I'd been planning my trip to Vietnam for a few months. To clarify - my definition of "planning" is mostly limited to choosing a country and daydreaming about a few things I'd like to do there. Here's what the list looked like for Vietnam:
- I knew I wanted to scuba dive. Diving has been the driving force behind most of my recreational, occupational, and financial decisions since I first back-rolled into the ocean. Vietnam isn't the Mecca of the diving world (or even Cordoba for that matter), but the country's combination of warm water and low prices was pretty attractive.
- I wanted to visit the country that had unleashed such a massive clusterfuck upon American consciousness. The fear, confusion, madness, and desperate sorrow of the war expressed through film and prose has been an uncomfortable source of fascination for me since I was young. To walk through the streets and jungles that shattered so many minds and dreams and deeply held conceptions of righteousness/duty/truth...then it's firsthand, then it's real, then I can touch the warplanes and see the pictures and read the words and understand that Vietnam is a real place with real people and real suffering, and not simply a chilling metaphor for everything that is fucked up and corrupt and rotten about the 20th Century American Dream.
- There wasn't really a third point.
It was going to be relatively easy to achieve the second goal. Saigon crawled with remnants of the war; palaces once occupied by the Diem dictatorship, American and Chinese military hardware strewn across the courtyards of museums and memorials, former Viet Cong hideouts reborn as chic coffee houses, backstreet markets selling canteens and wristwatches and ammunition scavenged from fallen GIs, vivid socialist posters featuring men and women holding guns, ratchets, babies, sycthes (sometimes all at once). If there was anything I cared to see outside of the city (and there was), a few thousand "travel agents" operating in the backpackers district would be happy to help, for a reasonable fee. Small price - good for you, good for me. No worries on that front.
Still I couldn't sleep, despite my utter exhaustion and obnoxiously good spirits. Because for the past week, bad news had been brewing in the South China Sea and after unloading a furious barrage of death and devastation on the Philippines, Tropical Storm Washi was making its way northwest. Right past my intended dive site at Nha Trang, a small city on Vietnam's southeastern coast.. Before leaving Korea I had exchanged emails with many of the dive operators in Nha Trang, anxiously prodding for information about the current conditions and any predictions about the weather to come - but I hadn't heard anything for a few days. Since I was due to hop aboard a night train bound from Saigon for the coast in less than 24 hours it seemed wise to check if anyone had emailed me back* before committing 40% of my vacation to a place that (for all I knew) could be getting hammered by a typhoon.
*People check their email more often than they eat, drink, make love, or shit. Even if you combined these four activities, email-checking would still win the Frequency Contest in a landslide (I'm pretty sure). So why is it noteworthy to mention that I checked my email in Vietnam? Primarily because as soon as I leave my home country, I immediately shun technology with a ferocity that would make a Luddite uneasy. I have never brought my laptop on vacation, my phone is turned off and wrapped in a ball of dirty boxers and socks. My iPod is used strictly to soothe rage provoked by crying babies on airplanes.
This isn't because I consider technology to be bad, really. But it seems so terribly ordinary, and I like to imagine travel as the continual experience of the extra-ordinary. Technology makes my ordinary life less boring and monotonous because I can easily access new information that interests me, or communicate with many people. All of this is secondhand, though - I can't actually touch the carved stone steps of Chichen Itza, or pour a cup of coffee for the Branch Davidian who wants to tell me how the media totally fucked up the story in Waco. I'm only getting a distillation of the real thing. Which is better than nothing, I suppose. But when traveling, when there is something real and beautiful that I can touch or see or smell or hear or taste or sense in some way directly, well at these moments I can't imagine being a slave to the screen for even a second. I'm terrified that I will miss something subtly mind-shaking as I send a text message, or that a fellow wanderer will notice my ear buds and decide not to ask for directions. I have to be vigilant for the experiences of the present moment, and technology interferes with that openness. But anyway...
