Blog

Whew. The first internet bar since Pho Chao in Vietnam…200km ago! 

The distance may look small on a map, but the difference between Lao and Vietnam is like night and day.  We entered Lao on Jan 19th, after climbing a long 5km mountain road to the pass/border.  Vietnam had been cloudy and cold in the previous week, contributing to Adam and Jim’s day-long illnesses.  The moutain pass seemed to be holding the clouds on the Vietnam side though.  As soon as we crossed the border and started going down the steep valley road, the clouds thinned and soon the sun was shining full force, warming us once and for all.  60km in, it became so hot that we can’t bike comfortably from 11:30am - 3pm due to intense sun.  Luckily the weather is dry so the shade is cool.  For the 5th time or so now, I think we’ve finally arrived in the tropics.  I’d be surprised if the cold caught up with us again.

Besides sunshine and warmth, the other thing we immdiately noticed in Lao were the huge trees, certainly old growth all along highway 8 from Vietnam to Lao’s main north-south highway, 13 (these two highways are two of only a couple more paved roads in Lao).  What an obvious difference in lumbering policy.  I’ve never seen such big trees in China or Vietnam, though given their populations, its understandible that their wood resources are strained.  With 30 million people in Vietnam, even the countryside has a dense population.  We found it difficult to get more than 100m away from a house for camping.  Lao on the other hand only has 4 million.  So even though we’re on the main highway, the traffic is very light compared with China and Vietnam.  I’d heard about bikers loving Lao due to light traffic on this good road, but I had no idea most of Lao feels like a national park with by far the cleanest freshest air and water I’ve seen on the trip.  This has opened up wonderful camping possibilities, though the night before last we stayed with a family (Vin) who invited us in when Drew stopped to ask about tire shops.

We’re resting today, but look forward to continuing our journey south to Cambodia through this beautiful country, where most people live in small villages mostly composed of wooden houses on stilts.  Unfortunately some things are more expensive than Vietnam since they have to be imported, but fortunately people seem more honest in their commerence with us.  Another pleasant difference here in Lao is that although children and adults still say hello to us whenever we pass by, nearly everyone says hello in their native language, “Sa-ba-dee,” with a tone that seems more genuine and less mocking.

We’ve left Kansas. 

The last 18km of China ran along a smooth highway with broad shoulders elevated above the actual road that sliced like a low flying duck through a valley. The road dipped suddenly then wound around a conch shell mountain only to exhale at the zenith onto a lumpy backstreet that hiked back up and through a gate.  What to do with this twisting shaking elation?  My peddling legs quiver. My hands grease the handlebars. This must be it. There was a man in green uniform staring straight ahead Queen Guard style.  I can hear my heartbeat.

 That was it. They stamped our passports out. They stamped our passports in.  We rode through into a cave of emotion built up over a week of expectation. Restaurant huts slumped with thatch roofs and patched sides that bulged out at the middle.  Dogs, bigger, Rin Tin Tin dogs, flopped their heads down on parched asphalt next to parked motorcycles mounted by men watching and yelling Chinese style, “Hello!” We’re here, aren’t we? 

It was sunny after a long stretch of rain and the cold that kept our emotions in check over Christmas and New Years. This was stepping outside and being free. As if China were our parent’s house.  This was like summer. I want a beer like now.

Lucky for me, they love beer in Vietnam. Within the first day of riding, before being comfortable enough to utter our first raw phrases of  pigeon Vietnamese, we see Bia Hoi (draft beer) signs hoisted above huts with chairs and tables stretched out beneath the brazing sun like tourists on a Bahamian beach. 

We are not in Kansas anymore. We are in freaking Vietnam!  And suddenly I feel lazier. Like I do when the plane lands in The Bahamas on a visit home, and the hot, heavy island air rests on me like the elbow of a large friend, and when I stand up to dismount the aircraft, my feet trudge as if through quicksand, as if gravity is more confident closer to the ground closer to the equator at Tropic of Cancer latitude.

They say that people from tropical countries are lazier because of the heat.

China is on the other side of a mountain.  Practically right there, bikable, touchable. Hyperactive frantic truck honkers. Factories smoking sulfur oxide pipes.  Little, barefoot children running up from behind hedges. Water buffaloes running to douse themselves in mud. We’ve impalpably switched countries: lo mien for pho bo, tea with meals for tea after meals, 645ml beer bottles with rice and dishes for draft beer served with peanuts at beer bars. The beer is just as weak. 3-4%. But it is sweeter, and cheaper, at 2,000 dong, or one quai or $0.10 (the cheapest ive ever paid) a mug And the people sit on the sidewalks to drink it like they do in Beijing’s hutongs.

