To make a long story short, we were in a compromised situation.\u00a0 The wheel of the trailer fell off.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Generally speaking, this is not the way it’s supposed to work.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was dark.\u00a0 We were right next to a busy road.\u00a0\u00a0We were stranded.\u00a0 We couldn’t move the trailer further than walking distance.\u00a0 As far as we could see in the dark, water-filled paddies stretched into the distance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I felt\u00a0trapped.\u00a0 Before, we could bike away from anything we didn’t like.\u00a0\u00a0Now we were stuck.\u00a0 Two kilometers back,\u00a0the trailer had broken again.\u00a0 At that time a family invited us into their home for dinner.\u00a0 Because we were near a large tourist site, I was suspicious, but complied anyway.\u00a0 One of their relatives took me to find a repairshop for the trailer axle, which had to be welded.\u00a0 The family didn’t tell us they wanted money for the meal until afterward.\u00a0 We ate an awkward but not unpleasant dinner with them.\u00a0 The uncle did not eat with us, and afterward we left.\u00a0 It was the tourist site away from which we were biking when the trailer broke.<\/p>\n
Drew and I checked under a bridge under the busy road.\u00a0 Piles of garbage and deposits from people who couldn’t wait surrounded water-filled holes.\u00a0 Cars thudded along overhead.\u00a0 “Well…” said Drew, “we could probably make it work if we had to.”<\/p>\n
Drew and I climbed back to the group, empty handed.\u00a0 “I would just like everyone to know I am thouroughly\u00a0enjoying this,” said Pete, the perpetual optimist.\u00a0 So cloudy was I, I at first thought an odd bit of sarcasm had escaped his lips.<\/p>\n
We found a strip of land next to a dirt road\u00a0 within walking distance.\u00a0 People could see us from the road, but there wasn’t any traffic.\u00a0 We rolled down the bikes, carried the trailer and set up the tents.\u00a0No cars or motorbikes\u00a0came down the road.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 This site was right by the road and across the water from a veritable village of houses.\u00a0 We piled the gear close together and locked everything down.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Do you have the\u00a0broken axle?”\u00a0Adam asked me as he stowed his\u00a0gear.\u00a0 I was the\u00a0last person to examine the break before we moved the trailer.\u00a0 I realized I didn’t have it.\u00a0 It would be difficult to have that fixed here, let alone\u00a0have a new one made.\u00a0 If\u00a0I’d lost it we would certainly be at the prey of the tourist site indefinitely,\u00a0unable to escape.\u00a0 I tore through my gear and then ran up the road to where the break ocurred.\u00a0 Thankfully I found it lying in the dust.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I settled down that night by the side of the road alert but weary, oddly at peace with a night gone awry.\u00a0 We had made the best of a bad situation, and it satisfied me.\u00a0 Perhaps Pete’s perspective wasn’t completely ridiculous.<\/p>\n
We awoke the next morning to propaganda blaring from a nearby village.\u00a0 All of the gear sat just where we put it the night before.\u00a0 Adam and I\u00a0collected the axle and biked off in search of an arc welder.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We had no idea how difficult an arc welder would be to find.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 “two something something” was what I heard.\u00a0 We assumed it would be 20,000.\u00a0 Great!\u00a0I thought.\u00a0 He welded it cleanly and ground it down.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I tried to pay with a twenty-thousand bill, but the man wouldn’t take it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The weld had only cost two-thousand.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Me and Mr. Bien. Photo courtesy of Adam Wolf.<\/em><\/p>\n At that point we realized we’d been overcharged by about fifty times.\u00a0 But that was water under the bridge.\u00a0 So it goes with tourist sites.\u00a0 The metal worker, a man by the name of Bien, invited us to sit down in his shop and have tea.\u00a0 As we drank the tea, we communicated with gestures and the little of each other’s languages we knew.\u00a0 We asked how old his child was (three), he asked us what we thought of Vietnamese women (beautiful).<\/p>\n As foreigners, we will inevitably run into people wanting to take advantage of us.\u00a0 It comes with the territory.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 We decided to stop.\u00a0 With the help of my phrasebook, I attempted to explain the source of my unsmiling condition.<\/p>\n The previous day, the man had made a good impression on me.\u00a0 He had a great smile and huge friendly eyes.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was clear he didn’t understand the situation.<\/p>\n Eventually a high school age boy emerged from the back.\u00a0 After a few attempts at explaining in English,\u00a0I wrote down the situation, and upon reading it, the boy proved much more helpful than the phrase book.\u00a0 The welder and his wife had a lively discussion.\u00a0 We exchanged a few more notes.\u00a0 The man told me to sit down, and then handed me 20,000 dong, or a fifth of what I’d given him initially.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 I took the money, and wrote out a note which was translated simultaneously by the boy.\u00a0 The man looked me in the eye as the boy translated, and nodded emphatically at the key points.\u00a0 In the last line, I said I knew the man was a good man, but was still sad at the situation.\u00a0 The metal worker looked down and then back up at me, and nodded.<\/p>\n I stood up to leave.\u00a0 We shook hands, and he made me to understand the boy was his son.\u00a0 He was a proud father, as he should have been.\u00a0 I shook hands with the boy.\u00a0 We left on good terms, me much relieved.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perhaps the uncle (Uncle Slick, as Adam calls him) is a lost cause.\u00a0 However, it seems that engaging with people almost always proves a more successful strategy to resolve conflicts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Like the uncle, we become conditioned to viewing certain people in certain ways.\u00a0 For him tourists are there to make money off of.\u00a0 By not fully employing my prejudices against people near tourist sites, I allowed him to cheat me.\u00a0 Perhaps I would do better to be more suspicious.\u00a0 Yet at the same time, I would have missed out on a valuable experience.\u00a0 I do not often make myself vulnerable, but perhaps more vulnerability would enrich rather than hurt.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To make a long story short, we were in a compromised situation.\u00a0 The wheel of the trailer fell off.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Generally speaking, this is not the way it’s supposed 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