Touring the DMZ with South Vietnamese Vets

In Hue -- the capital of Vietnam during the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945) -- visitors have three principal choices for tourism: a boat tour of the king's tombs located on and off the Perfume River inland, a looksy at the Citadel in town (largely destroyed during the French and American wars, particularly the Tet Offensive in 1968), and a tour of the 'DMZ' (demilitarized zone), that once separated North from South. For the latter, it practically makes no difference who you sign up with on a group tour -- a travel cafe, an agency, your guesthouse, your hotel -- you end up on one of two buses that engage in one of the less rewarding trips you can take Vietnam: 11 hours in all, about nine on the bus, a dissinterested guide who was three at the end of the war, and little explanation to take in sites ('firebases,' 'army camps,' filled-in bomb craters) that no longer exist. One guide said: 'We're passing a firebase...' as the bus of 30 tourists zipped by, 'But there's nothing to see, and locals will just try to sell you things, so we're not stopping.' Money well spent.

I signed up for a tour reluctantly (partly to see what so many take, and because it was harder to access some sites -- including the Vinh Moc Tunnels where 300 villagers lived underground -- on my own), but instead I broke away for half of the tour and hired a South Vietnamese veteran to take me to a few sites not included in the tour. It doubled the price of my day trip -- from $10 to $20 -- but was easily four times as rewarding.

On the way to the US Cong Tien firebase (aka 'Charlie 2'), where my 62-year-old guide Dien had once worked (and met with 'Westy' -- General Westmoreland -- many times, apparently), we stopped off in a forest of rubber trees to check out a bomb crater. It's one thing to look at a hole, another to get some background. 'We're south of the DMZ now, but the VC came here every night. We'd send up flares every 30 minutes from 5.30pm to 6am so they couldn't make movements. During the day the US bombers flew overhead to ID camouflaged enemy bases... then bomb it or drop agent orange. In 1968, this was all jungle. By the end of the year... nothing.' The workers collecting rubber wore uniforms. Dien explained why, 'The government runs this whole area. They're party members, working like collective farmers.'

We finished at a North Vietnamese Cemetery, where over 1000 gravestones are grouped into areas for 'heroes,' 'southern soldiers' (meaning VC from the south), Hanoi soldiers, soldiers from Ho Chi Minh's home province, and unknown soldiers. There I gave 25 cents to a minority kid with a deformed hand ('from agent orange') and shook hands with a North Vietnamese vet with one arm, visiting on a group tour from Hanoi. Mr Dien spent 'two years, six months' in a re-education camp. The US welcomes southern vets who spent three years in a camp, and their families, and pays to relocate them. But Dien spent six months in a hospital from an illness he sustained in camp. 'I've tried and tried, but your government says no. I don't understand.'

With a few hours to spare today, I took a tour up Highway 49 -- an old 'elephant trail' and 'tank trail' that's now a bumpy paved road to Laos -- where the US used to send artillery to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. South VN vet Mr Dung, 53 (a refreshingly unpolished but knowledgable 'guide'), only spent a month in jail after the war. 'I wasn't important,' he said. 'I was young. I spent three years in the army. I joined at 17, illegally. I lied about my age to get in. I wanted the money,' he laughed. Mr Dung -- who wore a bandana much of the trip and carefully weaved around Laos-bound trucks going 70 km/h -- is a talkative, likeable guy who stopped people on the road to talk. In Hong Tien village -- about half Vietnamese, half Pa Hy people -- he stopped a little 70-year-old man with gray hair and a ballcap on, and chatted as if they knew each other. Turns out, his family was born in Laos, moved to middle Laos in the '40s, then across to Vietnam in 1976. The VN government allows that, I wondered? 'Sure,' Mr Dung said. 'Laos and Vietnam are like USA and Canada -- like brothers.'

