The Motorbike Diary

Elsbeth writing…

I had a fantastic weekend last weekend at Mai Chau! Of course, I loved my trip with you mom, but this was also a great experience.

The night before the trip I was so nervous that I hardly slept. We were meeting the next morning at 5:30 a.m. in front of the Opera House. I was anticipating having to get up so early (I set my alarm for 4:40, having packed my backpack the night before). I didn’t want to over-sleep my alarm. I was also nervous about driving at that time in the morning on deserted city streets (if you’ve read my previous blogs you’ll know that I haven’t had good experiences driving on my motorbike when few people are around). Luckily, though, I did get up on time and make it to the Opera House safe and sound.

When I arrived, a group of about eight bikes was already waiting there (including Ellyn and Steve), but we still waited a good half an hour for some others to turn up. Finally, we decided it was time to take off before the traffic got too bad. We revved up our bikes and made tracks out of Hanoi. The first few hours of driving was non-stop, gut-wrenching traffic. It takes skill, patience, and a level head to weave your way around the pandemonium of semis, dump trucks, cars, SUVs, bicycles, motor-carts, pedestrians, peddlers, water buffalo, dogs, geese, and of course your plethora of fellow idiot (understatement) motorbike drivers all packed onto a narrow, two-lane highway. Not to mention the deep, jolting pot holes that can really throw a kink in your bike and the bumps that send you flying otherwise. The going was tough but thankfully I came out unscathed. I only nearly hit two dumbass girls on a motorbike who pulled out in front of me and weren’t looking where they were going. I was literally about two inches from their front tire. I shook my head at them in reprimand, since I had no free fists.

Gradually, the traffic thinned. After getting through the worst of it, I kept driving and driving without seeing anyone from the group ahead or behind me. I was starting to freak out that they had turned off the main road without me seeing them or that they hadn’t stopped to wait for everyone. I stopped on the side of the road and was starting to call someone when four other bikes from the group came up. Apparently, they had been farther behind me and said that the rest of the group would stop up ahead before they turned. Surely enough, not long after I saw the group on the side of the road for a pit stop. We drove ahead for another 45 minutes and stopped for a Vietnamese breakfast of Pho. Then we drove and drove, stopping every now and then until we reached our destination in the valley of Mai Chau.

The rest of the drive there was both one of the most amazing, exhilarating experiences of my life and one of the most frightening experiences. There’s nothing like reaching those speared rock mountains after driving for several hours through dusty streets that seem out to kill you. These are the mountains you hear about in Asian legends and folklore. They’re the ones you see in paintings hanging in Chinese restaurants. And it’s obvious why they’ve given people so much inspiration throughout the centuries. Even by looking at them you feel like you’re in some myth. Then to see them when driving on a motorbike—ah, I can’t even describe that. I just want to say that it’s by far the best way to explore the countryside here in Vietnam. You feel so much more a part of everything around you. You feel vulnerable and at the same time it gives you a rush of adrenaline. There’s no air conditioning, no stereo blaring your favorite radio station, no screaming kids in the back seat, no windows to stop the dirt and pebbles kicked up from some dirty truck in front of you, or windshield wipers to scrape away the rain so you can see properly. There’s nothing to make your ride particularly comfortable or to make you forget your surroundings. You’re right there with the elements. You swerve for Water Buffalo who are just inches from your hand if you stretched it out. You can actually smell the jungle and rice paddies that surround you. You have to stop to put on a poncho to protect yourself from getting absolutely drenched. It’s brilliant.

We made our way up and down and up and down again through steep mountain cliffs. On your right side are the mountains with loose rocks and on your other side are straight drops down a couple hundred feet or so. I usually love heights, but this scared the bejeebus out of me and the huge semis and road construction didn’t help matters either. Stupidly, I should have been in second gear on the way down, but I was in fourth. I knew this and didn’t shift down. Thankfully, I was fine—next time I’ll know better both when driving a motorbike and a car. It twisted up my stomach all night just thinking about having to drive up through those mountains again the next day. Yet, despite this fear, the drive was gorgeous. I’ll post pictures on Shutterfly…eventually. I’m still slowly working on deleting and fixing pictures from my trip with my mom. The hills and valleys are absolutely amazing. Then there’s the traditional wood and stilt houses nestled within them. It’s a true adventure.

We finally made it to our destination by 11 a.m. after driving for a good five hours. Our homestay was in a small village in a wide, flat valley filled with rice paddies and surrounded on all sides by mountains as far as you could see. We all stayed in one traditional wooden stilt houses in a campground/compound area for tourists. The house was about 15 feet in the air. Underneath is a slab of concrete where meals are served on low wooden/straw tables and plastic chairs. Inside the house there is one large room. The floor is made of straw woven over wooden beams, so you can see straight to the concrete slab below. You feel like you’re going to fall through at any moment as the floor crunches and moves underneath you. Nevertheless, there was some big, ornate wooden furniture up there in the corners. The women who worked and lived there first laid out woven mats and then our thin mattresses side-by-side. They covered them with clean white sheets and beautiful traditional embroidered blankets. I chose a mattress with an exceptionally thick, embroidered blanket. I wish I could find one like it and have enough room to take it home with me. The inside was like our ancient blue sleeping bags at home—good enough for winter. There were no windows in the house—only shutters which were open to the cool mountain air blowing in. The weather was perfect for traveling the entire weekend: overcast and cool with not too much rain. This was by far the best homestay I’ve done so far in Vietnam. The house, our beds, and the bathroom were clean and tidy, the food was fantastic, and the owners were lovely.

When we arrived they hadn’t prepared a lunch for us at the homestay because they didn’t know when we were coming, so we drove down the street—right through a rice paddy—to a restaurant where we had a shared Vietnamese meal. It was great to chat with and meet everyone on our trip. It was a good, friendly group.