In any case, I managed to extract my iPod from its dank-boxer-cave (loudly crinkling several plastic bags in the process and, no doubt, thoroughly pissing off the other people in the room). Type in the WiFi password, hate myself more than a little for becoming another e-tourist. The device connects, a single bar flicking weakly in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Out of sheer habit my thumb taps the Facebook icon; I still don't believe I consciously moved those muscles. I realize my mistake and am about to exit the app when I notice the message box has a red "1" hovering above it. I read the message. Then I read it again, again, again. Then once more, and just once more, over and over, with my eyes too bloodshot to stay open and my heart racing too fast for sleep.
About an hour later, as I lay silently staring at the ceiling, still as an suspiciously joyful corpse, I had to chuckle at the whole scene. Every cell of my body was flooded with hope and happiness. All because of a message written on a social networking website. I refuse to buy a Kindle or iPad; I love paper books. I cherish handwritten letters more than any other post from home. I'm a tireless (if overenthusiastic and ineloquent) opponent of the cheapening of communication in the digital age. And yet I couldn't deny that these words, black Times Roman on a glowing yellowish screen, had shook me more deeply than anything I had ever read before. I thought that the medium counted for something, at least to me; maybe I was wrong. I had just violated two of my major principles: 1) disengage from technology while traveling and 2) never put much stock in any message that could potentially be erased by a well-placed magnet. I'd violated the hell out of these principles, in fact, but I felt great. What if Sal had been summoned to the road by a Facebook message from Dean and Carlo Marx? Maybe that would be OK.
Somewhere near the Rocky Mountains, there is a girl who I love. I love her completely. I can't explain my love for her with words, or even thoughts - somehow that pure feeling gets diluted as soon as it is expressed outwardly. Sometimes I try to send my love directly from my heart to hers in a beam of light-energy, across oceans and interstates and pine forests. I like to imagine that she senses this connection, even if she doesn't understand it, and feels happy for a while. I often write to her. And sometimes she writes back.
I woke up the next morning and stumbled downstairs into the lobby. I wrote to her, and used the hostel's phone to call a divemaster in Nha Trang. It doesn't look good, he said; visibility is only one meter underwater, the sun hasn't shone in days, and there's a hellacious wind that refuses to calm down. Sorry mate - no dives this week.
I couldn't stop smiling.
My mind was full of her - when I closed my eyes I could see each word that she wrote, clear as you like. A mind full of love. But a mind relaxed, and easy-going as well - none of the clutching, analytical, planning, paranoiac tension that too often passes for love. This love left room for life and otherness and fluidity - it was not jealous of my attention, anxious for action, greedy for further validation. The love simply brightened everything around it - lighting thousands of candles without diminishing its own flame, just as the Buddha said.
And it was, for lack of a better term, pretty fucking terrific. Let me try to explain...
The Cyclo Tour
 |
| This guy. |
As I walked out of the hostel, a chubby man with a round, cheerful face wheeled his cyclo into my path.
"Hey my friend, you wan' city tour? I take you ev'ywhere, no problem. Good price!"
I've always been fascinated by cyclos. No other mode of transportation seems to fit as neatly into the motif of Class Struggle as the cyclo - the fat, opulent bourgeoisie lounging in comfort as the worker sweats and strains to propel him to his destination, rewarded by a few pennies carelessly plucked from a wallet bulging with cash. History and vivid imagery...I love it.
So as I'm trying to sidestep the guy, trying to ignore the irony of him offering me (citizen of the capitalist/imperialist aggressor that once tried to crush the Vietnamese People's Revolution) a chance to reenact centuries of oppression on a blisteringly hot Saigon day, she pops into my mind. And I imagine sharing the ride with her, and laughing about it years later. I smile. She would love this moment. This is life. And the next thing I know, I'm buying giant bottles of water for us and hopping into the seat for a whirlwind tour of Saigon.
Whirlwind might be a bit of a misnomer, actually. Because cyclos are slow. Like glacial, it'd-be-faster-to-backwards-crab-walk slow. Really goddamn slow. But oh man, there are very few rides I have ever enjoyed as much. The snail-like pace allowed me to see everything in the city - not just the big impressive buildings, or the handful of places where we stopped, but the life of the city. Shirtless guys washing motorbikes with buckets of dirty soapwater and ancient brown rags. The old women in Vietnamese hats using one hand to pinch one nostril and blast out a snot-rocket while making a baguette sandwich with the other. Children wearing the bright red scarves of the Young Pioneers on their way to school, the girls with long, shiny black hair and thick round glasses trying to avoid the taunts and flirtatious slaps of the boys behind them. All the people of the city, doing the things that people do. Even the plump European tourists with their high black socks, fanny packs, and permanent confused scowls - I saw them all and loved them. I thought of her, and I loved her, and them, and the city, and life.