Heading up forested hills that too had been leveled by agent orange during the war, he flagged down a motorcycle guy going the opposite way. Sam, about 25, lives in hut on the mountain and was balancing a self-made metal detector in front of him. Mr Dung translated, 'He's searching for bomb shells and bullets. Honda pays 250,000 dong (about $16) per kilogram of iron.' I asked if he found anything today. 'Not much,' Mr Dung again translated. 'Just some helicopter bullets and M-16 shells.' Mr Sam held out a handful and offered it as a gift, then showed how his detector works. Turning it on, a 1950s war-movie radio sound came on, as he passed it over the metal, it silenced. 'Very dangerous work.'

If you want good DMZ tours, Stop-n-Go Cafe in Hue offers alternative tours ($16 by motorcycle -- but 300km in one day!; or about $50 or $60 with car). Or you bus to Dong Ha, about 50km north, and drop by DMZ Cafe, where Dien (and two other South Vietnam vets) work. Let me know if you're interested in meeting Mr Dung in Hue.

Conversations that Happen

The night before a man and woman stopped him on the street. The woman held a knife and wanted money. 'She was very afraid. She didn't know what to do with the knife. Women are more unpredictable with tools. It was two million dong (about $125), but all they got was money.' The guy -- very blond, slouching in the wicker lounge chair at Vietnam's only hostel -- the superb Backpacker Hostel in Hanoi -- had invited himself to a lounge conversation. His slurring and droopy eyes made me tired, but I slowly realized he knew what he was saying, even if he was on his second beer in the eight minutes I knew him. 'I was born in Sweden and grew up in Finland... I'm a Swinn,' he said slurring. Very drunk, yet quite coherent. It's just another hostel conversation.

On a typical day for this 'online guidebook' research of mine, I go to about five or six hotels, a couple museums no one wants to see (like the stifling and almost unattended Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hue today), a couple restaurants, a couple cafes, a few travel agents to ask about bus times or renting a motorcycle, and a shop selling the same 'Tin Tin in Vietnam' t-shirts that I declined 12 years ago on my first trip to Vietnam. I stop for a bottle of water a couple times a day too. Often if you offer a 'nuoc nho' (small water) you get the usual responses: 'you speak Vietnamese!,' 'where did you study?,' 'do you work in Hanoi?', ['are you married?,' 'how many children do you have?' Sometimes you get sideswiped by conversations with folks with more time than you. Usually it's welcomed.

I stopped by an half-expat bar in Hanoi yesterday recognizing someone I had met a couple weeks ago and got to talking with a ponytailed German, Mr O-- , who half-heartedly worried about his Vietnamese wife. 'She goes out all the time. Leaves me at home to take care of our son,' he said emotionlessly. His son's name? 'Tim.' He plans to go back to Germany soon, taking his son. I asked how he filled his days in Hanoi: a shrug and a smile. Nothing really. He's been living here for four months, after meeting his wife a few years ago during a long trip. He called Hue, where I am now, just a 'bunch of stones.'

Landing in the superb Hue today -- a central city with a funny accent that lies just south of the former Demilitarized Zone that divided Vietnam into North and South following the 'French War' in 1954 -- I met several older guys who spoke English fluently. One, Mr Dung, stopped me as I pedalled in the blissfully humidity-free heat along the Perfume River. 'I worked with the US Marines for three years,' Mr Dung said. 'So my English is American English. But I forget so much.' He wondered if I wouldn't want to go to some ethnic minority villages in the area on a daytrip. It was an unusual tact. All the group tours here offered by the usual whirlwind of travel agencies -- to the DMZ, to the former king's tombs up the river -- pile tourists into the same bus or boat. This was something different. 'It's not about personal economics. I just want to create a memory,' he said, this coming after a 10-minute, very unpushy conversation. I believe him, generally. I said I'd call him in a few days, and I will.

Later at a travel agency plugging 'motorcycle tours,' an ex-South Vietnamese officer, Mr Trung, sat with me as I ate nem lui, a very delicious Hue-style meal of pork strips wrapped around bamboo, that you pull off in a cucumber and lettuce filled rice paper. 'The south is much nicer than the north... how do you like the north?,' he asked.

