Blog

No, not the intergalactic spaceship, but rather the newspaper in Livingston, my hometown.  They’ve agreed to publish articles I write about the trip and I post them here so the blog readers get them as well.

(Published in The Livingston Enterprise Jan. 31, 2008)

A fever friends and a feast while biking throughVietnam

        EDITOR’S NOTE: Former Livingston resident Jim Durfey, a 2000 Park High School graduate, has been bicycling through Asia and Europe with a group of friends. Below is another update on their journey. The Enterprise is periodically posting his accounts of the trek.

By Jim Durfey
For The Enterprise

In the Vietnamese town of Thai Hoa, I awoke to a feverish heat. Sweat soaked my shirt and my skin burned. As I contemplated the prospect of a midnight visit to a hospital in the countryside of a developing nation, I took my temperature. Forty degrees Celsius: I knew it was above normal, but I don’t know the Celsius system to know just how high the fever was.
        A simple equation I used often at Park High converts Celsius to Fahrenheit. I tried to do the math. I even wrote it down, but my mind muddled the figures. Eventually, I decided to simply try to cool myself off. So long as I was conscIOUS and had friends close by, my situation wouldn’t be too dangerous.

‘Now we are all friends’
When my bike group arrived in Vietnam, we were immediately faced with many challenges. Aside from a few mispronounced phrases, we couldn’t speak Vietnamese. In China we knew prices for rooms and food. In Vietnam we were clueless. We also didn’t know what the Vietnamese would think of us. The Chinese unfailingly love foreigners, especially Americans. Relations between the U.S. and Vietnam, on the other hand, have been normalized for only a dozen years or so, and it was not so long ago we were at war with each other.
On our first night in Vietnam, we rented out the attic of a couple in their early 60s. Pictures of our male host decked the living room walls. Here he stood, chest gleaming with medals, shaking hands with an officer. There he stood in the battle dress uniform of the North Vietnamese Army. Most certainly, he had been in the army while the war ravaged his country. Yet he sat with Americans in his home, cordially serving us the strong tea he probably missed on the battle front.
Mr. Quan, a quiet young man who helped us find our attic that night, sat with us and drank tea. We discussed his job in a city far away, his effort to teach himself English, and his girlfriend. He made a passing reference to Vietnam’s history of conflict with France and the United States. He quickly laughed nervously, saying, “But it is no problem, now we are all friends. We don’t care so much about the past.” It seemed the Vietnamese didn’t want to dwell on the war any more than Americans did.
I wanted to focus only on accomplishing daily tasks. Ordering food, finding the bathroom, and getting directions at first all required creative gestures and much mental exertion. However, more difficult problems yield more fulfilling results, or sometimes more delicious ones. After a couple of days, I knew the price of a bowl of pho, or rice noodles, and how to flavor them with fresh mint and a squirt of lemon.
A friendly feast
Though still communist by name, the Vietnamese government began a policy of economic liberalization in the mid-80s. The following flurry of foreign investment and development significantly raised the Vietnamese standard of living. New houses, narrow but deep and tall with distinctly bright colors crop up everywhere. Motorbikes and scooters crowd the roads. Young Vietnamese clothe themselves stylishly in Western fashions. The development has also affected hostel standards and prices.
Eager to extend the financial life of our trip, we chose to camp more often. One afternoon we searched for a site in dreary weather under clouds that promised rain. A jovial woman in a raincoat rode up to us on her motorbike. We explained we were looking for a campsite. She shook her head and feigned a shiver. It’s too cold to camp, she seemed to be saying.

        As an alternative, she brought us to her house. We sat inside one of the cozy wooden buildings that composed her residence while she served us tea. Soon she began preparing a meal. I wound up in a boat with her husband, who trolled around his fish pond, laying nets and harvesting fish.
The Ngugom’s, as we learned the family was called, served us a feast of fish, soup, vegetables and rice. We ate sitting on the floor with them and their two children, communicating without language and laughing at our different eating styles. That night they put us up, and the next morning refused to take the money we offered.
I wondered afterwards how many Americans would do the same for foreign travelers in the U.S. Then I remembered the summer a couple dozen Latvians descended on Livingston. After the jobs they were promised fell through, the community came together to help them find host families and work. Perhaps the most significant differences between Vietnam and the U.S. are not the most important.
On the road again
With the help of a damp rag, I found that my fever came down nicely. I was out of danger. Due to other symptoms, I couldn’t begin biking immediately. About those other symptoms - well, let’s just say my toilet paper consumption increased by several hundred percent. Thankfully, I was back on the road and back to normal (in the most important sense of the word) after a short recovery period.
Biking or traveling isn’t always easy. Things break, people fall ill, and sometimes one simply cannot communicate. However, I find it’s always easier to fall into an outhouse than a rut. Every day I see the sun rise on a different horizon. The scenery, people and food all change. Perhaps the challenges make me tougher, but the sense of achievement suffices for satisfaction. If the accomplishment also results in successfully ordering some food or a smile, I’ll consider it icing on the cake.