 I sat and typed with a little espresso mug of Vietnamese coffee served with a French filter or phin and condensed milk or sua sitting unstirred at the bottom.  I am to let the coffee steep, then stir. The man who served it to me said that most people usually only have one cup because it is so strong. Foriegners might ask him to add water. This reminds me of the saturated coffee I drank mistakenly in full 200ml mugs in Spain. For my first two months there, I attributed an accelerated heartbeat to stress and change in atmospheric pressure. I thought I was going to have a minor heart attack.  I asked the Vietnamese man in the café  to kindly dilute my cup, which still left me wired until about 2am. I go mad over the sweet milk though.

The French left their charm.  Their ability to lounge delicately and enjoy a cup without looking gratuitous did not go lost on the Southeast Asian coconut trees that swing at the gentle folds in their waists and the lazy way people start their mornings with a mug of beer drunken with breakfast noodles, or the way women sit at restaurants at every time of day feeding children, waiting for kicks. This slowness pulls at our nerves, and we stride slower and shorter.

This is the tenderest way to travel.  To ease into a country, one road at a time.  We see only the road in front of us and the people we ask directions from and bargain with for food and shelter. Biking cuts out the stress of guidebook mustsees. It limits scope to the next town for lunch or rest. It ties our experience more to the connections we make with people we talk to, to the lands we must trek. A day contains so much for us because there are no moments folded into a bus ride, or a two hour bullet train. Vision is slow motion.

I forget speed. The adrenaline junkie jumping from kick to kick, text message to TV station, to music video, to dessert, to diet, to advertisement, to dancing on tables in dark clubs, to conversation topic, to shopping spree for candles, switched.

S   L   O   W      D   O   W   N  .  .  .  .

Notice: Motorcycles packed with three men warming each other’s hands in each other’s jackets or mothers with newborns curled up in sacs on their backs or little girls clutching pigs with fifteen chickens tied to their dad’s motorbike.

This does not seem odd to me. I panic that I am no longer surprised. What is experience if not shock? Is it all just muck? Treacherous annihilation? When all is well in the universe,  where is my irony? When all is equal, and we start on a clean slate in a new country where none of us speak the language nor have any prior history (except for a brief visit of mine in Ho Chi Minh City in 2005) where is there brooding space? Where is there a shadow from which to dispel myths and reveal hypocrisies? When all seems normal, and rolled out onto the scenery like a slow, winding road, where is there difference between the edge of my skin and the beginning of theirs?

In Hanoi, the tension of motorcycle speed and imminent danger raced beneath our skins as we road South from the Chinese border. They zoomed past, nipping small parts of our limbs, knuckles, wrists, leg hair, and we became nervous at this more agile danger that makes Chinese dumb trucks look like big stupid animals.

Yellow, the color of French colonial buildings, drooped dilapidatedly beneath weeping coconut trees onto the screaming streets. The unpreserved buildings bent their unmanicured backs hairy with smoke to the growling motored bikes like defeated relics bowing to their new, swifter masters. Doi moi, the country’s economic reform, has Asian and European investors pouring into Vietnam. They, like the Chinese are quick to develop. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, population growth and agricultural development has people fidgety to make a buck. It strains our communication because we can never be sure if people are trying to make a profit or be nice.

We don’t speak their language so we cannot build confidence or respect.  We can only smile and hope that  the smile in the crinkle of our eyes transmit feelings of friendship.  Sometimes, we are redeemed with mutual signs of friendship. A man paid for my dinner a few nights ago. Sometimes, we are treated like big companies with elaborate PR image management schemes.  Last week, a woman riding her bike next to mine, got off and asked me for money as calmly as if she were asking me for the time.

We’ve left Kansas. The homogeneity of hospitality and curiosity that followed all the way down China is variegated here. Statues of armed women and men with jungle hats reminiscent of famous images from the Vietnam war (the Vietnamese call it the American War) trickle through city parks. The fine arts museum in Hanoi was decorated with portraits of soldiers surrepticiously welcomed in clandestine villages where peasants rebandaged their wounds and restocked their food supplies. Huts hid beneath the shade of banana leaves where guerrilla units planned attacks against Diem’s government.

The Vietnamese like their freedom.  If China is known to the world for its Great Walls, Vietnam is known for its wars against the Chinese, the Japanese, the French, and the US. Our connections with them are more complicated because of this history. They do not fawn over us like the Chinese whose exposure to foreigners has been limited. We have to bargain hard for food and shelter.  For fruit. We ask a price for milk, eyes go up and roll around, and a price rolls out from the top of the head.  Little boys kick us out of their soccer games if we don’t make the cut.  Vendors kick us out of their alleyways if we linger too long without a purpose.

I sit and type slowly with the alcohol of midday beer rolling through my skull. Women are around me fondling their babies, pushing their 13 year olds towards me to translate. Fruit is peeled, sliced and put on my computer for me to eat. I am being motioned to come inside the house and eat lunch on the floor with a straw mat spread out beneath. I only meant to drink a beer and then leave. But men, liquored up from prior bar stops, keep motioning for my glass to be refilled as they ask me if I want to marry their friends. I’ve had three, and am about to have the fourth. I can’t keep this up. I am buzzing, typing through the buzz.