My northern taxi driver this morning -- heading to the Hanoi airport (I splurged on the flight, since the train was full the next couple days) -- was a hilarious guy who used to taxi for Vietnam Airlines and was delighted by his "$37,000 car" he was weaving past motorcycles on the 40-minute drive to my flight. He was the sort of guy who knows a pretty good amount of English, as long as he's talking. He spoke of Fulbright scholarship winners he's driven, and trips he's taken of Australian couple to Hoi An, about meeting his (Vietnamese) wife in Czechoslovakia 21 years ago. His daughter's just graduated from high school -- he's proud of that. He speaks well, but understand maybe 10% of what I said. 'Ho Chi Minh!,' he said at one point. 'Number one, number one.' I forget why. He had a TV screen playing the softest of pop hits from the 70, 80s and 90s on the dashboard: often things like A Supply, E John, B Adams playing behind snippets from Raiders of the Lost Ark or Terminator III clips. He stopped himself mid-sentence talking about Vietnam's hospitals, 'Wow! Listen, oh this is very good!' And started singing along. It was Richard Marx. When we got to the airport he gave me a bottle of warm water out of his trunk.

Waddling with the (Former) Enemy

I don't chase down 'American War' sites or often bring it up in conversations here. It's not out of creating some sort of faux pas, or dodging the reality that the US and Vietnam were in war a few decades ago. I rarely get anything but a bright-eyed response when I tell someone where I'm from: nuoc my (America). But occasionially the war flickers in my path and I follow it a bit.

With a few hours to spare in Cat Ba Island -- where I was trying to see what an independent traveler could do there if they DIDN'T go on a package tour (one expat guessed 'about 1%, maybe less, of travelers come without a tour') -- I rented a motorbike for a few bucks and drove 8km to Dong Quan Y (Hospital Cave) and found myself being introduced to a 60-year-old man in green army uniform with a medal on his chest, Vu Dinh Khoi: 'A Distinguished War Veteran,' according to his card he handed me.

Museums and attractions are the best when you stumble onto curators or workers that really love what they do. Last year in Cluj Napoca, Romania, I had a personal tour of the Pharmaceutical Museum by a very entertaining man in an oversized lab coat and large glasses. 'This is mummy dust... it is used as aphrodisiac...' he said with long, awkward pauses in his English, for effect I think. 'Wow,' I offered, 'Interesting.' He shot back, 'For you... itisinteresting... for me............. itisnormal.' He went on to other impliments and tools -- in 'Romania's fourth oldest pharmacy'! -- holding out his hand with impressive stares like a gameshow host tempting contestants with prizes like new cars or trips to Calgary. I mentioned I was from Oklahoma originally, and when I left he -- no joke -- fist-pumped to me as a farewell gesture... 'OKLAHOMA!' It's safe to say, I loved the museum.

Mr Vu had that quality. Waddling into the dark passageways of the 'cave hospital' with his granddaughter trailing along, Mr Vu pointed out many of the 17 rooms that were built into a rocky bluff in central Cat Ba from 1960 to 1965, and served as a bomb-proof hospital throughout the war. He spent several years here himself. 'This is where 10 doctors slept.' 'This is where five officers slept.' 'This is where' -- clicking his tongue, and suddenly smiling, 'we played ping pong.' In one room he asked me to back against the wall, he moved to the opposite. 'This is the meeting room, but we also sang here' and he burst into claps and a peppy propaganda song from the war 'Vietnam... Ho! Chi! Minh!' Granddaughter clapped, but leaned to the wall mouth closed.

Leaving the cave on the other side, I asked Mr Vu if I could take a photo. His waddle turned into a sprint. He took the camera from my hands and handed it to his granddaughter and pushed me over to a rock and cradled me like a newborn. I've never been hugged more intently by a 60-year-old veteran of a former US enemy. Granddaughter snapped two photos and Mr Vu said 'Yes, very good, very beautiful.'

They waddled back into the cave together and I to my motorbike where a shirtless guy covered in sweat was waiting to overcharge me for 'parking' and to sell me warm bottles of water.