最近我找不到有汉字的电脑，可是在 Cambodia （东南亚）我今天找到了。我们现在都很好。这星期我们和一个很友好的日本人碰见了。他叫Yuske, 他也骑自行车在一个特长路：日本到澳道理。他二十四岁而且他也带来了一个吉他。所以我们天天跟他又骑车又弹唱音乐。太好了。他打算跟我们骑到泰国，以后我们去印度他还往南走。

Yuske：我们新的日本朋友，他现在跟我们去泰国。

取乐Yuske,意外 ，我们两天前和两个年轻的欧洲人在路上碰见了；那个男的是法国的女的是俄如萨的。他们已经花十八个月从法国骑自行车到东南亚。他们和我们有差不多一样的目的：好一点了解我们的世界所以他们可以帮助建设世界和平。他们有很都很好的故事。他们现在往北走，我们往南走，可是我们一起花了一个晚上野营。他们去了中亚州在特高的山而且根很多特好的人认识了。他们的故事让我们希望也往中亚洲走，可是我觉得我们今年没有机会。欢迎上他们的网站：www.common-life.org

Elena (俄国) 和 Gael (法国)

我肯定想中国，可是我们几次在涝洼找到了中国饭店和中国人。我们在那里吃了很多中餐因为我们想了天天吃中餐，我特别想红烧茄子，南瓜和排骨 =）我找到了中国人的时候，我想跟他们聊天因为我就不会说东南亚的话。这几次我找到了好玩。东南亚的人是很好的人，可是我必须照会说英语的人跟他们聊天。所以我现在少一点很本地人聊天。不过我们弹唱的音乐越来越重要，是我们的国际话。

我希望祝你新年快乐！我在网上看到中国冬天天气的问题，让我很悲哀知道那么都人不会今天回家过春节。我希望你可以好跟你的亲人在一起好吃好聊天好高兴高兴生活。这春节我们都因该记得生活的最重要的部分：亲人，朋友，平安，和聪明点的回答为了我们世界的问题，最后让我们有世界和平。我祝你和你的亲人平安！

-高竹 （Peter)

After little more than 2 weeks of beautiful cycling in Lao, yesterday we crossed our third international boundary, which in Southeast Asia are coming quite frequently in these smaller countries (3 countries in 5 weeks opposed to China for 3 months).  Several people had told us how terrible the dirt road is in Cambodia coming from Lao, naturally leading to growing apprehension, but we were thoroughly pleased to find a brand new paved 2 lane highway built by the Chinese that was just completed last July 2007, as foretold to us several days ago by a very experienced middle-aged Swiss bicycle touring couple, Mr. and Mrs. Karl Gunthard, whom we met on the road.  It is the same road with the same name (Hwy 13) as in Lao, only newer, in better condition, and even less traffic than Lao which we thought would be impossible.  Excellent.

 

From here we are planning to spend about 1.5 weeks heading south to Phnom Phen, the capital of Cambodia, where we will spend some time with Celina, one of my Maryknoll friends who has been doing mission work there for 2 years.  She has graciously found a host family with enough space for us.  I’m looking forward to learning more about this country by seeing the needs and responses of various organizations through Celina and her friends’ extended experience here.  Since we were unable to visit our German friend, Kathrin, in Vientiane Lao, due to route and timing, this will be our first visit to an old friend since Kevin and Kaishan’s wedding in Guangzhou and Hong Kong back in Nov 2007. 

On Jan. 30, we had the pleasure of meeting Yuske, a 24 year old Japanese man in Pakse town, Lao, who is also cycling far – Tokyo, Japan to Australia. 

He had planned to leave that afternoon when we arrived, but after talking with Nakia (who lived in Japan for 3 years) and having lunch with us, he decided to stay the night in a Guesthouse with us – good choice.  The next day, Yuske decided instead of going straight to Thailand, to join us first to Cambodia and then on to

Bangkok.  Yuske also enjoys music, especially blues, and is also carrying a guitar on his bike!  He is the first cyclist we’ve met who is also carrying a guitar (though we did meet a middle-aged Chinese man with a saxophone).  We jammed together at our guesthouse that afternoon and have played several times since.  Our common songs are House of the Rising Sun and a blues riff in E.  Nakia has also been a great student and has learned the Japanese lyrics for one of Yuske’s favorite songs.