The Trip to Phu Quoc
A heart full of love was wonderful. Still, I wanted a mouth full of saltwater as well. Or at least a logbook full of dives. So I booked tickets to an island called Phu Quoc off the southwestern coast of Vietnam, not far from Cambodia. Phu Quoc was a former French and American stronghold, famous equally for its delightfully relaxing beach getaways and brutally sadistic prison camps. Luckily the prison camps had closed, but the beaches were still open. It was a bit remote, requiring six hours of bus travel and nearly three hours by hydrofoil ferry to reach the island, but I bought tickets for the night bus started off, looking forward to the murmur of ocean waves after two days with the howling, honking motorbikes of Saigon.
On the intercity bus to the terminal, I met a Spanish couple from a city south of Barcelona. I can't remember the name. Having not spoken more than a sentence or two of Espanol since I came to Korea, I felt a little uncomfortable talking to them at first. I struggled to remember the correct tenses for verbs, I spliced in Korean words (chincha means absolutely nothing in Spanish, I'm sure), and generally felt exceptionally embarrassed for being stupid enough to ask them "A donde van?"
Fifteen minutes later, we were making plans to have dinner on the island when we arrived. The man was incredibly kind - encouraging me to speak comfortably without being condescending, offering corrections and clarifications when I was confused, even talking about politicians from my home state of Minnesota with shocking accuracy (for example, Jesse Ventura had some hilarious ideas about conspiracy theories and Michelle Bachmann is a shameless idiot). I felt such warmth and gratitude toward these couple for including me in their journey when it would have been so much easier to offer a few polite sentences and gradually drift into silence. I felt her beside me again at that moment, and I smiled. I smiled because of the kindness of people we meet on the road, and the unlikely stories that we hear, and the joy of sharing our experiences with others. I smiled because life was OK.
Fast-forward - we were locked in a heated argument with the Vietnamese bus driver over a ticket snafu. It seemed that the travel agents had told us our tickets were for the 11pm bus, when in reality they were for 1am. Since it took six hours to get to the ferry, which left at 8am, and the Vietnamese roads were not known for their high speed limits or well paved-ness, we were quite worried. The Spanish man became extremely upset, gesturing angrily at the bus driver and two men who (I thought) were employees of the company. Eventually it turned out that there was one seat available on the bus. I wished the Spaniards bueno suerte and climbed aboard, feeling more than a bit guilty. I told them we would meet again on the boat, and not to worry. And the strangest thing was, I really meant it. I knew they would be OK. Because life was OK.
As I searched for my seat on the bus, I discovered something - the two men who had been talking to the Spaniards were not employees at all. They were passengers. One man was sitting with his wife, who held a small baby girl in her arms. She was obviously worried, especially when I mistakenly sat down next to her. Her husband, who had been talking to the bus driver, smiled at me when he walked back to his seat. "You can sit there, is OK. I can sit next to my wife."
They were beautiful, sitting there together. Only a few minutes ago I had seen him as an obstacle, frustrated by his inability to perform what I thought was his job. Now I saw him as a human being who had acted out of real compassion. Maybe he wanted to aid some confused foreigners, maybe he just wanted to help the bus driver get things settled down so nobody else on the bus would be late. But some type of kindness was at work here. His wife snuggled in against his shoulder, the baby wrapped in a scratchy green bus-line blanket, and he sighed. I looked at them and felt her again, felt love for her and them too.
The other man was sitting right across the aisle from me. He was short and slender, with carefully arranged hair and new blue jeans. His glasses looked like Lennon's. He was also with a woman, a beautiful young lady with large dark eyes. They looked kind. I leaned over to him and thanked him for helping us with the tickets. I asked him where they were going, and he said they were going to his wife's hometown to spend some time with her family before the Tet New Year. She showed me a small bag of gifts they were bringing to her parents. And I felt that certain kind of warm happiness, always felt especially strong in the chest cavity, that usually ends up in tears, for me at least.