IF YOU GO to Cat Ba Island, you can rent a motorbike from anyone from about $5 or $6 per day. To reach the Hospital Cave, take the road north of town (towards Cat Ba National Park) about 8km. It's signed (blue and white) to the right side of the road, just past a small village where the shirtless guy lives. Entrance is a whopping 50,000D (about $3.10), but I thought worth it. Mr Vu is likely there during busy times (Friday to Sunday); the cave doesn't keep regular hours.

Tour Guides on DIY Trips

In Cat Ba island where something new for me is streaming along the streets -- Vietnamese tourists. Ten years ago, when I was living in Saigon, destinations were pretty much the turf of sunburnt foreigners toting backpacks or the occasional wheeled suitcase. Now it's hard to get room from all the souvenir shops hawking things directed to the local market -- seashell wind chimes, 'du lich Cat Ba' hats (Cat Ba Tourist -- I love how literal souvenirs can be here), weird fake bugs on a stick, and all sorts of things floral. It's nice to see more Vietnamese having the money to afford vacations -- even if it's just for a couple days.

Backpackers don't like to admit it -- or even realize it's a possibility -- but they're actually one great herd of package tourists. People get from Saigon to Nha Trang to Hoi An to Hue to Hanoi, all on an 'open bus' ticket that stops off in front of their guesthouse. From each place -- particularly from Saigon and Hanoi -- group tours of two or three days are arranged to the Mekong, Sapa and here at Halong Bay. Very very few -- perhaps only %5 -- go DIY style, as I'm trying to do.

I arrived into Cat Ba, the principal town of Cat Ba Island (Old Woman Island -- which faces Old Man Island, per legend off to fight the Chinese), yesterday by hyrdrofoil from Haiphong. I rented a motorcycle -- about $5 or $6 per day these days -- and roamed the islands 50-plus kilometers of paved road, then stopped at the gates of Cat Ba National Park, where I started on a 'two hour hike' up to a rusty watchtower. I accepted an old guy's offer for a 'guide' for the heck of it, and ten steps up the steep jungly steps, he yelled for his daughter/granddaughter -- Van Anh -- who ran up in flip flops to be my new guide. She looked about eight -- I asked how old she was '10... 12!' (Earlier this year I had a possibly 12-year-old truck/taxi driver in Mexico nearly sideswipe a bicyclist on a mountain road.) We slipped on the steep, muddy path going up, her waiting for me as sweat dripped off my nose and I fumbled with a walking stick they provided in one hand, a huge bottle of water in the other. At the top was the rusting watchtower, with a seriously wide-open frame, with sparing metal-bar steps going around a seriously wide-open frame. Van Anh didn't go up, and I took it very slowly. At the top, you could see through -- roughly five stories below -- the wide cracks between the long, weathered boards that served as the 'floor.' I held onto the side bar the whole time and tried to step under the visible metal braces below the boards. I am not macho.

Two days ago I took a daytrip on another mountain hike with 27-year-old Thong in Ninh Binh, a few hours inland. He bought a tacky 'Cuc Phuong National Park' souvenir for a friend, and mentioned he was meeting his 'girlfriend's parents' that night. Before we got back he started mentioning stomach pains -- gone the next day -- and confided the gift was for another girl. 'Maybe she'll be my girlfriend some day.' He speaks Russian, studied it four years in college -- this, doing math, means after the USSR, making Thong one of maybe eight Vietnamese people who continued Russian studies after the the USSR gave up communism. I asked where he'd go if he could anywhere in the world: 'to your country [USA] because I could learn a lot, and Moscow so I could practice my Russian.'

Traveling with Van Anh I saw no tourists, traveling with Thong for the day, I spent about 20 minutes looking at remarkably cute langurs and gibbons in the company of six other tourists.

Pythons & Biceps in Hanoi's Outskirts

Just leaving the Water Puppet performance in central Hanoi -- where tourists pack into tight rows of plush red seats in an air-conditioned hall to watch an hour-long performance of dancing fishes, dragon, turtles, farmers splash in the water to a live soundtrack of traditional Vietnamese music; it feels a bit tired, but at $1.30 a ticket it's hard to skip -- I got a call from a friend here, Adrian, a Quebecois photographer here to document shipping, industry and circus performers on a art project for a few months. As soon as he mentioned 'nightclub opening,' 'python guy' and 'would you like to go?' I was on the back of a motorcycle taxi heading to the circus to head off to Hanoi's farthest-flung outskirts to a nightclub that had no idea what was in store. (Nor did I).

