Wide awake at 2am my body knew it wasn’t going to fare well for the all-day tourist trip, the only formal one we’ve booked. Sitting in the darkness for 5 hours my mind wandered across a wide range of thoughts, missing my love and my home back home, increasing anxiety around the grind awaiting me at the office, trapped in a sleepless purgatory to my captor of chainsaws.
I walked the width of two stairs from our hotel lobby to the van, gracefully landing, my phone flying, thankful I didn’t twist my ankle for the hustle ahead. We picked up more eager early-risers and were grouped and separated and shuttled onto our speedboat up the Saigon river. Our guide was fantastic, using humor as education to paint more stark realities upon our collective blank canvases.
“See the helipad on top of the hospital? It’s just for show, only the military has helicopters.”
“Notice the beautiful restaurant on the water. It was very popular among locals but they raised prices to lure in tourists and because of this the government shut them down.”
“So many houses are being built here, but wealthy Chinese bought them all up, raising the prices of houses, until we can’t afford them.”
“This is where an uprising happened because the Chinese put an oil rig in the middle of Vietnamese waters without permission. An angry mob set out to burn the Chinese factory to the ground. There were two factories here, one Chinese and the other Japanese. The locals didn’t know which factory was which, so the Japanese put up a big sign that said -> CHINESE FACTORY THIS WAY ->”
Sipping on onboard cha sua da and noshing on rambutan we came to the real work to be done - water hyacinth. The entire river covered in the clusters of green leaves, underneath live thick roots used for making rope and handbags. One boat would go first, cutting a line through using brute force and a small propeller - reversing the engine once through in order to free the boat from the tough tendrils. We did this dozens of times, go-stop-reverse-go-stop-reverse. Landing at Cu Chi we were again grouped up and led to separate destinations - some going straight to the war tunnels themselves, others on a countryside drive, the five masochists among us opting for an 18 mile bicycle ride in 100 degree heat.
Thankfully they asked for our measurements before we arrived , ensuring we’d at least have a chance for success. Our guide was incredibly friendly and suspiciously fit, decked out in top-notch riding gear. The electrolyte powder dumped in our water bottles and handlebar bags for our stuff and shocks on the bikes were nice touches. The Scottish family and us rode quickly on paved streets to very little traffic. The first few miles were hot but fair, to increasingly sparse scenery. We stopped at a rice paper factory, hard laborers pulling bamboo stretchers out of the sun and peeling the familiar foundation of the Vietnamese spring roll like you would a fruit roll-up. I felt a bit like a gawker - the workers looked incredibly weathered from the relentless sun and get paid $150 a month for 10 hour days, 7 days a week. Maybe my air-conditioned, soft-fingered job back home isn’t so bad…
We continued onward, turning off of paved streets onto our first rough dirt path of the day, through an endless symmetrical canopy of rubber trees - leaning into one another to form an inverted V for us to ride between. Half of my attention was always on the road, large stones and dried dung and large branches a constant threat. My wrists were taking the brunt of the vibrations, and I starting wondering how people endure off-road biking as fun.
Our next turn was down a muddy path through acres and acres of bitter melon farms under the unyielding sun. A scooter coming the other way stopped our guide and gave fair warning, to a shrug and an onward! We came to a watery intersection where farmers had giant hoses everywhere, spewing water in all directions. We had no choice but to pick up our bikes and walk the distance, happy to return to “just muddy” on the other side of it all. The Scottish mom among us was in last place, a giant tractor looming just feet behind her. I regret not snapping a photo of the menacing hilarity.
Soon the mud turned into sand, the worst terrain I’ve ever encountered on a bicycle. The nuance between solid and shifting was inches apart, and we tried our best to follow exactly where our guide rode, having to stop abruptly once our tired turned from under us. It was an exhausting few miles back to pavement, stopping once more to inspect a $100 bill on the side of the road. This was funeral money, fake currency printed for the dead to spend in another life. I inspected a 1,000,000 dong bill and was tempted to slip it in my pocket. “This does not belong to me” the guide said as he released the Benjamin into the wind. We felt guilty at the notion of keeping what wasn't ours and watched as our paper took shape, fluttering slowly back to the grass.