Because of Lao’s beautiful natural environment, clear skies, and sparse population, we’ve been camping more and more.  In fact, we hit a new record last night with 4 consecutive camping nights.  Unlike in

Vietnam’s dense populated countryside, Lao’s countryside even right off the main north-south Hwy 13 that we’ve been on for the past week is very sparsely populated making it easy to find secluded camp sites. 

However, after meeting Gael and Elena last night (biking from France to Beijing and then back to France – www.common-life.org), we’ll try asking people if we can camp in their yards to increase our interaction.  Gael and Elena told us that most of their time in

Cambodia, if they tried to camp away from people’s houses, the people would come out and invite them to camp right in their yards anyway.  Indeed last night, the one house of neighbors came out to our site smiling and talking to us in Khmer (the Cambodian language) even though we didn’t understand, and re-started our dieing fire by putting on all the big logs we had for quite a large fire, we think, to keep away what few mosquitoes there were, and possibly to keep away evil spirits (according to Gael and Elena’s understanding).  See the post below, “Gael and Elena”for more info on their incredible journey. 

 

Something that has surprised us is how dry Lao and northern

Cambodia are.  I was expecting jungle, and although our first 150km in Lao from Vietnam on Hwy 8 had plenty of old growth forest, it wasn’t humid and soon gave way to younger forest and cleared areas reminding me a bit of Kenya’s semi-arid landscape east of Nairobi, seemingly parched by the dry season’s powerful sun.  After crossing the border yesterday, the

Cambodia side has many small brush fires burning in the forest for no apparent reason as there is no agriculture there.  Much of the forest along the brand new 2007 Chinese-built highway has been cut down and now has patchy fires, perhaps to clean the forest floor and hopefully not simply slash and burn. 

The benefits are that mosquitoes have been kept to a minimum and it’s been easy to find dry wood and start camp fires. 

FYI: Lao is Laos.  For some reason, English has added an “s” to the local and therefore actual name of the country, perhaps analogous to Vietnamese boiling down “

America” to “Mee.”  Conversely “Vietnam” in English is the same as in Vietnamese minus the space between the two words,

Viet Nam.  How about calling every country by its real name in its local language? 

It was getting late and we were hoping to make it another 18km or 1 hr to Stung Trung town, especially since it is the first and only town for another 160km in this northern forgotten and unpopulated part of Cambodia.  It wasn’t meant to be though, as instead we were blessed with running into two other seekers with similar goals - young people in their mid-twenties also bicycling the world for greater understanding and goodwill…but in the opposite direction.

Meet Elena and Gael, found on-line at their website: www.common-life.org

  

Elena is from Russia and Gael is from France.  They’ve been bicycling from France for 18 months, having extended their original plan of 1 year to over 2 years, planning to end also in France around December 2008, going back through China and Russia.  As we found with Kuang Sub and Su Ji from Korea, Gael and Elena were extremely talkative, pouring out many of their incredible experiences especially from Central Asia for most of our (camping) evening together, perhaps since they don’t have a larger group like us to float around in to process what they’re experiencing with different people…or maybe they’re just on fire for what they’re doing, or both.  Either way, they are an inspiration to us. 

Unlike us, they were not afraid to tackle India in the summer and parts of Central Asia (“the stan’s”) in the winter – the most direct route from Beijing to Europe.  They told us of high mountain climbs with their loaded bikes, one 50km uphill, an amazing 20km long plateau at 4000m above sea level with no one around, brakes icing up on a different occasion, and camping in -30 C (-10 F) weather.  Confirming reports I’ve heard from other cyclists, they raved about the kindness and hospitality of the people in Kazakhstan, Kashmir, Uzbekistan, and

Kyrgyzstan.  So often when they would be pitching their tent, people would come out and invite them to stay in their homes, to eat, drink Vodka, and occasionally party with their friends and family. 

However, they were perhaps most excited about their experience inPakistan.  They said they thought Pakistan was their favorite country so far on their journey, the people having given them a warm welcome with nearly all not caring much for politics (which seems to be common trend in the world among average citizens).  They traveled safely through areas close to Afghanistan and though they were there a few months before last fall’s turmoil in Pakistan over the opposition leader returning and later being assassinated, Karl Gunthard from Switzerland who runs his own bicycle touring company (www.bikereisen.ch) told us last week that he was there last October and November during the thick of it and that he had no problems from those political issues as a bicycle tourist.  “You biked through

Pakistan?” I asked Karl surprised.  “How was that?”  He looked at me with a smile, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Fine.  It was just fine.”

Gael and Elena also told us they ran into two Americans traveling in Pakistan by motorbike, who told them likewise that they had had no difficulties and instead similarly had had positive experiences with the Pakistani people.  Moreover, though Gael and Elena didn’t go to Afghanistan, they had met another couple who had traveled safely through Afghanistan, though the couple said they did feel it was a bit more dangerous which required additional caution.