All the women in town have stopped here at one point or another and rubbed their hands through my locks. I write through it. It no longer phases me. I am sober cab. I have to be or I will get nothing done. Here comes a bamboo pipe with tobacco.  I tell myself the only polite thing to do is to smoke it. People swarm around me like flies, like whirring motorcycles on Highway 1A, Vietnam’s main artery, the road we’ve been avoiding for the last 5 days since Hanoi. Men, alcohol infested, old women with betel juice stained teeth, childbearing women, loud and catty, all try to talk to me, get a reaction out of me. But it is hot and I am tipsy and straining what is left of my brain to concentrate. It is difficult to write for longer than a two minute stretch but, I will not leave.

We’ve left Kansas. Things have slowed down. Life seeps through like coffee filtering through steel. When it is all on the other side, inside its proper cup, it will be right and strong, with a bitter sweetness like Angostura. Tasty enough to sip and brood over.

Why would anyone want to hear about us?  That beats us.  But we’re still here.  And to celebrate our incredulity, we’ve made a special page to feature other people featuring us. Sometimes it even features other people as they feature us featuring us.  Prehaps a bit narcissistic, now that I’ve put it that way, but go to the media page to judge for yourself.

Also, I think the links all work, but the computer I’m currently on is slowly self destructing, and I’m not hanging out in this net bar to fix them any longer. It may be a while before I see a computer again, so just email me and be patient.

-Jim

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.

Taking a stroll around Hoan Kiem lake in the middle of Hanoi one can meet all sorts of people.  Food vendors, international travelers, or Hanoi residents chatting on benches. I happened to be share my bench with a former Vietnamese resident who was kind enough to share his story with me.

Mr. Lee is 67 years old and has been living in Canada for the last 28.  Mr. Lee grew up in Southern Vietnam, and in 1976 when the North fully integrated with the South to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam life changed for him rapidly. 

He explained to me how there were no freedoms, how people were issued one shirt per year, all the same color. ”People were forced to live off of 3kg of rice a month, terrible.  Even if you wanted more there was no way to get it.” He told me how his brother, a former presidential pilot was forced to go to a “reeducation camp.”  He himself was spared because he was a water works engineer and was needed. He was put to work in one of the provinces of the South.  

With a tone of self disbelief he told me that in 1980 he and his brother took a boat from the southern coast of Vietnam to Thailand. He claims his brother’s navigational skills he used as a pilot allowed them to correctly make their way over the five day journey. The boat was 6 ft wide and 106 ft long. ”There were 103 people in it, and you could reach out and touch the water, 103 people!” They had to be very careful and skirt the international waters because there were Thai pirates known to seize the ships.  The boat had one single-block diesel engine and would not restart if it was ever shut off, he knew this because once they reached shore they tried to restart it but could not. ”I don’t know how we did it” Mr. Lee exclaimed.

Once in Thailand he made his way to Victoria Canada where he now resides.  He lives there with his whole family, and spoke fondly and often of his grandson who likes to kayak, camp, and wants to someday spend more time in Vietnam to better understand it. 

This is Mr. Lee’s second trip back to Vietnam and has been traveling for about one month now.  He was very interested to hear about our trip and thought it a wonderful idea. He thought it a great thing to do while young, he wishes he would have had the opportunity to do a similar thing at my age. “Now I have the money, but not the health” he told me.  He had wanted to do a motorbike ride from Saigon to Hanoi but could not find anyone to do it with him, so he is traveling by bus. 

Of Vietnam today Mr. Lee has a very different outlook than he did 20 years ago.  He thinks things are much better, as indeed for many they are, but still thinks people lack freedoms. He also told me that social mobility is a challenge and that for poor to become rich is very difficult.  He feels that people in Vietnam are eager to look forward and put much of the past behind them, and with Vietnam being one of the fastest growing economies in the world it is not surprising.

Mr. Lee for me was a great example of how change can happen in a relatively short period of time. From fleeing his country as a refugee he has returned as a tourist and was very eager to tell me of the beautiful places he had visited. I can only hope to have more genuine encounters like this one as we make our way towards Laos. 

We began the new year under clear skies in a new country. We rolled across the Vietnamese border on the first of January and biked under blue sky, for the first time in several weeks, through the border and down a long hill.

I was eager to see if the change from China to Vietnam would be subtle or drastic. The car horns definitely changed. The architecture reflected more European influence. We biked through the small border town of Ding Dong, and down a huge hill. So long was the hill, I began to suspect the entire country was downhill. The children yelled “Hello!” with American accents. People along the side of the road waved and smiled. They seemed less surprised to see foreigners. And many more spoke English.