On the back of Adrian's bike, we followed Vietnam's most famous 'python artist.' Mr Tong, a 40-something circus performer, wore a tight black shirt, black slacks and tan loafers -- he's been working with pythons for 16 years. 'It's the most important act of the circus,' he said at one traffic light, in English. 'Wait till you see the crowd go crazy tonight. I'm the big performer of the opening.' Thirty minutes later we pulled off a main road, and onto a new development's fringe, where -- reached by a red-lantern-lit sidewalk into a former field, was a booming outdoor courtyard packed with local families crouching at small plastic tables watching a 1-2-3 mix of performances. On stage was a guy wearing a 'Desperately Seeking Susan' jacket and sporting a Kajagoogoo hairstyle (bleached spikes, relentlessly '80s), belting out vocals (and dance moves) to a pre-recording synth track. Some kids held their ears at the high notes.

We got ushered into the 'VIP room,' a FBO regularity. It was an open house with a plain tiled floor, a few bamboo mats on the ground with a dad smoking a water pipe and some kids sitting around. In a corner was a simple bed, with a couple models applying more make-up before their upcoming choreographed dance peformance with a gay guy with a show-stealing grimace and shiny fake red-leather pants with long Daniel Boone white fringe.

Mr Tong, meanwhile, was getting ready. He had put on a leopard-skin headband, leopard-skin wrist bands, bicep bands stretched taut over his bulging muscle, and a single shoulder strap over his broad shoulders. I asked where the costume came from. 'This? I designed it,' he said. 'It's based on the Vietnamese legend of Tac San: a jungle man who saves a princess.' Is that something like Tarzan?, I asked, noting the similarity of the name. 'No, it's not Tarzan,' brushing the long tail of his full hockey-style mullett -- the only one I've seen in Vietnam. Certainly no sideburns in the way to stop his hair-brushing flick.

A few minutes later Mr Tong jumped on stage to a 'Night at the Roxbury' soundtrack, clapping wildly. Out of a basket he pulled two giant pythons and wrapped them around him. Occasionally he pulled unwilling and very frightened girls and boys -- maybe nine or ten years old -- out of the audience and draped them over their shoulders. Family members and other kids jumped up and down in their seats, clapping uncontrollably.

Mr Tong was a little more subdued after the performance. Wiping off sweat, he mentioned he'd been to New York before. 'I spent a week in Madison Square Garden with the Ringling Brothers,' he said. 'New York's great. It goes nonstop. I stayed up so late that month. Sometimes after 1am!!'

Unexpected things like this is pretty much why we travel.

Sapa Tours... It's a Frenzy!

Sometimes researching guidebooks just means being a tourist. Sapa emerged as a must-stop itinerary-changer, with high mountains, traditional H'mong and Red Giay villages and cool temperatures in the far north of Vietnam. Fancy hotels are there now, and fancy tourists, even though it takes an overnight train to get to nearby Lao Cai on the China border (no airport!).

After a few days of talking to tour agency after tour agency about the wildly overlapping mountain treks in the area, and dodging Black H'mong grandmothers holding babies and whispering 'you want marijuana? opium?' eerily on the streets, I just went with a cheap one and didn't expect to get much more out of it than what you see. (And the area is very beautiful.) My guide -- not from the area -- was friendly, but made no attempts to converse with farmers in terrace ricefields working in the rain with 30-cent ponchos on, or the H'mong women with silver doughnut earrings and rubber rain boots helping us by hand down steep muddy slopes. When I asked why Tai women wore headscarves he answered 'because of tradition.' I was thankful for my rain pants at least, but by the time we reached the village of Ban Ho, some 25km from Sapa (half done by jeep), the mud and rain were forgotten in a Tai village of longhouses and waterfalls. The hot springs across the river was flooded out because of the rain, but locals seemed relatively fazed still by foreign visitors (despite the daily inflow of a dozen or so). I got invited into one house for a quick dose of rice wine, brewing in a large cauldron in an open, concrete-floor kitchen.

