Dispatches are true short stories told in my own voice.
In October 1993, I woke up in Than Hoa, Vietnam, this rural town in northern Vietnam, with an enormous sense of dread and foreboding. The reason was that I was on a bike, and I had a hard choice to make. I was on a mountain bike I’d brought from home—Aurora, Illinois. And I was in the middle or the front-end, really, of this months long, solo bicycle journey from Hanoi in the north to Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) in the south.
And this being 1993, Vietnam was a different country that no longer exists today.
It’s nothing like the Vietnam that people might visit on a holiday nowadays. Vietnam back then was an extremely poor country, and especially the North was the poorest of the poorest regions of Vietnam, after long years of war with the United States, which ended in 1975, and then 11 more years of economic disaster led by a communist government that really didn’t build an economy that worked. It was a poor country of rice farmers and then a couple of big cities.
And in that context, I showed up with my bike, and back then, ‘93, it was the second year, I think, that Vietnam allowed foreigners to go between cities without having to register with the police every time you moved. And that allowed bike travel to happen, which is why I decided to conjure this journey, with $800 in my pocket, and just start riding.
My goal was to have a giant adventure and see where I could go.
I had no idea what I was doing. If I knew how hard this journey was, I probably wouldn’t have done it. So there was some ignorance. I don’t know if it was willful or not, but I started this journey with bright eyes and strong legs and got beaten down in the process by all the attention that I received as a white guy in northern Vietnam, especially.
Whole towns would come out to watch me eat a meal at roadside. Or have a drink when I stopped to get water. It was such a point of fascination for people to see a foreigner.
I’m six-three, I had a beard, bandana, spandex, bike shorts, I was a alien creature. And so if my bike broke down or I had a flat tire or I just had to stop for tea…you know, I once counted 49 people from a village who came out to watch me have tea for 20 minutes, just taking a break from the day’s ride.
This was the kind of environment I was in: 90-degree heat, it was either burning sun or it was an ongoing monsoon rain. And you just rode through it. Back then, of course, this is pre-internet, so my family had no idea where I was. There was no way to communicate with the outside world for days at a time, if not longer. No internet, no, no cell phones. It was just a different time. It felt like one of the greatest adventures of my life. Which of course it was.
But at this point, when I woke up that day in Tanh Hoa, the intimidation I felt was overwhelming because I had no idea what the next 300 kilometers held in store.
The guidebook I had, which was my only clue as to what was upcoming, was a Lonely Planet Vietnam on a shoestring guidebook. And it told me where the next place that was allowed to host a foreigner, to rent a room to a foreigner overnight, where that place, that town was. So I knew where to ride to every day because the guidebook told me, up until that area, Thanh Hoa.
But after that, the next town would that the guidebook said had a place where a foreigner could stay 300 kilometers further south, town called Vinh, V-I-N-H. And I knew I couldn’t ride 300 kilometers in a day. And so my choice was, in Thanh Hoa, to have breakfast at a little mini hotel kind of place—hotel in quotes—and then get on the train, because there was a daily train that went through the town, and take that south and basically abort my whole idea of this bike trip, which is a solo mountain bike trip, peddling my way through Vietnam.
I could cheat basically and take the train, or I could stay true to the mission and and just ride into the void, so to speak. So the crossroads that I was at, quite literally, was the intimidating factor. And where would I stay that night?
I had no idea.
I could only probably peddle around 140 kilometers. So I ended up, I think, riding about 130 kilometers before dusk. You couldn’t ride after nightfall if you wanted to live.
I ended up having one of the most interesting encounters and nights of my life that night, which I’ll tell you in a different Dispatch.
Or, if you’d rather…
