs, birds, circadas were all bellowing at full capacity, resulting in a din about as loud as a crowded restaurant. Did I mention the bats? Bats are about as plentiful at night as birds are during the day, but they are much more daring on the road.

We reached Mui Ne at about 8pm. It sucks coming into a town at night, because it's very hard to judge what is nice and what is naughty. We passed the ten kilometers of big and small beachside resorts and traveled the small coastal road into the little villiage of Mui Ne itself. In the center of town was an open air food market where several tables of drinking men were goading us to join them. We did eventually sit next to a table of three bleary-eyed lads in their late teens or early twenties. They had just finished a round of food and were sharing a small cup of something among them. They knew zero English, but were very talkative to us nonetheless. One offered me a sip of his drink, which I accepted out of politeness. It was rice wine of the rubbing alcohol variety and I found out later that they had brought their own plastic bag full of the stuff. Who knows where that stuff came from. After we ate they offered to let us pay for their meal as well as ours but we casually declined.

We picked a nice little hotel at random from the road. There were two rows of bungalows surrounding a small open-air restaurant and several gabezos equipped with hammocks and tables and chairs. A low hedge protected a sandy courtyard from ocean winds and behind that was a sliver of beach lapped by a noisy but relatively docile sea.

We would spend two days in Mui Ne doing mostly nothing. Eating. Bread and butter for breakfast. Pho and rice and fresh spring rolls and this lightly spicy tomato soup with goat meatballs and fresh-baked, rice-based mini english muffins sprinkled with scallions. The old lady sitting next to us showed us the proper way to dunk the english muffins and even gave me a boiled egg which tasted about as old as she looked. We did a lot of reading. I finished "Everything is Illuminated" by Johnathan Safran Foer read a great book by (Kanzeburo - I think) Oe called "A Personal Matter" while Mike finished "The Corrections" and tore through several Harpers and New Yorkers. That's the kind of east-coast-wannabe-Oprah-book-of-the-month-club-left-leaning guys we are.