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To make a long story short, we were in a compromised situation.  The wheel of the trailer fell off.  By fell off, I mean the trailer was here, dragging across the ground on one side, and the wheel was over there, lying on the rocky road.  Generally speaking, this is not the way it’s supposed to work.  

It was dark.  We were right next to a busy road.  We were stranded.  We couldn’t move the trailer further than walking distance.  As far as we could see in the dark, water-filled paddies stretched into the distance. 

I felt trapped.  Before, we could bike away from anything we didn’t like.  Now we were stuck.  Two kilometers back, the trailer had broken again.  At that time a family invited us into their home for dinner.  Because we were near a large tourist site, I was suspicious, but complied anyway.  One of their relatives took me to find a repairshop for the trailer axle, which had to be welded.  The family didn’t tell us they wanted money for the meal until afterward.  We ate an awkward but not unpleasant dinner with them.  The uncle did not eat with us, and afterward we left.  It was the tourist site away from which we were biking when the trailer broke.

Drew and I checked under a bridge under the busy road.  Piles of garbage and deposits from people who couldn’t wait surrounded water-filled holes.  Cars thudded along overhead.  “Well…” said Drew, “we could probably make it work if we had to.”

Drew and I climbed back to the group, empty handed.  “I would just like everyone to know I am thouroughly enjoying this,” said Pete, the perpetual optimist.  So cloudy was I, I at first thought an odd bit of sarcasm had escaped his lips.

We found a strip of land next to a dirt road  within walking distance.  People could see us from the road, but there wasn’t any traffic.  We rolled down the bikes, carried the trailer and set up the tents. No cars or motorbikes came down the road. 

We often sleep outside, but we usually find sites away from roads, hidden in the back country and viewable only by local houses, the residents of which inevitably prove welcoming.  This site was right by the road and across the water from a veritable village of houses.  We piled the gear close together and locked everything down. 

“Do you have the broken axle?” Adam asked me as he stowed his gear.  I was the last person to examine the break before we moved the trailer.  I realized I didn’t have it.  It would be difficult to have that fixed here, let alone have a new one made.  If I’d lost it we would certainly be at the prey of the tourist site indefinitely, unable to escape.  I tore through my gear and then ran up the road to where the break ocurred.  Thankfully I found it lying in the dust.   

I settled down that night by the side of the road alert but weary, oddly at peace with a night gone awry.  We had made the best of a bad situation, and it satisfied me.  Perhaps Pete’s perspective wasn’t completely ridiculous.

We awoke the next morning to propaganda blaring from a nearby village.  All of the gear sat just where we put it the night before.  Adam and I collected the axle and biked off in search of an arc welder.  The previous night the uncle guided me to a shop that only had an acetylene torch, which can’t weld as deeply as an arc welder.  We had no idea how difficult an arc welder would be to find. 

We had not even gone a kilometer on the main road when I spotted the thick coiled wires I’ve long associated with electical welders.  Eager to avoid paying the 100,000 dong we were charged the other night for the weld, we asked the man how much the weld would be.  “two something something” was what I heard.  We assumed it would be 20,000.  Great! I thought.  He welded it cleanly and ground it down. 

I tried to pay with a twenty-thousand bill, but the man wouldn’t take it.  He went into his back room and rummaged around, bringing fifteen-thousand in change and making me understand he simply didn’t have the additional three-thousand in change.  The weld had only cost two-thousand. 

Me and Mr. Bien. Photo courtesy of Adam Wolf.

At that point we realized we’d been overcharged by about fifty times.  But that was water under the bridge.  So it goes with tourist sites.  The metal worker, a man by the name of Bien, invited us to sit down in his shop and have tea.  As we drank the tea, we communicated with gestures and the little of each other’s languages we knew.  We asked how old his child was (three), he asked us what we thought of Vietnamese women (beautiful).

As foreigners, we will inevitably run into people wanting to take advantage of us.  It comes with the territory.  However, once you break down a barrier, whether through smiles or odd welding requests at seven in the morning, you stop becoming a foreigner, an other, and most people value you as a person and not as a unit of wealth. 

Later, after we had installed the repaired axle in the trailer, we happened to drive past the shop of the man who had initially welded the part, and overcharged me by fifty times.  We decided to stop.  With the help of my phrasebook, I attempted to explain the source of my unsmiling condition.

The previous day, the man had made a good impression on me.  He had a great smile and huge friendly eyes.  Now he pointed up to the sky, seeming to say it was chance and god who had broken the trailer, it was fate, beyond his control.  It was clear he didn’t understand the situation.

Eventually a high school age boy emerged from the back.  After a few attempts at explaining in English, I wrote down the situation, and upon reading it, the boy proved much more helpful than the phrase book.  The welder and his wife had a lively discussion.  We exchanged a few more notes.  The man told me to sit down, and then handed me 20,000 dong, or a fifth of what I’d given him initially. 

Through the kid, the man explained that the uncle who had originally guided me to the place, had told him to cheat me and taken 80,000 dong of the money I’d payed the welder, but he was sorry and wanted to return the money he’d taken.  I took the money, and wrote out a note which was translated simultaneously by the boy.  The man looked me in the eye as the boy translated, and nodded emphatically at the key points.  In the last line, I said I knew the man was a good man, but was still sad at the situation.  The metal worker looked down and then back up at me, and nodded.

I stood up to leave.  We shook hands, and he made me to understand the boy was his son.  He was a proud father, as he should have been.  I shook hands with the boy.  We left on good terms, me much relieved.  It’s possible he wasn’t being completely honest, but at the same time, he didn’t have to give me any money to begin with. 

Perhaps the uncle (Uncle Slick, as Adam calls him) is a lost cause.  However, it seems that engaging with people almost always proves a more successful strategy to resolve conflicts. 

Like the uncle, we become conditioned to viewing certain people in certain ways.  For him tourists are there to make money off of.  By not fully employing my prejudices against people near tourist sites, I allowed him to cheat me.  Perhaps I would do better to be more suspicious.  Yet at the same time, I would have missed out on a valuable experience.  I do not often make myself vulnerable, but perhaps more vulnerability would enrich rather than hurt.  In any case, I hope the armor I usually deploy doesn’t make me so oblivious to my fellow humans as Uncle Slicks at tourist sites.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 7:53 am and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.