Most of the trip was talking with my trekmates -- an Irish woman on leave from working with the elderly, a Danish 21-year-old in very good shape (and a Spanish football jersey), and Mr Alex, an 18-year-old Brit who drank tap water in Laos (got sick), likes musicals ('not Grease, it's well crap'), and dreams of eating a New York breakfast ('like in Pulp Fiction: pancakes').

If you go to Sapa, and want to trek, it's worth going on one with a homestay, even if the family barely mixes with you, as ours didn't (other than a drunken encounter after rounds of rice wine). It's worth overnighting in Ban Ho, not the nearer Ta Van, which is less atmospheric. Picking a tour: I'd recommend being sure you get a guide who was raised in the area. Some agencies -- most -- will dodge this question. If you pay more for Handspan or Topas tours, available locally, you're sure to get one (but a two-day trek is about $70 per person as opposed to $30). One small-town agency, called Sapa Adventure, and operating out of Duc Minh Tours, was set up by a local guide. They charge $35 and the guides speak local languages. It's worth doing that.

Don't think you have to book a trip before you go. Mr Alex went on a two-day climb of Mt Fansipan -- Indochina's tallest -- which cost less than $30. A Dutch guy on the tour pre-booked the same trip and paid $140.

Back in Hanoi, more to come...

Watching TV in Sapa

BETTER THAN A MUSEUM?
Travel isn't a full-time deal unless you let it get out of hand. I find -- whether I'm in Yakutsk, Sliven or Bac Ha -- I end up turning on the TV a bit, if there's one available. Coming into beautiful, cool, mountainous Sapa -- exhausted from motorcycle failures, overnight trains and a week of Hanoi heat -- I turned on the Mountain View Hotel's TV and found two Vietnamese channels and Star Sports channel playing a 1970s Wimbledon game without announcers. I went Vietnamese and found two FANTASTIC shows.

For starters, I lucked into seeing the last half hour or so of ROBOCON: 2007 Hanoi, a (apparently Toyota-sponsored) competition of robotic devices manned by teams from around Vietnam. People in the audience -- wearing headbands, waving flags, standing the entire time -- yelled for the Hanoi teams and politely golf-clapped for teams from Saigon and Danang and Vinh. At least eight announcers made sense of the game -- a few wore 'goofy' ties. That said, the whole thing, without understanding what was said, couldn't have been taken more seriously.

Apparently it's a single-elimination tournament with four-man (always men, not my fault) teams running with manual controls around a 'playing field' with steel rods and blue, red and gold cubes that they picked up by their robotic devices and placed onto them. Scores ebbed and flowed -- up and down -- so apparently you could deduct points from opponents. I never figured it out. Danang shut out a Hanoi team 9-0 in the final and erupted in more joy than the Colts showed after their recent Super Bowl victory (this is not an exaggeration).

The next morning my research had a bit of a delay as I stumbled upon the 40-minute version of 'THE PRICE IS RIGHT' called 'Hay Chon Gia Dung.' Fascinating viewing. They had the audience with the same gold tags, some of the same music (but sadly no Cliffhanger game with the yodeling guy and the mountain... or the gay MC with the forced smiles on camera). The 'Bob Barker' was reasonable enough, but a bit gruffer than Bob's warm way (and no mentions of neutering your dog, something that NEEDS to be done in Vietnam). He did borrow the... 'are you sure you're ready?'... to add suspense before unveiling a winning prize. 'Bob's Beauties' seemed more stiff to the task, occasionally fumbling a product demo. Like Bob Barker's version, four contestants are 'called on down' to bid on cheapie prizes to win bigger stuff. And a shot at the $1.00 wheel.