One of Gael and Elena’s goals, similar to us, is to seek the truth about a country’s situation and the character of its people first hand, instead of blindly relying on bent and imperfect media sources and worse, commonly held misconceptions about countries and their people (stereotypes).  Beyond the common human error of projecting the violence and turmoil of a small number of countries onto whole regions (as in the Middle East and Central Asia with regards to Israel – Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan) and even onto whole continents (as in Africa[1] with regards to Sudan and Somalia), another such misconception, among many residual fallacies left over from the Cold War that French Gael and Russian Elena have faced together, is the idea that Central Asian people (from countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan which used to be part of the Soviet Union) don’t like Russians and didn’t like life “under the USSR.”  I mean, the USSR was a “bad” and “evil” thing, right?  Were they not the “enemy” from the American sphere’s perspective?  How could anyone possibly have liked the USSR and what they did?In fact what they found, proving Gael and his west European education wrong, was contrary to this line of thought.    1) Central Asians warmly welcomed Elena and talked with her and Gael (in Russian) about how they like Russia and Russians – in addition to enthusiastically explaining their culture and sharing their lives with them, taking advantage of their common language, Russian, unlike most cyclists that pass through who don’t speak Russian.  2) Many Central Asians also talked about how they had liked life in the Soviet Union and the advantages they had, one big one being that the Soviets brought in better education, and for free.

This is similar to what I found among a couple of my Serbian friends living in Beijing and among East Germans in Wittenberg when I studied there in 2002.  I don’t remember anyone in Wittenberg jumping to say that life now is better than before the Berlin Wall falling in 1989.  Instead, most said the DDR (East Germany) had advantages that are now lost, while unification withWest Germany and a capitalist economy have brought different advantages and the best system would combine both.

Beyond sharing their experiences with us, we were impressed with their organization and involvement in a project with UNESCO to build a database of the world’s monuments and their having a formal sponsor from a French-Swiss bank which has allowed them to extend their trip, buy a new tent and a lap top computer, in addition to a French bicycle company that initially gave them free bicycles.  This has got us thinking about how we here at Fueled By Rice could more precisely encompass our principles and goals with a product or project now, besides a probable end product like a book or video, in addition to considering possibilities for sponsorship.  Advice welcome.  For now one of our main goals is being realized with the production of this website, allowing you to experience our journey with us and to learn some of what we are learning via this blog, the photos, and the videos.  Thanks for your interest!

We only had one evening with these quality people, but their effect on us will be felt on the rest of our journey.         

---

[1] Africa in fact is the second largest continent and has the largest number of countries - 47 of them- of any other continent, yet is most commonly clumped together simply as “Africa” even in sentences when specific countries of other continents are being named – listen for it while people are talking.  Although many African countries have had turmoil over the last 50 years during which nearly all fought wars to gain independence from their European colonizers and occasionally civil wars to deal with conflicts stemming from arbitrarily drawn borders by Europe, currently, there are only a few countries with war and major violent conflict: Sudan (Darfur region) 20yr civil war between north and south, Somalia – over 10 years of anarchy and war lords, and for the last month, Kenya, due to public discontent over their rigged presidential election.

I wrote an article for my hometown paper, The Enterprise.  You can find this article on the Media page, but I thought I might as well post it here, too.

Published Dec. 26, 2007, in The Livingston Enterprise, Livingston, Montana

Bicyclists soak up China knowledge - literally

EDITOR’S NOTE: Former Livingston resident Jim Durfey, a 2000 Park High School graduate, has been bicycling through Asia with a group of friends. Below is an un update on their journey. The Enterprise will periodically post his accounts of the trek.