As the bus lumbered out onto the highway, I began to listen to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. After a few minutes, I skipped directly to "If You See Her, Say Hello". Then I listened to "Visions of Johanna". And finally, "Lay Lady Lay".
And I knew that she will always be the best thing I have ever seen. I slipped into the half awake/half dream state and thought nothing coherent, except that I loved her.
The Motorbike Diaries
The owner of the hostel shrieked as I skidded out of control across the narrow alleyway, barely avoiding a telephone pole. A group of English girls slightly older than me looked up from their Tiger beers and shouted something typically dense and British, the only intelligible part of which was "Oy!" Finally by some stroke of luck I remembered to release my grip on the handlebars, killing the motorbike's engine. I was inches away from the wall of a neighboring cafe. I took off the helmet, handed it to the lady with shaking hands, and informed her that her motorbike is very nice but no thanks, I will be walking to the dive shop.
Phu Quoc is not a huge island, but neither is it small. Unless you are staying in one of the resorts in the heart of Duong Dong (the rough equivalent of a city center, I suppose), it takes quite a while to walk anywhere with people. Which can be a problem, if you are depending on some of those people to take you scuba diving.
After twenty minutes of walking, I realized that I did not want to spend half my time on Phu Quoc as a pedestrian shuffling between the hostel and the harbor. This conclusion was simple; however, there were some factors that complicated the equation. First, my disdain for bicycles. I just don't like riding them. Not much to it. Second, and more complex, is the mixture of infatuation and abject terror I have for motorized two-wheeled transportation.
I had never driven a motorcycle. Or a motorbike. Or a scooter, dirtbike, etc. I love the idea of going fast, and I love the idea of feeling the wind in my hair and face and being fully open and exposed to the area through which I'm traveling. I love these concepts. What I don't love, however, is the possibility of falling off and needing skin grafts from my ass to reconstruct my scalp. So I've never tried it before.
There weren't many options on Phu Quoc, though. Car taxis were extremely rare and expensive. Motorbike drivers were plentiful, but prone to charging outrageous fares and delivering you to the wrong destination. Bicycles were....lame, I guess. Wasn't going that route. So I had to bite the bullet and try a motorbike.
I can't explain the feeling I had when I kicked the bike into 4th gear and hit 60 km/h down the windy road along Long Beach. I know it's not that fast, really, but I felt as if no human being had ever traveled so effortlessly and freely. Just wind, all around me, just air moving back and forth, under my shirt, through my hair, between my toes, rattling around in my ears...simply air.
I came to the end of the paved road, where the smooth asphalt abruptly changed to rough red rocks. The handlebars shook as I swerved from side to side; I decelerated quickly and came to a stop. I wasn't ready for this. Rough terrain ahead. Time to turn back; it's been a good run, but no need to get reckless. And then I imagined she was sitting behind me, not saying a word, not trying to change my mind, just sitting fully present in the moment. And suddenly I was full of joy again, no fear or doubt. Charged with excitement, grateful and amazed by the road ahead of me, ready to do anything. I whooped (yes, literally "whooped"), buckled the helmet, and tore off again.
Whipping past coconut trees, ramshackle buildings with corrugated tin siding and bright blue tarps as roofs, a herd of cattle mooing with annoyance as I hummed past, the acrid smell and taste of smoke rising up from roadside fires, the grit of fine red dust kicked up by passing trucks in my eyes and teeth, the warm touch of the sun on my back and shoulders, the relentlessly subtle steady shaking of the motorbike's engine shimmying up my arms and spine, the sudden thump-a-whump of rocks and holes in the road, the easy feeling of complete freedom in the moment. I'm glad she was there. I'm glad I didn't turn back.