The key difference in the Vietnamese version was TACTIC. Vietnamese -- born for this show, it must be said; the audience were as animated as if they were watching robotic wars -- didn't get the bid-a-dollar-over-the-highest-bid scheme to get up on stage. A sample bid of the four would-be contestants went like: 110, 130, 100, 125, with 125 coming last (think about that for a second). Prices, too, were a lot lower than we're used to -- getting on stage meant bidding on $50 products, and the grand showcase was flooring worth about $250. In some games, you had a one-in-two, then one-in-three, then one-in-four lottery-style guess to win something like a moped. The odds are against you.

Both of the showcase winners way overbid. Guess they were shocked at the low value too.

But two of four contestants got exactly $1.00 on the wheel, of all things, but didn't get to 'reach' into Bob's pocket for a hundred-dollar bill. Some things don't translate, I guess.

(If you're looking for it, it's on at 7am, at least in Sapa.)

PS - I really will try to get photos of these shows soon...

Backroads Mishaps en route to Bac Ha

I've long been saying that in Vietnam anything's possible: where there's a will, there's usually a way. I may need to revise that after a disasterous two-day trip to Bac Ha, a minority town of H'mong people near the Chinese border, an overnight train trip north of Hanoi. Most people come this way to Sapa, a mountain valley town of 1600m -- facing Mt Fansipan, supposedly the highest in Indochina. I plan to go, but timed my trip for Bac Ha's Sunday market first. If all went well, I'd arrive early enough to see the Saturday market at nearby market at Canh Cau too. It didn't.

Off the train in Lao Cai at 7.30am, I left the streams of foreigners piling into white minibuses to Sapa, an hour west, and rented a Honda motorbike in a cafe and headed 'about two hours east' to Bac Ha, a 66km trip. About 50km there, weaving along green pointed mountains, an occasional truck passing me on a blind curve of the 1.5-lane road, the bike started to sputter and died. A summary of the next eight hours:

* restarted, and died
* coasted 2.5km downhill engine-dead
* restarted and went 1km uphill to a thatch-roof shacked labelled 'xe may' (motorcycle)
* getting a new spark plug (not needed) for 30,000D and taking off
* 4km uphill, engine dies, I coast down 2.5km after several failed tries to restart engine
* tried to push bike in 90-degrees uphill, with my backpack balanced on seat
* guy stops and ties rope to bike and pulls me to shack again (after much discussion; he asks for 50,000D -- about $3.10)
* shack guy: Doan -- a young guy in black slacks, black muscle shirt, stylish hair (impossible to imagine in the Vietnam countryside not long ago) -- puts in new engine parts 'this will cost 600,000D' (about $38) -- I'm helpless, it's way too much for something the renter will never pay back, but agree
* wait five hours -- village has 'foreigner rotation' with pipe-smoking grandmothers, pregnant 19-year-olds, relentless kids (yelling 'xinh chao', handing me live beetles) around me every second
* after dark, I arrange a moto taxi to Bac Ha, 19km away -- a whopping 100,000D ($5.50 or so, too much)
* next day, I taxi back (half the price) and Doan asks for $100, I negotiate down to $60 -- while he climbs barefoot up a tree to get me plums -- and I drive off
* 3km later it dies and I wheel to another xe may shop, of Mr Tong, who fixes it in 10 minutes for 20,000D ($1.20), invites me in for tea, photographs me on his phone, offers me a local girl 'for a wife'
* I ride on no problem, don't say a word to the renter when I return it -- any though of getting my rental fee back (about $7 a day is a laugh, and siting changes in their bike could lead to more problems, and 'repairs' -- the bike's definitely riding better now, so I certainly don't feel guilty about it)

I've had many such mishaps before but all ended as easily as my second encounter. When researching Vietnam, you hear many complaints (today, an Israeli tourist got mad at an ATM not working here in Sapa and punched through the glass door of the ATM booth... two hours later it's fixed, but not the ATM... really got to wonder about that guy)... I willed myself not to get angry that I was basically taken advantage of by a mechanic who seems to know little about bikes. A person in Sapa told me, 'In Vietnam, if there's a problem with the bike you rent, you have to pay for it.' So I can't really fault the renter.(But just imagine Hertz saying the same? Renting worn-out, old vehicles you have to fix when things go awry?)

