Round the river bend
Why did the chicken cross the road?
When you're driving in Vietnam, answers to that question and others are literally answered. Apparently, the chicken cross over the road to pick at the ground some more for those delicious bugs and ants – for there must be something better on the other side. The chicken, like many of us, view that the grass is indeed greener on the other side, and will risk life-threatening speeding motorists to follow her instincts.
Driving in Vietnam is a sequence of near misses, guts, luck, and the random spin in the loom of chance that weaves two paths bone-crushingly close together.
We rented a motorbike – a POS Vietnamese made motorbike – to explore the Mekong Delta. We looked at the map and decided that the region wasn't that big. We were wrong. In total, over two days, we drove only ~ 80 kilometers. We made our way up to Vinh Long from Can Tho (where we spent one hellish night with the infamous mosquitoes), crossed over to Long Xuyen, then down to Can Tho again.
The national highway network consists of two lanes paved thoroughfares bleeding into a fickle assortment of loose gravel, sand, dirt and sometimes no roads whatsoever, only an earthen path punctuated by craters and dips and bumps alien to the Western mind.
Vietnam is full of busy intersections where hundreds of motorcyclists blare their horns, yell and speed recklessly with their entire families on a motorbike. I've seen five people bunched together on one bike. There are very few stoplights in Vietnamese cities... you just nose your crotch rocket in the direction you want to go, speed ahead, and pray that the other guy coming straight at you will swerve in time. In most intersections, there are six different directions from which the vehicles congregate, and in the madness, somehow, the Vietnamese makes it works.
At the last possible second, you swerve and avoid the snorting buses, rumbling trucks and the swirling chaos of bicycles, vespas, hondas and rush of animals and pedestrians.. all sharing the same road. Big cars have the right of way, followed by motorbikes, and finally the hapless pedestrian. The rule of the jungle apply -- get out of the way or become a smudge on tar.
After an afternoon of driving and a crash into a field of thistle, our motorcycle's battery gasped and fell into an infuriating hibernation. For the next two days, the engine will stall at the most inopportune times: in busy intersections, in the middle of nowhere on a dirt path as the sun went down, in the middle of the highway as a cargo truck barreled right into our path, etc. And we couldn't drive at night, as the the lamps were not working, and the kick-start operated like an teenager on drugs.
Whatever the difficulties, the region more than makes up for it with its breathtaking vistas and sublime moments. Cafes among green rice fields strung out hammocks for afternoon siestas, as banana and coconut fronds dance in the wind. Boys straddle buffaloes, working their way home against a blushing sunset, as cars and bikes and taxis speed past. Fields of corn and rice, standing at attention like soldiers, or when the wind moves among them, like young girls dancing in some mournful and samsaric play – it is so green, bright bursting fields and translucent leaves and dark pools of water... small brooks follow us, to open up into larger creeks, interrupted by arching bamboo bridges and flanked by thatched huts, where rows of vegetables peeked out at us from behind neat rows of fences. Old women carrying loads of fruit to the market, young girls in their white ao dai's bicycling to school, men stooped, working on their farm equipment and rowing their boats towards the open waters...
The country lived in a time capsule down here, somehow more pure and more true than the services within the largest cathedrals and temples — but all this I see on the back of a bike, speeding by, on the surface, like footnotes to the novel...