By Jim Durfey
For The Enterprise

CHINA - On our third day biking out of Beijing, the rain started. We stopped to spread waterproofing over our luggage and ourselves. I was already so soaked, I forewent my raincoat. The rain only pelted down faster. It seemed to rise up out of the ground and gush out of our fenders. We couldn’t ride behind each other. Earlier we had found a road built on top of a dike. The water pooled in the road. Cars passing us created wakes over a foot high. “Gosh,” said Drew, one of my fellow riders, “for being on a dike, we sure are wet.”
When my friends and I decided to bike from Beijing, China, to Paris, France, biking on a flooded dike wasn’t what we had in mind. We were hoping for knowledge. We wanted to know of Asia and its people what you can’t get learn from a book. We counted on surprises. But what continues to surprise me is the extent to which biking forces knowledge on you, whether you like it or not. After the rainstorm, I had soaked up so much knowledge about weather in Northeast China, my hands looked like I’d swum across the Yellow River.
Until we began the trip, we were unaware of the sorts of knowledge available for those willing to bicycle across a country. As we biked south, we ignored fluctuations in crops and harvest times at our peril. Fields alive with the excitement of harvest made for great views. But farmers spread crops like rice on the road to dry. Swerving around a pile of corn forces one to note details bus or train passengers might miss.
I have also ground up the muscle-burning hills of Southern China on a bike. Only Lance Armstrong and people using motor vehicles fail to notice hills. As we drifted south, the crops tended towards rice as the landscape tended away from flat. In Guangdong Province, in the deep south, banana trees and sugar cane greeted us. We knew we had successfully escaped snow.
Foreigners in China cannot escape becoming celebrities. At least they can’t if they travel in groups of five on heavily loaded bicycles to areas rarely visited by foreigners. Last week, I stood in front of a crowd of 500-some high school students. The headmaster of the school had asked that I come and speak. I have no qualifications to address such a crowd, but merely being a foreigner in China exposes one to such opportunities. Lack of credentials withstanding, I explained our reasons for doing the trip.

“We want to increase understanding between our two and other countries,” I said in English, and then translated into Chinese when the students claimed they didn’t understand.
I threw in a bit about not merely worrying about money when it came to goals in life. And so goes my public speaking career.
Everywhere we go, large numbers of people gather around us. School children mob our tables when we eat. They follow us back to our cheap accommodations for the night. Mostly, they’re curious. I often answer the same questions over and over again. However, with celebrity comes added hospitality.
In between the north and south, one Mr. Deng invited us into his house for tea. I was tired and wanted to go bed, but he made it hard to refuse. We sat down with him and drank Wulong tea. One of the finer brands of Chinese tea, Wulong tea leaves are pressed together after harvest, aged, and form hard chunks. A unique characteristic of Wulong tea is that the flavor becomes stronger the more times you steep it. As he poured it, Mr. Deng explained how the tea we were drinking symbolized friendship.
“At first,” he said, “the flavor is very light, just like when we first met we were reserved. But with each steeping it gets stronger,” he continued, “just like we open up and connect with each other the longer we know each other.”
Long-term relationships, unfortunately, are not facilitated by living in a different city, village, or rice paddy every night. My four friends and I have other plans for our lives. We can’t bike forever. But while the trip lasts, we will bike through Southeast Asia, India, and perhaps beyond. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, we will continue trying to extract all of its flavor in whatever time we have.
We will probably run into more tea and more rain. We’ll do our best to experience both fully and report back. But for the experience itself, we have only our bikes and our hosts to thank.

Former Livingston resident Jim Durfey, right, talks with Chinese people curious about his bike trip across Asia with friends. Photo courtesy of Jim Durfey (actually taken by Peter Ehresmann).

I am foreign female. Call me Ethina, short for ethnicity. I am from the land of diversity.  

Sometimes this land is so diverse, so small and unique, that it is unidentifiable by normal earthling computers at land borders, and it must be validated by passport, bank cards, expired driver’s permit, Japanese ID card, expired American E visa card, or any other official ID I might have to offer additional validation.  Sometimes it is necessary to take Subject FF into the upper room with mahogany chairs that shine their polished governmental varnish beneath the interrogation light, sit Subject FF down, and ask meaningful questions like, “Where are you going in Vietnam?” or “You worked in Japan?” or “Where are you from?”

 

After Agent Border Control has run out of meaningful questions, and Subject FF is sufficiently feeling like a single cell organism, she can be released to walk out into the light where she is free to join her American friends and enter Vietnam, stamped and all, like shiny happy people holding hands around a globe.

Leaving Vietnam was much easier than entering it. We peddled our hearts out 30 km up the jungle mountains that stretch between its long spindly leg, and

Laos. We wanted to get out. Fast. I’ve read that the North of Vietnam is far less friendly than the South. My trip to Ho Chi Minh City (in the South) in 2005 was full of fun moments between warmhearted streetvendors in the market who tended to my needs like Grandmami’s with fleshy warm arms. I remember joking in the market with women who didn’t want to go down on the price of fruit, and walking away with a bag of things I didn’t pay for. It was picturesque. It was harmonic. It made me choke a little.

 But this is memory, which always projects itself in vibrant, Broadway musical colors. This was also me as a foreign tourist traveling with Japanese Yen to burn for 3 weeks, looking for kicks and giggles. This was not biking for a year, trying to make my means last till the end of the year.

But its hard trying to explain that to a woman working for pennies, who doesn’t have the luxury of leaving her job for a year to see the world by bike, who has fantastical images of beautiful exotic rich foreigners on display boards hoisted up in all her countries’ cities, who equates all the foreigners she sees as better off, rich, able to live beyond their means.