The sun sunk in the sky and the light softened. We still sped downhill, but needed to stop soon. We pulled into a village not having any idea how to say “hotel” or “guesthouse” in Vietnamese. In fact we knew little more than how to say “Hello”, which makes for short conversations.

In the middle of the village we stumbled upon one Mr. Quan, who spoke English well. He took us to the home of stern, serious man, who offered to let us sleep on the floor of his attic for 100,000 dong, or fifty yuan, or about six dollars, or the price we normally paid in China for a regular room with a bed. We accepted the offer, and Mr. Quan stayed around to help translate. He worked in a bigger city nearby, but grew up in the town of Dong Ma, where we were staying.

FBR and Mr. Quan (in the middle).

As we sat downstairs, drinking tea served by the inn owner, we quizzed Quan on useful Vietnamese phrases. He always replied rapidly in an indistinguishable series of impossible-to-replicate sounds. We had him write some phrases down. He took my pin in his thin, sinewy fingers, and wrote “Toi co the cin o day khang?” Great. It slowly became obvious Vietnamese would not be a quick study.

Mr. Quan was very soft spoken, but had a wide smile. He told us about his girlfriend in the bigger city, and his desire to get a better job. We talked about Vietnamese history. “For a long time,” said Quan, “it was under French control, and then American.” Here he paused and laughed nervously before continuing, “but it is no problem, now we are all friends, we don’t care so much about the past.”

I looked up at the wall above Quan. Dozens of pictures featured the inn-owner, here his chest crowded with medals, there he shook hands with a high-ranking officer, here he posed in the normal battle fatigues of the North Vietnamese Army. He was about sixty years old.

I don’t know what it is that causes a man to invite his former enemies into his home as guests. Maybe it is only because we’ve forgotten the past. Maybe it’s just to make a buck, or dong. However, I’d like to believe it has more to do with one’s will towards peace and forgiveness.

Later that evening, I found that my axle had broken. That’s one of the number one things you don’t want to break on a bike. The next morning, my host pointed me in the direction of the bike fixing place. I wandered around aimlessly, pointing at my wheel and asking bemused early-morningers, “Bike, where?” When I wound up back at the inn, the inn keeper came out and guided me to the bike mechanic, then stayed around to make sure he did everything correctly. I obtained the new axle and put it on my bike. It worked much better after that.

Four days in and we’re naturally still adjusting to some big differences in culture and language that the China - Vietnam border divides. A funny thing, international borders are.  We are new in this culture, and now clearly see how comfortable we were in China - that we understood much of the daily culture, knew the pricing, and could speak the language.

We had been cold under grey skies in western Guangxi prov, China for more than a week. Though rather symbolically, the day we pedaled out of Pingxiang city to the Friendship Gate 18km away, the sun began coming out and was full force by the time we reached the moutainous border crossing.  It has been warmer since, however the nights remain cold: 5 Celcius (41 F) on Jan 2, when we woke up from camping in a dry rice field near Bac Giang town.  The first 2 days were beautiful and amazing biking - slightly down hill for over 100km, winding through a gorgeous moutainous valley following a river.  50km northeast of Hanoi, the land flattened out into fertile fields of rice and corn.

The language barrier has been tough, and it comes through mostly when we have to order food.  Jim’s phrase book has helped us, but so much that we were able to easily communicate to people before (about our trip goals), is now lost to non-English speakers.  Although we have run into 1 or 2 English speakers each day, most people don’t speak English northeast of Hanoi.

A major cultural difference that I am slowly learning how to handle, is pricing, negotiating, and rip-offs.  The Vietnamese play hardball.

Adam shared a proverb he’d heard, “The Cambodians plant rice, the Laotians harvest it, and the Vietnamese sell it.”  Moreover, an old Frommer’s travel guide at our current guesthouse discusses how Vietnam is more expensive than other SE Asian countries and how the Vietnamese always seem to be on the go (by motorbike), from 6:30am when the roads are clogged, until they fall over exhausted in the evening…go go going forward, up, ahead, making money where ever possible.  I’m slowly beginning to accept this as a different cultural characteristic, but I must admit that for the first 3 days, I was quite upset and put off by it.

