mapping the start of my motorbike trip

(These events occurred January 5, 2009.  Thai Binh to Ninh Binh - 70 km by motorbike)

On January 5, I attempted for the third day in a row to make it to Ninh Binh.  The first two days had been foiled by the Fonda’s temper tantrums, but with only 70 km to go, I was determined that today was the day.  I was anxious to see the caves, karsts and countryside for which the area was known.

After a breakfast of bun (pronounced boon; it’s noodle soup with pork), Zoom and I hit the road.  Although it was cold, the sun came out a little bit.  I thoroughly enjoyed a second day photographing from the back of the bike with Zoom’s skilled driving assistance.  

overloaded push bikes

My fascination with overloaded motorbikes continued and I enjoyed photographing them transporting piglets, an unbelievable quantity of flowers and even one carrying live scorpions.  In addition to the motorbikes, I encountered and photographed push bikes precariously loaded over twice the height of the bike with unidentifiable objects in plastic rice sacks.  And then there were the buses.  

Tet holiday celebrated on January 26 was fast approaching.  Tet for the Vietnamese is like Christmas, New Year’s and birthday all rolled into one.  Those who can afford to do so buy new clothes, new motorbikes and a myriad of items for their homes.  That stuff has to come from somewhere and I encountered bus after bus completely filled with cargo that literally overflowed out the back and sides and onto the top.  Every new bus sighting prompted a round a giggles from me while Zoom would chase after each one with the Fonda trying to put me in perfect position to capture the absurdity.

overloaded bus

I was also tickled to see another novelty regarding transport.  Cyclos are three wheeled carts/bicycles that are sometimes used to transport people, but more often these days, used to move cargo.  As in the case of the motorbikes, buses and pushbikes, cyclos carrying cargo are more often than not overloaded and very difficult for the driver to pedal.  Frequently, the cyclo driver will enlist the help of his motorbike driving friends, though, who will push him along using one leg while driving their motorbike.  In the larger cities, this practice has been deemed by authorities to be unsafe (surprise, surprise!) and is only utilized when the participants believe no police are around.

Every hour or two, I like to stop for breaks. If you’ve ever ridden a motorbike for any length of time, you know how hard it can be on your bum after a bit.  The breaks not only provided a respite from that, but also gave me a chance to sample the varieties of coffee and tea and how they changed subtly the farther south I traveled.  It was also a chance to meet the locals and chat with them for 15 - 20 minutes before hopping back on the bike.  

giving a friend a boost

On this particular day, we stopped to get coffee and snacks.  The old woman who owned the cafe sat chewing something called trau cau (pronounced chow gaw) which is a white powder (nam stone according to Zoom) combined with some kind of fruit and root and is all wrapped together in a leaf.  The combination turns red when chewed and makes the chewer look like she has a bloody mouth.  Zoom says chewing it makes you warm which I interpret to mean that it gives you a little buzz.  It’s quite popular with the old Vietnamese ladies and reminds me of the betel nut chewed by the old women in Bali.

The old lady’s cafe was also a pseudo gas station.  Instead of having tanks in the ground as we do at home, however, she had a 55 gallon drum of gas that she would pump by hand up into a giant syringe that was fitted with a garden hose instead of a needle.  After pumping the desired number of liters into the syringe, she would use gravity to empty the contents from the syringe into the motorbike’s gas tank.  As she got to the last bits of liquid, she would have to move the hose by hand in a wave-like motion  to empty all that the customer had paid for into the gas tank.  Over the next six weeks, I observed that life in Vietnam is lived and worked by hand.  This was just one of many examples.

Vietnamese schoolgirls' way of holding hands

While we were drinking our coffee, a nearby school let out for lunch.  Children from grade school to high school ages all dressed in neat blue and white uniforms flooded the streets, mostly on bicycle.  Many rode two kids per bike; some rode three on a bike.  Early practice for moto driving, I thought.  Frequently, they would peddle three or four bikes in a row and the girls or boys driving would keep one hand on the handlebars and use the other to hold hands or arms with the child on the bike next to them.  

Seeing this caused Zoom to reminisce about his own childhood.  He told me that unlike today when almost every child had a bike, there weren’t many bikes then and they used to ride three to four children per bike.  

This lead to other happy memories.  When he was a boy, he and his friends tended water buffalos.  They would take their charges to the lakes and rivers, climb on their backs and use them as diving boards.  They would also engineer buffalo races which is pretty comical given how incredibly slowly the beasts move.  

Most homes in Vietnam, even the poorest, now have TV’s.  Interestingly, according to Zoom, they didn’t arrive in homes in Vietnam until about 20 years ago.  Color TV has only recently made its appearance in the last 6 to 10 years.  Zoom remembers when the first few homes in his village got their TVs. The lucky owners would sell tickets to the other villagers to come in and watch them.  

a typical Vietnamese living room

I enjoyed hearing his memories and marveled at what different childhoods we’d had.  Part of the difference was that he grew up a country boy while I was a city girl, albeit from a small town in Western Kentucky.  Still, I didn’t have cattle or chickens much less buffalos to race or or use as springboards.  Perhaps some of the country kids I grew up with had experiences more similar to Zoom’s, but I suspect that his childhood stories are probably much more like those of my father or grandfather than of my contemporaries, even those from the country. 