So we peddled hard and fast to escape the jeering “hellos” and the hands held out from the motorcycles, accompanied by long lipped yells, “money, money,” which is exactly what we felt like. Money. People without identities. Foriegners that blended into the pale pink landfill of other foreigners who’ve passed through. How to tell the difference between one type of tourist from another?

They called me Feijoren or African in China. So often that, in the end, when we were close to the border, I started to say yes to get out of explaining.  I had bought a map early on to show people my little unidentifiable archipelago nation. I would take it out, and people would look, and sound it out: Ba-ha-ma.

I took efforts to explain that I wasn’t from Africa, meticulously drawing out the geography of my country:

“It is NOT near Thailand or Africa. It’s a small island country in the Caribbean, between North and

South America. Near

Cuba. Do you know

Cuba? See?

Cuba?” I’d point. 

 “Ahhh.

Cuba. Castro,” people would say.

“Yes. Castro.”

“She’s from Cuba,” they gestured at me, sweating from all the attention.

I would smile, exhausted and deflated, suffering from a feverish spell of deportation.

Over time, I realized that this emphatic explaining killed conversation rather than nurtured it, people would look and nod, and move onto someone else to wonder over. So, not wanting to miss out on the obsequious attention, (Subject FF, Ethina for short needs her kicks too), I tucked the map into the quiet pages of my GRE book, which I no longer have time to study.

But what is a person without a country? A color that blends into the wall, quietly screaming. A foreign devil. A dollar bill.

The Chinese are paranoid about size like I am paranoid about the name of my country. They’d sometimes ask us, “Which is bigger? China or America?” Which is a loaded question when you consider independent states, autonomous regions and indigenous peoples.

And really.

Africa is a big place. And I am from there ORIGINALLY, if we were to speak in terms of roots or neo-African, nu-soul, black pride movement. If we were to speak in terms of Vietnamese American, Vietnamese Australian, Vietnamese Brit. I mean, I don’t call myself African Bahamian because 85% of The Bahamas is black, but maybe I should.

I’ve never even been to Africa.  But I suddenly feel the need to take that repatriation boat back to the Ashanti tribe in modern day Benin, or join a Rasta Farian commune in Ethiopia.

I suddenly feel the need to nod heads with Nigerian and Cameroon immigrants selling Timberlands in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, or Shibuya, Tokyo, or Sanlitun, Beijing, or Kowloon, Hong Kong, with eyes smiling at the sides as they call me sister.  This is black pride movement coded in covert head nods and side smiles at checkpoints along an underground railroad to the North, like smoke signals, like expats-in-Asia that fish out other expats in disdain. I spotted a foreigner (the game most expats-in-Asia play) in Than Hoa, a small town in North Vietnam, and we both nodded at each other after being formally introduced by the restaurant owner. But nothing more. Meaning understood. Please forget you saw me.

But Vietnam doesn’t have a size complex. It’s small and that is all there is to it. And because it is small, its land border between Ping Xiang and Dong Dang towns, which mostly facilitates the passage of Chinese and Vietnamese people, and perhaps never before a Bahamian, it is unequipped to handle cases where new countries come up. And also, because it is small, most of it has been touched by foreigners. It has been mucked by travel. Its eyes, like our eyes, are desensitized, perhaps even hardened to the outside world that comes snooping and prodding.

Not many people have called me an African but have assumed I was American or Indonesian, or French, or Indian.  I am clumped in the foreigner pile, not set aside in the small country group as I was in China.

The country’s slender body has had more time to be infilitrated by foreign tourists than China’s closed borders would let.

Vietnam’s wars fought on its own soil has exposed it to the West. There are ATM’s with Visa and Mastercard signs in the small towns.  There are Western Unions set up in small towns where you are can’t send money, only receive it.

Doi Moi, Vietnam’s economic reform, has opened its markets to foreign investors and its shores to foreign tourists, gently urging its citizens to open their hearts to foreigners, to try and get along with the world for the benefit of the country.

And we bike sweatily through the dirt roads in the small towns desperately trying to avoid the bus usurping highway 1,dodging yippy “hello’s” and child laughter skipping across the road like pebbles from the sky. They know who we are. It’s like they can sense foriegners from a kilometer away. We must have a smell. Like old people’s children.

Unlike China, we have no camera crews stopping us on the road for impromptu interviews to be aired on local TV stations.  No one has invited us to the grand opening of their restaurant to draw the interest of American investors. No one fawns attentively at us.

Instead, we have to bargain hard for everything. Nothing has a set price. Everything is up to the whim of the stall keeper.  This is making us skeptical. We want to leave. We are paranoid of people’s intentions. These are not the innocent, pure third world country people that foreigners love. These are people with flaws. These are people who don’t give a damn about pleasing the doe-eyed foreigner.