To be fair, on all three days in Vietnam so far we have also run into a nice person who is eager to help us (a guy helped us find an inexpensive guesthouse and restaurant our first night and talked with us for a while about Vietnam, and a highschool senior tried to help us find a guesthouse in Bac Giang, though failed), and there were a few people in China who tried to charge us more than the going and fair price (so thankfully we’re experienced when it comes to negotiating prices and handleing those uncomfortable situations).  However over our 3.5 months biking in China, I can maybe remember maybe 5 such unpleasant instances.  In our first 3 days in Vietnam, we’ve had 2 major situations and I’ve had 2 or 3 minor situations.  I think in addition to the basic cultural difference and our lack of language power, the fact that Vietnam has so many more foreign tourists (I saw over 100 in Hanoi just biking to our guesthouse in 15min) with plenty of money and who are weak bargaining rookies, has contributed to my sour impression that Vietnamese will rip me off at every turn if I’m not on my guard - and this has nothing to do with my being specifically American, just my being a Western tourist.  I’m sure most westerners just pay the first price quoted without thinking much beyond, “wow, only 5.00 dollars or euros? That’s CHEAP!” when in fact $5.00 for a room or 1 meal is quite a bit in these economies, and to some extent disrupts local economies.

Our two big attemtped rip-off instances involved two different small restuarant owners in two different small towns.  Without language, we immidiately started writing down prices to bargain and to confirm them after we entered Vietnam - espcially since EVERYTHING has to be negotiated and the current conversion is confusing: Vietnamese Dong run 16,000 / US$1.00.  (Vietnamese small town restaurants, like Chinese, do not have menus, one simply looks at the meat and vegetables available, and orders from those, so there are no “listed prices.”)

In a noodle restaurant one evening (for a late night snack), Adam, Nakia, Drew, and I asked about noodle prices, and the female owner wrote down 6,000 per bowl.  We asked for 3.  When it came time to pay, she asked for 45,000 total, over twice the price she’d written down (6,000 x 3 = 18,000).  She was adamet and confident that we owed her 45,000 (we’d recieved nothing else, no drinks or other side items).  We had a body language banter for a few min, mostly involving each of us pointing earnestly at the old and new written prices.  Confident that we were in the right, though confused and trying to find our error, we forgave 2,000 and left her a 20,000 Dong bill.  When we walked out, she didn’t yell, follow us out into the street, or otherwise make a big fuss as we would have expected if we really did owe her 45,000.

The next night, in Bac Giang town, we ate at a small street side family run restaurant (as we always do).  We almost left before ordering because their first quoted prices were too high.  Nakia stayed on though and bargained the prices down to nearly half the original prices.  With these prices, the rest of us agreed to stay and eat there, dispite being a bit put off by the attitude of the young woman from the famiy doing the bargaining.  The prices were written down: 15,000; 15,000; 20,000 for the 3 dishes, plus 15,000/big communal bowl of rice which we had 2 of, so 80,000 total Dong, but the total wasn’t written down.  At the end of the meal when I went to pay, the young woman totaled the bill, and wound up with 175,000 Dong.  It seemed high, I looked confused, and asked Nakia what she had negotiated and told the others the total to which they all were surprised.  Nakia came over, and noticed the written prices per dish were different, and actually was a whole new sheet of paper.  When we motioned that we thought the total was too high, and we wrote down the old prices, the young woman loudly said, “No, no, no,” and was clearly upset.  Had we not been sure of the other prices, her confidence and anger probably would have convinced me just to pay it to avoid continuing the unpleasant confrontation.  However since our money is tight, we’re seasoned travelers, and the total was SO much higher than it should have been, we continued to assert that we knew 80,000 was the agreed upon amount.  The young woman walked away flustered, back to the family’s dinner table were they were eating, and continued eating her rice.  An older woman got up from the table and came to the desk where we were standing with the bill. She’d watched the previous scene and looked at the bill as we continued (as best as we could) explain that we’d agreed on lower prices before ordering.  She quickly agreed to what we were saying, wrote down the correct total (80,000) herself next to the 175,000 total, and even gave us proper change for the 100,000 bill we paid with. 

We were all troubled by what the young woman had tried to do, and were confused that she’d even try to rip us off after writing the prices down.  Curious about the whole situation, after I’d paid, I took the sheet of paper with both her and the older women’s totals to the table where the family was eating to ask the younger woman about the difference.  I remained in silence since I don’t speak Vietnamese, shrugged my shoulders to show my confusion at the difference, and I tried to have an inquisitive and neutral facial expression to be non-aggressive about my inquiry.  The young woman was clearly upset upon seeing the paper, pushing it out of her sight, and speaking quickly and nervously while motioning for us to leave.  One of the young men at the table spoke a few English words, saying that she was wrong or bad, and that they were sorry, to which a few others at the table agreed.  We left upset and disspointed that we must have seemed like such fools to the young woman that she attempted such an obvious rip off.

We initally thought there must be something in the language that we’re not getting, some how there must be other symbols that mean higher numbers, like letters that we’re mistaking for numbers that mean larger amounts.  However the other restaurants we’ve eaten at have been straightforward and stuck to the originally written down prices.