After lunch we went back to the house, chilled for a bit, took naps, and waited for the rain to stop. Then we hired one of the men who lived in the stilt houses to be our guide and take us around the valley. He led us on a seven kilometer trek through the rice paddies, village, and eventually up through jungle and mountain. We thought at first that we were just going around the mountain on a nice afternoon stroll, but no. Half of us ended up practically getting lost in the mountainous wilderness when the other half raced ahead through the bush. We had to constantly stop to yell out “Dung Oi!” Dung—pronounced zung, but she likes to be called zoom—was our group organizer/leader and “Oi” is the equivalent of “hey.”

Despite our fears that it was getting dark and we wouldn’t find our way out again plus the fact that we were filthy and sweaty from struggling up slippery rocks plastered in red mud, the whole thing was a pretty comical experience—especially when we finally found the other half of the group only to discover that our guide had disappeared ahead. Now none of us knew the way out! Yes, we did survive this ordeal, obviously as I’m posting this on the internet. Civilization! We came upon a small farmhouse hoping it wasn’t another scene from Deliverance and these weren’t natives waiting cook us in a stew. Sorry, no painted, spear-bearing locals (although I did faintly hear drums on our trek), only a water buffalo giving us the most absurd look.

We trudged back through rice paddies as the sun set with a perfect reflection of the mountains on the paddies. All of us were looking forward to a good hot shower and a filling dinner. We got what we wanted. We ate at our homestay on the concrete slab and the food was delicious. Then we decided to have a bonfire. We paid our homestay to set up the fire and bought two clay jugs of (weak) traditional rice wine. We drank this wine through long hollowed bamboo straws that we stuck in the pots and drank communally. We also invested in a bamboo dance and accordion player. You have two long bamboo poles laid horizontally on the ground and six poles (three sets of two) laid vertically over the horizontal poles. There are six people (three at each end) who have two ends of the bamboo poles. In unison, they bang them in a rhythmic pattern on the horizontal poles. We all tried our hand at this. Then while the poles are being moved people dance over them. You have to step through the poles a certain way before they hit your ankles. Simple enough and most of the time you escaped the bang of the poles, but sometimes you didn’t. It was a lot of fun. Still, I was exhausted from the long day, so after about an hour some other people and I went back to the house and straight to bed where mosquito nets were already set up over our mattresses and waiting for us to climb into.

The next morning we had a breakfast of sticky rice at the house. It was wrapped in a husk, which had been cooked on the fire. When you peel open the husk there’s a banana leaf inside. You peel open the banana leaf and in that is the sticky rice which you can dip in crushed peanuts or sugar. After breakfast we packed our things and took off right away. We drove through the valley to a minority Hmong village where there was a Sunday market. It was fantastic to see. All the women were dressed in their traditional brightly colored woven dresses selling their homemade ribbons, yarns, and cloth. The men—some of them also traditionally dressed—were selling ammunition and other things for hunting. I bought some ribbon and a little purse.

After that we drove further down the road to a path only for motorbikes. It wound up and down the mountain on very steep hills. I didn’t think my bike would make it and I was sure to use second gear on the way down. In the valley below we ran into a bumpy gravel road and traveled down a little ways to a dingy general store where our Vietnamese members negotiated lunch for our group. In the meantime, I walked around with two other girls from the group. It was a farming community filled with little wooden houses and children running around and climbing trees in their traditional outfits. So peaceful. It was straight out of a National Geographic picture. On the way back to the general store some of the group members and the store owner were climbing the small mountain behind the store, so of course I ran to join them. Apparently lovers climb up this mountain to have their romantic rendezvous. It was steep going up and even harder down on the slippery gravel, but the view was amazing. You could see the entire valley up there and the little dusty village below.

By the time we reached the bottom, I was starving. We took our motorbikes just down the road to another general store where we ate our lunch on straw mats on the floor. After lunch I road on the back of another ex-pat’s bike instead of driving my own. I was nervous about the twisting steep roads and another Vietnamese girl had offered to drive so I let her. We took off back home and she drove for a ways until it started to rain a little. Then we stopped and another Vietnamese girl, who had wanted to drive earlier, offered, so I let her. I jumped on the back of another ex-pat’s bike and we drove and drove and drove. Our group split up along the way. Apparently one of the bikes behind us broke down and so half of the group was with them and the rest of us were up ahead. We decided to wait for them at a café where we had sugarcane juice; however, as we were heading to the café, the girl who was driving my bike sped on ahead and didn’t realize we’d stopped. None of our phones had reception and the ones that would have worked were dead, so we couldn’t get a hold of her. I was also carrying her purse. Ha, well she had my bike and I had her purse, so it was a trade. The others eventually caught up with us, but by then it was dusk. We hopped on again and drove straight through to Hanoi. When we got into town it was dark. The ride had been long, bumpy, and nerve-wracking, but we made it safe and sound. It turns out that the girl had been in town for a good hour and a half at a café waiting for us, so we met up and exchanged our possessions. Most of the group headed to a Bia Hoi for dinner and it turns out that it was literally just around the corner from my apartment—such a relief that I didn’t have to find my way home in the dark. In fact, I had walked there for lunch the week before.

So…finally…there ends my adventure for last weekend. Now onto the next adventure this weekend. Happy Fourth of July! When you think about it, it’s kind of crazy to be spending the Fourth in Vietnam of all places. I’m headed to a BBQ with some work buddies tomorrow evening after work (yes, I work six days a week now). Then on Sunday I’m hoping to get a pedicure and my hair cut. It’s been a long, busy week this last week…work, work, work. Finally I have more hours! In fact, maybe too many. Troi oi! You can never win….