But I have always been a bit paranoid, even in China, where people were wide-eyed lovely. Always a chip on my shoulder. These are the side effects of a black pride movement. These are the side effects of a struggle for identity:  Insecurity. Anxiety. Sharp ears.  These are the fist thrusting attributes of someone who wants to see their pen’s end, someone who wants to read their own writing, lost in the murk of ego and meaningfulness, lost in the mist of their own lofty soul searching points.

I killed a fly that crawled out from the sticky bottom of my beer mug, persistent to finish what I’d started.

So sometimes, not-so-pleasant experiences that are outside my realm of familiarity can turn ugly in my mind’s eyes. Experience is often so much built from expectation, which is often based on misunderstanding, our mind funneling out possibilities based on prior knowledge. Sometimes a person scowling is just a person scowling because they’re son came home late from school. Sometimes a woman cannot move because she is breastfeeding behind a counter. And sometimes, she thoroughly hates your guts.

But until we touch, until we communicate, break the skin of our mental glares, until we reach out past our own comfort zones, we won’t know and we won’t be able to do anything about a problem if there ever was one. We will also not see the kindness in some of the Vietnamese poeple who invited us into thier homes and asked us for nothing in return. We will expect something to linger beneath the surface, and walk away feeling a little jaunted and unsteady.

We will remain foreigners in the pink pail foreigner club undistinguishable from other foreign people, a sea of salmon. In which case, running from identity to identity, country to country, movement to movement, gets us as close as we can to the real deal: discovery. The travel bug has blessed me with a curse.

Ok, sorry to have overwhelmed you. It appears that my December post titled, “Is there a just way to make US$1 million,” having asked for comments, has received the least number of comments of any post on the site. I don’t want to scare you away. There are no wrong ideas or answers here. Since in Vietnam and Lao we continue to see major income gaps between rich and poor (brand new gold-tan Toyota Hilux 4-door pick up trucks for the have’s VS. dump trucks used as buses to move The People around), please allow me to revive the discussion:

From my original 3 questions, I want to focus only on #2:

Is there a just way to make US$1 million?

One of the ideas that came up in the discussion we here at Fueled By Rice had was authors. If one writes a highly successful book and makes US$1 million, that would probably be a just way to make that much money. Perhaps a central idea here is that as long as the money one earns all comes directly from the fruit of their own labor, it is just…assuming fair prices. I’m sure there are other possibilities and even arguments against this.

This raises questions about the justness of investments, banks, and the stock markets where one makes money from money by simply putting it in the right place at the right time. I’d be thrilled if someone could argue for the justice in earning money from stock markets and banking.  I myself am earning interest on a savings account for doing nothing but having put the money in the account. 

Any thoughts would be great.

Thanks,
Peter

Last week was miserable, the type that can only be best described with a run-on sentence. 

 

The rain was falling steadily on an abandoned home in the northern Vietnamese country-side while I was lying inside it on the filthy uneven cement floor shivering and listening to my excessively loud heart-beat and moaning from fever on top of my sweat drenched sleeping bag with mosquitoes dive bombing my head contemplating if it was either malaria or dengue fever which was finally doing me in while trying not to hear the bat in the corner whom was making carnivorous barks at my stomach which was answering with slow deep and redundant growls of pain as I tried to remember how many days it had been since I had a successful trip to the outhouse while my short hollow breaths were seemingly running out of air.

 

For the first time on the trip I thought to myself, I do not want to be here.

 

As with any adventure in life ours has had its ups and downs.  Things had been adding up lately and it was putting me on edge.  I began to take things personally. When a truck horn would blow I would assume they were doing it irritate me.  When people would repetitively yell “Hello” at me loudly and mockingly then have a good laugh about it with their buddies I would let it bother me a little too much.  It is not possible to keep an attitude like this up on a trip of this nature; you will either end up going home or going crazy.  One must find ways to deal with all the nonsense.  Some scholars would probably call it something like refined optimism.  I think the air-force may use the term “the right stuff.”   

 

How did I solve my dilemma? Every situation has a good, a bad, and an ugly. The bad was that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. The ugly was obviously me, although the beard has been improving my looks ever so slowly. And the good was found in a number of places.

 

One day on our way heading southwest in Vietnam towards Loa we were in the countryside far from any guesthouse, or tourist spot in any guide book thank God, and were looking for a place to camp.  While exploring the area around a lake a family invited us to stay with them, it turned into the my favorite home-stay experience.  Mr. and Mrs. Nguyom and their two Children, along with a whole gang of neighbors invited us to sleep, eat, and rest in their home and were in great spirits the whole time despite the inability to communicate through common language.  I wasn’t feeling the best and wanted to rest but Mr. Nguyom offered to take me fishing instead, an offer that could not go untaken. So we rowed around a pond in a small boat netting fish that he farms and then later ate the fish for dinner, spectacular. They would not accept any money from us.