Finally, this morning I came down to the small front desk to ask about the washing machine we’d been told we could use yesturday and to ask for a map.  The washing machine turns out to be a service, for which it costs 20,000 per pound, and the front desk attendant estimated my rather small load to be 3 pounds and gave me a total of 60,000 dong (about 30 yuan, US$4.00, or 3 nights stay for me in other guesthouses).  I told him I thought it was too expensive, so I’ll just wash it myself. “Ohh, You can’t wash clothes in your room.”  This was a surprise to me, we had a bathroom sink that would work just fine for my essentials. “Oh, then I’ll just not wash my clothes,” I repled.  He reminded me, “You can’t wash clothes in your room, or you have to pay.”  “OK, don’t worry,” I said.  “I’m also looking for a map, do you have one?”  He found a small clearly used map in a drawer of the front desk and opened it up carefully as something had been spilled on it and the creases were sticking.  “Is this map free?” I asked.  “No no,” he said. “Its 10,000.”  Since I’d seen Nakia’s bigger map for the same price she’d purchased yesturday, this seemed high to me, and I told him so.  I then noticed an old price tag up in the corner that said “5,000.”  I brought this to his attention, which embarrassed him, and he said, “Ok, 5,000.”  Seeing a clear and recurring pattern in my interactions with Vietnamese selling me things, I told him that I’d read Vietnamese are known for being business-minded people and often look for ways to make money.  Is it a part of the culture?  His unclear response told me he really didn’t understand what I was asking about, but he said since I’d been traveling for a long time I wasn’t like other foreign tourists who didn’t pay as much attention to prices.  I then told him, “Since this map is small and its obviously been used, how about 3,000.”  “Ok,” he said, and I went off to find a bowl of noodles for breakfast of which they first told me the only noodles they had were 20,000, until I saw a hidden poster-menu that listed different styles of noodles including 8,000 and 12,000 kinds. 

On day 4 in Vietnam, I’m slowly coming to accept this different, more aggressive bargaining culture and I’m much less upset than two days ago.  I keep reminding myself that I’m a guest here and its my responsibility to learn how to play by Vietnam’s rules.  Maybe the ambitious Vietnamese business attitude is connected to global economic justice (see previous post, “Is there a just way to make US$1 million?”).  I can imagine it might seem quite just to the Vietnamese (and others) to play Robinhood with their comparatively wealthy foreign tourists, and if the foreigners don’t realize or mind that they’re being ripped off, then there’s nothing wrong with it.  Maybe I should even let myself get ripped off and knowingly contribute to righting past injustices.  But no, for this one, I will strive to better learn how to play the bargaining game, Vietnamese style.

There is on-going needless bloodshed tonight.

Kenya, Dec 29-31 2007 has seen violence and chaos break out in Nairobi after fraudulent elections.  I have several friends who still live in Kibera slum (1 million residents in a 2km square area), the heart of the violence, in addition to Maryknollers (Americans) doing mission work there.  Nearly 100 people have already died (as of Dec 31 2007) (over 300 have died as of Jan 5), and the tribal violence continues.

See article on the International Herald Tribune:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/31/africa/AF-POL-Kenya-Elections.php 

Moreover, while most of us are also aware of Sudan’s Darfur region, Somalia has become worse than Darfur and grossly deglected by international bodies due in part to Darfur’s high attention in the last 6 months.  Yet Somalia continues to live in chaos, violence, and fear due to anarchy since the mid 1990s, which again sparked up in the last couple months, creating a living hell for all people there.  Minneapolis - St. Paul has many Somalian immigrants who have come from that violent hell who can undoubtedly would appreciate all the outreach, support, and friendship-building availiable. 

Please keep Kenyans, Somalians, Sudanese, and Middle Easterners from Saudi Arabia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan in your prayers and pray for PEACE around the world, that all people around the world may see the light and say to their leaders who propagate extremism, intolerance, hate, and war of all kinds due to power and economic insentives (”The Military Industrial Complex,” as coined by former pres. Eisenhower): “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! NEVER AGAIN WILL WE KILL ANOTHER!

“WE ARE ONE, BUT WE’RE NOT THE SAME, WE GET TO CARRY EACHOTHER” -from One by U2

“THERE’S NO ONE JUST LIKE ME, YET AS DIFFERENT AS WE ARE WE’RE STILL THE SAME” - from Season Suite by John Denver

Things have been slowing recently. We wind down the last of the wicked mountains with their fake peaks, and gaping caves that gawk at us from a distance.  We trickle down the last thumb of China’s Southeast like the spittle that painfully combs the sparse grass hairs and tickles the muddy river belly of this border town Ping Xiang. 

I can smell Vietnam. Its right there: 18km away. It smells like rice mixed with mud. We will have to cross the Mekong, which fondles the banks of the Tibetan Plateau ，China’s Yunnan province, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, dribbling rice and fruits like a no-good man pollinates his offspring. It will be brown， a lazy spittle in dammed areas， a rushing gorge near the delta. Brown is not a color of shock. It’s one that dulls, like the oversized blazers and the Mao hats of old men who play Mazhong (Chinese chess) in parks. Peasants who blend into the mountains. Planters who blend into the fields. 