One night, I rode my motorbike to the north of the island. This time, the obstacles were man-made: dozens of other motorbikes, recklessly speeding buses, oblivious tourists reading maps in the middle of the road, shop owners spraying fish guts and refuse off their patios with high-pressure hoses. At times I felt tense, and wanted to turn back. Have a coconut shake on the beach, relax, sit and be still. But I thought there might be something beautiful out of that road that I could share with her, so I rode on. Gritting my teeth each time I rode blind through a giant dust cloud, always thankful that I emerged on the other side.
When the sky was black and air turned cool, I stopped at a small cluster of homes and shops by the side of the road. People were walking all around, carrying bags of rice and fruit and small tools, bartering under the thatched roof market, drinking coffee in small plastic chairs outside the cafes. I was the only Westerner in the town. I spotted an old man pushing a food cart by the corner, and I walked over to him. He was selling something that like looked like vegetables on a stick. I pointed to them. He grinned; he was missing several teeth. He pulled out a battered old box from the bottom of the cart and pulled out two crinkled bills. 3,000 Vietnamese dong. I paid him and took the food - I don't know if they were vegetables or not, but they tasted good. Warm, substantial, spicy.
As I sat on the seat of my motorbike, slowly eating the food cart offering, a parade of people passed by. They all turned to look as they passed by, but I don't remember anyone seeming suspicious or annoyed. We smiled at each other, and I really loved each person I saw. I really did - I loved them. My love for her was flowing into love for every person I saw, without losing any of its own beauty or strength. At first I thought of taking a picture of the village - something to remember it by, you know, because it was so special. Then I thought it would cheapen the moment - cheapen whatever connection I was having to this place and these people. It felt sacred, holy, like an unintentional pilgrimage to a shrine I never knew existed.
Lost in these thoughts for a moment, I didn't realize there was a man staring at me. He was only a few feet away. He had no shirt, only khaki shorts and rubber sandals. He had short gray hair, a generous paunch, and thin arms. His entire face looked kind, like you might see on a statue of Hotei. Kind eyes, kind mouth, kind wrinkles. He spoke to me in Vietnamese, and I felt incredibly embarrassed that I couldn't respond. He pantomimed sleeping - "Where are you staying?" I pointed sadly down the hill - just a tourist, wandering into the primitive boondocks for a "authentic" adventure. Exposed and outed. I'll be leaving now.
He laughed and said something again. Don't go yet. I smiled back at him, wishing I could tell him that I am a real person too, that we might have things to talk about, that I would like to hear his stories about life and love and all the sadness that goes along with them. I fidgeted on the seat of the motorbike, and he pulled out his wallet. In the pale golden glow of the streetlight I could see a blue Filipino banknote - five pisos, crumpled and stained by the sweat of many hands and miles. He handed it to me. A token of otherness, presented to the other. I don't know what he meant by it, but he looked happy as he did it.
I grabbed my own wallet and pulled out a 1,000 Korean won bill. I handed it to the man; he had obviously never seen Korean money before because he promptly called over at least a dozen people to look at it. There were little kids running through the crowd, alternately staring at me and light-heartedly threatening each other. One little girl, chubby and impossibly cute, stopped right in front of me and asked, in perfect English, "Hi, where are you from? What's your name?"
My heart went out to this little girl. So fearless, so curious, so alive. I spoke to her for a few minutes, as her friends stood behind her and looked mildly amazed that she knew so much English. The old shirtless man was still standing less than a meter away, still smiling, still holding the Korean won in his hand. Some of the kids were looking at the money in his hand, unable to hide their interest but too shy to ask questions about it. I opened my wallet and saw I had no more Korean money - only American dollars and Vietnamese dong. So I took all the dollar bills and handed them to the kids. I actually spent more money in that moment than I did to rent the motorbike, fill it with gas, and buy food for three days. I could not have been happier with the decision as I started up the motorbike and pulled out of the village, waving goodbye to the people in the shops and cafes.
A few kilometers down the road, surrounded by the thick cool jungle and blanketed by the kind of darkness that only comes in places where people have never built lights, I hopped off the motorbike and tilted my head toward the sky. Thousands of stars, bright bright bright, just shining there. No significance to them that I could see, beyond their beauty. And that was enough. It was enough that they be beautiful and bright in that moment. Nothing more was needed from them.
"I love you."
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