 

The next day we arrived in Thai Hoa and found a inexpensive guesthouse so I could stay and rest since I was still feeling quite miserable, and because Jim was becoming quite miserable himself.  Here we met two English teachers who took us to eat and invited Pete, Nakia, and Andrew to their home.  Since Jim and myself did not feel like to going far from the guesthouse we stayed behind. The owner however cooked us dinner and made sure that we ate enough to feel better. Forcing your guest to eat a lot is a Vietnamese custom as I found out, and so is not drinking any tea or water with your meal so that you can fit more food in. Although I did not feel like eating as much as they had hoped I would it was a nice gesture all the same. 

 

Finding kindness, along with slowly recovering form illness, one can quickly change their paradigm on the world.  Here in Lao the weather is warm, people relaxed and extremely friendly, and the traffic low, all great factors for happy cycling. My experiences make me hope that next time things start to get miserable good will be found somewhere nearby.

The ’s’ in Laos, like the Statue of Liberty and deep fried potato chunks, is another example of French opulence leading to unnecessary things. Let’s ignore it, shall we?

I have never seen old-growth forest in Asia. In China and Vietnam, rows of environmentally-friendly reforested trees marched up hillsides in perfect lines. Surely jungle areas creep and crawl with all sorts of growth, but huge trees one sees not.

In Western Laos trees of unprecedented height and girth spring up dozens of feet above the canopy. At their base they prove too wide for even two tall women to encircle in their arms. The trees ooze up rock faces, forcing nubbies of stump and bark into every nook and cranny, searching for purchase. They provide shade for whole seconds, even when biking past at high speed. Thank God the French were averse to logging this far inland. Hopefully the Lao government takes the “Preservation Area” signs seriously. In other areas clear cuts and slash and burn areas are apparent.

Big trees and cut trees. Courtesy of Pete.

The people of Laos seem as honest as their trees are tall. I constantly confuse 20000s and 50000s with 2000s and 5000s. I always seem to get the correct change, though.

In the heat of midday, we bike in our own sweat, while villagers sit in the shade provided by their porches. Thatch huts raised on stilts always have significant porch space. Villagers lounging on the porches casually waft a “Sa-bai-dee” towards us. Sometimes they shake their heads and laugh afterwards. I taste the sweat dripping off my mustache, examine the ample shade provided by the big trees, realize I my idea of destinations is itself excessive opulence. I join the villagers in their laughs.

Once one gets past the screamed “Hellos!”, there is a quiet humor and ambition underlying the attitude of most Vietnamese. They always laugh. Women in colorful flower-adorned hats smile softly at my inability to say “seven”. Others hide crinkled eyes beneath their short brims. Sometimes the hats fall off. Women biking or motorcycling ahead of me swerve about in the road, chuckling on their way to retrieve their headgear.

Mr. and Mrs. Ngugom invited us into their home one evening. That day the wind blew harshly and dark skies promised rain. Mrs. Ngugom approached Nakia, who was asking about camping sites. She pointed at the sky, making a shivering motion. Nakia’s female status often causes people to view our group differently than they otherwise might. Men are impressed, women empathetic. This time we took advantage of our female connections to stay at the home of the Ngogom’s.

Adam, who almost drowned once trying to look at fish, soon had Mr. Ngugom trolling him about in the family fish pond. I finally explained to Mrs. Ngugom that I wanted to help wash dishes. She chuckled her carefree laugh. “Ah, help, help” she said correctly pronouncing the word I mispronounced, “fine, help!” She gave me a basin and a quick lesson and I was soon washing away.

Given our experiences of past Vietnamese homestays, we were nervous. How much would this cost? The couple seemed genuinely nice, but what would happen when we tried to leave?

Mr. Ngugom took me to register with the police. We went on his motorcycle, winding through dark forested trails I didn’t recognize. Coming around one corner he almost collided with another bike. “Hahaha,” he chuckled. I chuckled along.

The woman at the house we stopped at laughed when I showed her everyone’s passport. She asked if I was Peter, then gave me back all the passports. “Get up and go!” her gesture said. Allright! Too bad more registrations aren’t like this one.

That night we dined on freshly netted fish and, if I say so myself, extremely clean vegetables. In the morning when we tried to give the family some money, they wouldn’t take it.

Adam banged his head a smashing blow on the low-hanging eaves. Both Mr. and Mrs. Ngugom laughed big belly laughs. Usually I wouldn’t laugh, but their humor was infectious. I waited till I was facing away snortled into my beard. I guess when life is funny, you might as well admit it.