We honker down and wait for it to come. We are not scared, but anxious. Crawling back and forth through the street lights filtering through steaming vats of dumplings and noodles, sallowing the viscous night with their fat yellow clouds. Tapping our feet, looking up into the sky, reading a chapter, looking for food, tapping our feet, restless in this halfway city with its half Vietnamese, half Chinese signs. We have nothing else to do but wait to leave.

I have guesthouse, restaurant, net bar radars and their Chinese characters zoom into my focal vision like a movie trailer. These are the only characters I can read so I notice them even if I don’t want to go online, even if I’m not hungry. This keeps my senses tuned to the present. These big gaping signs signify safety, and I look for them like they are Bahamian flags, a safety zone in war times. I tap my feet. I rub my freezing hands together like a New York vagrant over a 50 gallon drum fire. I shiver, waiting.

People are tapping the water pipes with laughter. Vulgar, drunken yells slam against the dusty hotel window like a drunk friend who doesn’t realize how late it is. We smell excitement. Our street is shaped like a tourist attraction with red tents, outdoor seating, and delicacies like skewered rat for gullible travelers to experience. I like to experience so I pressure my friends to go streetstall hopping. We sample a few, and have a beer acting like decadent expats in a lost generation, ortravelers just passing though, the only real attention this town seems to get from foreigners, unless your Vietnamese and you own a store.

Because of our visas and the holidays, we’ve been taking three day breaks every three days.  We have no more weddings to attend or friends to meet. We have no other purpose but to get to Vietnam, and it is 18km away. Aahhh! This is more like a vacation. My mind is vacating. My memories are slowing down. I am getting fatter and slower. Every so often I get a rush, and my group members and I play the “What night was that?” game. This stream is petering out.

Soon we will be looking at China in retrospect. Soon I will be comparing every other country to China and not Japan. Soon I will be looking for concrete architecture cropped by clay roofs and hollowed by courtyards, bright red wooden gates that smell of paint instead of age. I may no longer think of simple wooden temples with ferocious guardian statues and tatami mats and paper sliding doors, colossal gates that smell of cedar.

My imagery will be replaced by more recent contact. I will look for signs of China: its smells, its language, its sounds.  Soon I will miss it. Perhaps even the frantic honking of buses and the guttural growl of coal-carrying dumb trucks breathing their exhaust onto my legs like a teenage boy kissing a petrified ear will seem faraway and romantic. Like sound blown through a conch shell. Faraway pink sand.

I speak in the future tense because I do not know what is ahead.  Perhaps this is dangerous to do because I am making self-fulfilling prophecies that might kill the surprise. This is not living in the moment. This is waiting for tomorrow, like a fiance waits for a soldier.

In some ways, our trip is only beginning now.  All five of us having lived in China for a significant period of time before cycling through it, (my four months being the shortest period), we’ve traveled through the populous, Han-predominant East, knowing for the most part what to expect, knowing enough Chinese to interact with the locals, to tell them hello, to ask them their occupation, to get a little drunk with them.

We’ve seen indicators that might prove or refute premature suspicions we might have mustered up beforehand: 1. it is much cheaper to travel and easier to bargain in the countryside, 2. people are much nicer and will invite you into their home without knowing you, 3. it really helps to speak the language to gain people’s trust and make deeper connections, 4. many Chinese love foreigners and most in the countryside have not been exposed to them, 5. Most Chinese people have no idea where The Caribbean is.  

China is uncomfortable. It is always happening. It is loud with big signs, piercing music, shouting people, shouting buses. We cannot stop this life from happening. We cannot keep the children from creeping up behind us as we eat. We cannot keep curious people from grabbing and trying to open letters we want to mail home.

It is 11：10pm December 31, 2007， the last fifty minutes before the new year， and we wait，shell-shocked and exhausted， like night watchmen， like the MC at a New Year‘s celebration， staring at the clock， waiting for the jump， the ball to drop，for people to go crazy. I hold my breath for the next adventure when we will not have the safety net of language and background to settle us in comfortably. Perhaps, we will not have the innocence of non-traveled eyes, and the muck of experience will muddy the surprise of that to come.  Perhaps, our expectations of what will happen will turn out to be completely wrong.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. We still have to get through tonight’s scheduled street performance on the cold river front with the dribbling water petering out beneath the concrete arched bridge. I hope the audience behaves. But you never really know in China. Or anywhere for that matter。I hope the border cops are nice。  

People in China and the U.S. often tell me how incredible and great and awe-inspiring this trip is. That’s actually not what I want to hear. If they wanted to say that I was incredible or awe-inspiring, then I wouldn’t mind, and they would be correct. But this trip is not that incredible. One of the reasons we’re doing this trip, in fact, is to convince people that biking is not difficult, and that it represents a viable and often preferable method of transportation, especially compared to driving. We’ve met numerous other bike tourists along the way, many of whom are doing longer and more difficult trips than we. So read away and run out of excuses not to bike.