Our halfway point wasn’t even close, and most of us were already bright red from exertion. We approached civilization again, amused by the HELLOs and HIs peppering the sounds of birds and barking dogs. It’s a very strange concept to the Vietnamese, that foreigners would pay money to ride a bicycle through the countryside. Well-off parents typically buy their children a scooter once they reach 18, a promotion of sorts from their short, pedal-powered lifetimes. Being the Western weirdos was something I’m generally accustomed to, and I took the English greetings as intended - good-natured novelty that spices up the boredom of the day.
Eventually I stopped paying attention to the scenery, focused solely on making it to the rest stop - our 10 days of gluttony not doing us any favors. Shops and houses continued to appear, my favorite gate toppers being Doge-esque German shepherds. I now want two Doge statues atop my own fence. Much opening! I thanked gods I didn’t believe in when we slowed down to a hammock-filled restaurant, plates of dragon fruit and mango and watermelon peeled and sliced for our arrival. It was luxurious, sampling coffee crackers and peanut wafers and swallowing whole those juices-as-fruit.
As much as I wanted to nap in those hammocks our guide was quick to get us back on the road, a matter of fact 6-or-7 miles answer to my meek variation on “are we there yet?”. We hit our stride once again, assisted by smooth roads and even more roadside greetings. I was struck soundly by a scooter in the distance, a pink-and-red-wrapped driver coming towards us, her fingers outstretched in a V. I will never forget that moment, the peace sign given to me, an American, as I rode over the subterranean tunnelway where Vietnamese survived in inhumane conditions against terrible odds, invaded for illegitimate reasons by my fathers and my grandfathers. I hope she knows how powerful that symbol was for me, and I found myself giving the same symbol of love and forgiveness to everyone I came across. It makes me tear up just thinking about it, of how our older generations harbor so much bitterness and racism for the Vietnamese people, and they not only look up to us (see: it’s all about money) but it's a real reminder that absolutely no good can come from resentment and revenge.
My legs tensed up as we again turned onto rocky terrain, my fingertips barely holding onto the handlebar in hopes of giving my hands relief. Again the dirt turned into sand, covered in a sprinkling of treacherous leaves. I shadowed the path confidently, keeping our leader’s pace, my front wheel slowly veering a mere inch to the right. This began my slow fall, my wheel whipping 90 degrees, knowing that it would be better to relax my muscles for impact instead of trying to force the impossible and break a bone in the process. I landed hard and stared up at the sun, motionless, mentally checking my systems to ensure they were all operational. My left leg throbbed, my wrist ached, but I was determined to finish this ride. Our guide wanted me to take a rest after noticing my knee was bleeding, but I wasn’t having the pity of the group and insisted we keep moving. Single-minded I powered through the rest of it, an intentional blur, ignoring time completely and focusing solely on one foot in front of the other. Large buildings eventually came into view, blocked only by another short sprint over motherfucking sand. I dismounted my bike and walked across the final hurdle, elated at our arrival to the Cu Chi tunnels.
The Cu Chi tunnels are one of the biggest tourist attractions outside of Saigon - an all-too realistic war museum, of captured helicopters and crawls through tunnels three feet high, a few have been widened for the tourists. People living for months, years underground subsisting on boiled Tapicoa root - suffocating from the lack of air, using ingenious ways to disguise kitchen smoke, footprints, bamboo breathing tubes. It was sobering, it was sad, and as we crawled and stared and absorbed the group could barely speak. After exiting through the gift shop we came to the gun range, where tourists can shoot a wide variety of automatic weapons across the same landscape where millions of Vietnamese, tens of thousands of Americans died. I recalled the peace sign I was flashed a mere hour ago and my stomach started turning at the thought of firing weapons here as a novel way to pass the time. It took conscious effort to climb the single stair up the van home, our bodies overheated and aching, an important parallel to how it was, but one-ten-millionth of what the people who lived through the American War went through.
No comments:
Post a Comment