In some ways, Doan sees it as his right -- few foreigners go there, they come with Swiss Army watches, digital cameras, fancy cellphones (I'm guilty of all three), and so a little money is part of the deal. When I left he felt as a friend waving to a new friend. Why argue, really?

But I kept the old engine parts. Anyone want to buy them?

PS -- Bac Ha was gorgeous, and its market -- where hairy piglets squeal, H'mong outfits get sold (to fellow H'mong) and guys stop to smoke in bong-like water pipes at a stand for the purpose -- was worth the struggle (though I found dozens of tourists come by EZ daytrips from Sapa, alas).

PPS -- I'll try to get photos up of all this soon.

It Takes Five Days to Love Hanoi

Or One Glass of 15-cent beer
If you look at a world map and think a bit, there are very very few countries, where you have more than one major, world-known rival cities that divvy up political, cultural and economical duties over the centuries. France has Paris, England has London, Greece has Athens, Mexico is dominated by Mexico City, Argentina by Buenos Aires, Turkey (with all respects to its relatively modern capital Ankarra) by Istanbul. Vietnam -- like much bigger countries, like Russia, China, the US, Canada -- has two big players, Hanoi and Saigon. That makes the slender, but vastly populated country, a bit unique.

Last October and November, I updated the first installment of the ReidOnTravel guidebook in the south -- going around the Mekong and spending a couple weeks in my former home, Saigon. Landing in Hanoi last week -- a city I had always considered more beautiful, but didn't know as well -- I struggled a bit to see the link between Saigon and Hanoi. Sure, the traffic is manic, street vendors wear conical hats and hoist noodles and fish heads in baskets over a bamboo pole on their shoulder, and the language is even a clearer version of the southern slur. But in Saigon, walk into a room and people notice you -- you get smiles and conversation everywhere. Hanoi's different, more beautiful, but less friendly -- at least by comparison. This predates the 20th century, according to many I talk to. Some claim Saigon's built for business (always has been -- way before American GIs or global backpackers were trolling for beer or banana pancakes), and Hanoi's for poets, musicians, artists. My pal, a Hanoian for life, Nam says, 'Two big differences here: the weather's worse and the people are more cold.'

I've spent much of my first week checking hotels in the Old Quarter -- known as '36 streets' for the streets named for the product made on them (herb street, bamboo pole street, tin street etc) -- and going to museums. In the Hoa Lo Prison (aka the Hanoi Hilton), where Americans including John McCain spent years as POWs (McCain, to his credit, was the only prisoner who held his head high in his mug shot -- the others looked, understandably glum and head-down.) Elsewhere, taking much of the central streets by foot, I've had a mix of disinterested stares, motorbike-taxi hassle and scattered animated conversations in broken English from hotel staff. One talked about business potential, another teased a female worker for my benefit. On a fruit juice stop int he shade, I met a 22-year-old Australian, who just bought a Russian-made Minsk motorcycle. He's recently married a bar owner Vietnamese woman from the countryside and they're expecting a baby later this year. (I did the math -- she was about a month pregnant on wedding day.) He said recently he was wondering about the country though. 'People are the opposite of us. Not just here, but all of Asia,' he says, which makes me wonder if he's really ready for the long haul in Vietnam -- and his impending fatherdom. He invited me to their bar for a beer, and to a hole-in-the-wall for some particularly tasty bun thit (rice noodle soup with pork, much different than Saigon's bun thit nuong).

But my newly reacquainted connection with Hanoi only started to emerge, along with the fall-out of a stubborn jet lag, just doing what Vietnam's best for -- sitting and staring. Particularly at Hanoi's abundant, wildly popular bia hoi streetside 'bars' with plastic chairs spilling off the curb and selling glasses of beer from a keg for 2000 dong each (about 15 cents). The 60-year-old guys who run the place -- skinny, shirtless, drinking their beer with you -- chuckled as police came to get nearby bia hoi's to move theirs seats off the street. 'One more?' they asked, just as my glass was empty. Saigon doesn't have the bia hoi culture, and it's missing out. 'Sure, one more.'

NEXT: By train to near the Chinese border, overnighting in Bac Ha