We ride 18 speed bikes designed long rides. We have biker shorts, comfortable handle bars, and tons of other crap. Along the way, we’ve run into several other groups of bikers along the way. Old Chinese men form the largest population of bicycle tourists in China. Some travel in groups, some individually. They do both longer and shorter trips. However, all of them travel fast and light with little regard for how sweet their gear is.

One group we met north of Shanghai. The several older men rode older single speed bikes. They had no luggage to speak of. Indeed, we might have mistaken them for commuters were it not for a couple who wore shirts emblazoned with the name of their bike club. They were biking to Beijing from Shanghai to help celebrate the Olympics. We almost joined them at their accommodation for the night, but it proved slightly too expensive for us. We biked off into the night with them assuring us that if they, native Chinese, couldn’t find a cheaper place, surely us foreigners would not be able to. But we did.

The group of bikers with whom FBR has had the longest relationship has certainly been the Koreans, Kwangsub and Suji. We met them at the end of a long, hard day of biking on a busy road. We’re both about the same age and share similar world-views, as became quickly apparent when we stopped and talked to each other on the side of the road. We biked together for the rest of the day, when we wound up at the Zhuzhou campus of South Central Forestry University, Adam’s and mine old stomping ground. The Koreans proved to be very tolerant and easy going. We decided to camp, and I led everyone down a bumpy dirt road in the dark, to where I thought there would be a site. It turned out to be a damp rice paddy. “Everything is OK,” said Kwangsub, in what would become a mantra for the easy-going Koreans, “Whatever you want is OK, don’t worry about us.” We found a dry spot in the paddy, and it seemed all right.

The Koreans are biking from northeast China to southeast Asia, north to Tibet, through India and then on to Europe. They eventually might make it to the Americas during a trip which will last over three years. We excitedly discussed our reasons for biking over our first dinner. Kwangsub pointed out how biking binds you to the land more closely than other forms of transport: “If I use motorcycle I sometimes won’t get the feel. But if everyday I eat some rice [here looking pointedly at all of us] I can get the feel on my bike.” He went on to point out additional advantages of using bicycles: “It is my own power, it is a challenge.” We couldn’t agree more. Especially the part about eating rice. We biked with the Koreans for another week. They speak English well and their added perspectives proved invaluable when it came to processing our experiences.

Mr. Wang Yajun has already cruised around China for three years. He’s used up three bikes and a couple roles of film to ride from his home in Heilongjiang, far in the northeast of China, to Tibet and most other provinces in China. He bikes 100 km a day, although he once logged 230km coming down from Qinghai to Lanzhou. Mr. Wang is a widower. As he told me very earnestly, his wife was unable to bear children. Now that he has no attachments to his home, he bikes around, gathering experiences and for his health.

He also bikes in support of the Olympics coming to China. For this long voyage he has merely two handmade saddle bags slung across the back of his bike. Inside he has a saxophone, a banner with his name and mission on it, and some pictures of him in various locations of note around China. He also has a book with city government seals stamped in it, to verify where he has gone. Mr. Wang says he would like to bike outside of China, “but I’m too old now,” he claims, “so I’ll just bike on the mainland.”

We once stumbled upon two Germans in a small restaurant on a street crowded with other restaurants. It turns out they were also biking to Hanoi. Because they didn’t have much vacation time by European standards (four weeks) they were traveling quickly. But we eagerly listened to their stories of decades of previous bike trips.

Coming out of Confucious’ home town in pouring rain we were passed by a computer programmer also on his way to Shanghai. He worked with the Olympic committee and was also biking in support of the Beijing Olympics. He carried one very small bag. In Zhejiang province members of a local bike club approached us. Soon they were escorting us to a great campsite. They biked with us the next day, passing us off to bike club in the next town like a multi-wheeled baton.

We ran into another group of bikers in northern Guangdong. They were all retired workers from a wire factory, biking to improve their health. They biked at an aerobic pace, stopping only for short cigarette breaks. “You bike really fast,” I told Mr. Zhang, next to whom I was biking. “But you have so much stuff,” he replied, eyeing the piles of bags on my front and rear racks, and the trailer I was pulling. We biked with them for 40 km until they arrived at their home town. It was the final day of their bike trip. We said goodbye and wished each other well.

As we approach Southeast Asia, where roads are fewer, the weather warmer, and the tourists more numerous, we anticipate seeing more bikers.  Maybe they’ll have more stuff than us, maybe less.  They might go faster or slower.  Regardless of languages we have in common or biking philosophies, we know we’ll be happy to see each other, and eager to share experiences.  Such is the club you can join by hopping on a bike.