“Bum break” over, we hit the road again.  When I stopped to photograph a Christian cemetery (the first I’d seen in this predominantly Buddhist and ancestor-worshipping country), I heard a funny clunking sound coming from my motorbike. After having had only 1 day out of 6 actual road days without any mechanical difficulties, I admit that I was hypersensitive to any unusual noise, rattle or thump that emerged from the Fonda, but I just knew this sound wasn’t right. 

a Christian cemetery

Zoom agreed and we stopped at the next “xe may” we found.  A screw had broken loose inside the fan that cools the engine, but luckily we caught it in time before it rattled around and broke the plastic fan blades causing greater damage.  Zoom suggested we also take this opportunity to add some kind of glue to the back wheel that would work as an automatic puncture healer.  It turned out to be a great suggestion because, for all the trouble I ultimately had with the Fonda over the next 6 weeks, I never once had a flat tire although there was evidence of many punctures that were filled with glue.    

While the mechanic was repairing the broken screw and filling the tire with glue, I noticed how the non-occupied mechanics would “squat around” instead of “sit around” and commented to Zoom about what I’d come to call the “Asian squat.”  All over the world, people squat, but in Southeast Asia, the squat is more compressed with all the weight on the person’s heals instead of their toes.  Apparently, it has a name in Vietnamese - ngoi xom (pronounced noi some).  Naturally, it looks different from the way we westerners squat.  The Asian squat is a position of comfort for most, the equivalent of sitting in a chair.  In fact, even when chairs or benches are available, many Southeast Asians will opt to squat instead … sometimes ON the chair or bench!  I tried repeatedly to squat Asian style but within fifteen to thirty seconds I would fall over backwards.  Zoom laughingly compared me to a Weeble Wobble which I thought was generous since I only seemed to wobble, not weeble.  

ngoi xom ... aka the "Asian Squat"

While we waited for the repairs to be finished, we went across the street for lunch to a little “hole in the wall” roadside restaurant.  Most of the places where we would stop to eat would not have menus.  You simply look at the what they have in glass cases or see the ingredients on the counter and order based on that.  As the self-designated “culinary tour guide,” Zoom almost always ordered our food.  That day’s lunch was rice, chicken, some vegetables - for once, nothing out of the ordinary.  When the bill came, it was four to five times as much as it should have been. 

This had happened to me before on a couple of occasions in Cambodia.  As a result, I generally made it a habit to ask the prices before ordering which usually prevented such exploitation and the unpleasant feelings arising from such ugliness.  That didn’t happen on this day, however.  I don’t like to be taken advantage of but it’s equally important to me that I’m fair.  Zoom told her that he felt her prices were unfair and that her bill was high only because my skin was white.  He asked her to reconsider her bill.  She refused to budge an inch.  We both discussed the matter with her, but she was unwavering.  I refused to be exploited.  Zoom and I calculated what we thought the food should have cost, erring on the high side.  I then doubled that amount just to make sure I was being fair (perhaps in this town the food prices were considerably higher; doubtful, but possible) and paid the woman about 70% of what she was asking.  She and Zoom began to argue.  I had had enough and walked out of the restaurant.  The motorbike was ready, so I paid and we were on our way.

the platter making process

Later that evening, as Zoom and I were rehashing the events of the day, he told me that, although he hadn’t agreed on an exact price for our lunch in advance, the woman had quoted him a price range that was consistent with our lunch prices elsewhere and that, indeed, the bill was four to five times more than her initial quote/range.  So I felt better that we hadn’t been unfair to her, but wondered why he hadn’t shared that information with me in the restaurant.  Had he reminded her of their previous discussion when he discussed the bill with her?  I had no idea what was said to whom and could only rely on his translations to me which, although good, were far from fluent.  Ah, the frustrations of language barriers!  I was aghast when he also told me that, as we walked out of the restaurant, the restauranteer threatened to have people kill us if we didn’t pay the remaining third of her outrageous bill.  According to Zoom, he responded, “No one buys the meat of people in the market.”    Wow!

The rest of our trip to Ninh Binh was scenic, but otherwise pretty uneventful.  We stopped to see a platter maker at work and accepted his invitation to have tea in his home.  Eventually, we arrived in Ninh Binh.  It took me four days beyond my scheduled ETA to arrive, but we had finally made it.  I settled in to my hotel for the night, enjoyed reviewing photos from the previous two days with Zoom and looked forward to getting out to the countryside which was the magnet drawing me to Ninh Binh in the first place.

Total cost of motorbike repairs to date:  1,340,000 Dong ($79)

Number of consecutive road days without motorbike repairs:  0/7

Although I didn’t capture the old betel nut chewing lady pumping gas by hand on video, I did capture another lovely lady on a different day doing the same thing from a free standing drum.  To see a short video of it, click here.