You Gotta Love a Country that has a Grey-Crowned Crane On Its Flag

And I finally got to see one of them – four, actually, sitting in the same tree in a pasture behind the Rwenzori View Guest House in Fort Portal, Uganda. The guest house doesn’t come remotely close to having a view of Rwenzori, the country’s highest mountain, but it does serve lovely dinners family-style so you can find out how just how much more interesting your fellow travelers are than you.

Fort Portal was the first stop on the Great Circle Tour of Uganda that I just finished. I’ve got over 100 reasons to call it a success, here’s a bunch:

Crested Cranes, a three-month-old leopard cub, a male lion, chimpanzees, African Fishing Eagles, Long-Crested Eagles, a Spotted Thick-Knee, Spur-winged Plovers, giraffes, elephants, a Ross’s Turaco, a Southern Ground Hornbill, two hyenas, a jackal, a Nile Crocodile, Olive Baboons, Cape Buffalos, White Rhinos, Hartebeests, Kobs, Oribis, Waterbucks, Bushbucks, Nile Crocodiles, Nile Monitor Lizards, Colobus Monkeys, all kinds of Kingfishers, Bee-Eaters, and Flycatchers, Wagtails, Shrikes, Wheatears, Chats, a Hunter’s Sunbird (wow, color!), Weavers, and African (not English) Sparrows.

Things have been pretty phat for me at the Uganda Buddhist Center. Every morning, after I do some yoga, watch the sun rise over Lake Victoria, and meditate, one of the helpers brings me a thermos of hot water and some tea or coffee, which I usually take to a spot where I sit with my binoculars. Birds I’ve seen at UBC that I haven’t seen elsewhere include Golden-breasted Buntings, Red-cheeked Cordon-bleus, and Firefinches.

I did a four-day trip with one of those workers to his home village near Lake Kyoga (way off the tourist map, worth a separate entry), a short trip to Jinja (“Adrenaline Capital of East Africa” until they built a massive dam across the Nile), and a few day trips to Kampala and Entebbe, but that was pretty much it until I got a burr to see the other 95% of Uganda. I told the UBC workers that I’d be back in a week; I ended up spending 17 days on buses, in matutu van taxis, on the backs of boda-boda motorcycles, and on foot exploring up-country.

I discovered that the Have-To-Dos have lost their grip on me. My situation lets me take the long view of African travel, so I can resist the temptation to visit every “must-see” national park and wildlife preserve on the map. That’s a strong but mighty expensive lure. This is not news to experienced African travelers: wildlife tourism is expensive. Chimp viewing permit: $60 or $120/day, gorilla viewing permit: $300/day ($750/day in Rwanda!), National Park fee: $40 per 24 hours, plus vehicle fee, plus driver’s entrance fee. If you decide to stay at a lodge inside the park, there are some budget options, but many start at $125/night. Treble that for Serengeti Park in Tanzania.

Get your maps out. My first two destinations were Fort Portal and Masindi. Fort Portal is the starting-off point for three national parks and several wildlife preserves. If your thing is gorilla tracking, you’ll likely spend a night there. I was sitting on the fence about walking up steep jungle slopes to spend an hour or three looking at gorillas when I came up with a new mantra: “I’m saving my money for a Good Serengeti Experience.” So instead of visiting the parks, I spent most of my three days in Fort Portal just walking through nearby villages.

I ingested gallons of dust, but the rewards were talking to villagers who were more accustomed to seeing tourists in SUVs than trekking. I got to see prison laborers being rented out to work on large plantations—yep, just like Mississippi. I got the knack of talking with men and knowing the right moment to move on, just before they hit me up for money to rebuild their houses which burned down last week, or gas for their motorcycles, or whatever—yep, just like New Orleans.

I did one safari, to Murchison Falls National Park. I have this fantasy in which people leaving Uganda are required to show proof at passport control that they’ve visited Murchison Falls. I do believe it is the first time in my life I’ve ever gone on a tour that required me to travel with people I’d never slept with. I hit the mega lotto—my two safari mates were a Ph.D. student doing her dissertation research on HIV-positive children and her engineer husband. Liberals!

The only complaint I have is that because of the timing, we got to the chimp-viewing part of the park after lunch and to the Ziwa Rhinoceros Sanctuary late in the morning, when animals know better than to work up a sweat looking for food. But it did allow me to get my picture taken standing in front of a dozing rhino, with about 30 yards between us. Each rhino pair (mother/child) has its own armed guard to protect it from poachers, and they see two-legged primates with telephoto lenses for noses all the time, so the fear factor was close to zero.

We did a 15-kilometer boat cruise to within a kilometer of the bottom of the falls. Along the way we saw at least 50 hippos, plus elephants, Nile Crocs, and at least 20 species of birds that you won’t find anywhere in North America. One clay wall was filed with hundreds of nest holes for different kinds of bee-eaters. Thankfully the boat driver occasionally shut off the engine so we could hear the birdsong and not freak out the mammals.

This was the Africa I imagined as a ten-year-old looking through 1950s issues of National Geographic, but with color added. I tried to ignore the question I’ve been asking myself for the last four months: “Why did I wait so long?” It’s a useless question, just a ploy to distract me from the here-and-now. Instead, I needed to look at the hippopotamus that had just surfaced and sneezed a few feet away from the boat.

Hippopotami are floating snorting miracles. The giraffes, the baby leopard, the lone hyena that crossed the road in front of us—all miracles. Murchison Falls is another one—a 25-foot gap through which 9/10 of the Nile River spills. So were the musicians busking in the parking lot of the ferry that crosses the Nile on the way back from game drives. The blind stringed harp player was especially miraculous. So was the African sky later that night.

My circle trip took me to Gulu, which has suffered more than many other parts of Uganda. Gulu was a local base for the Lord’s Resistance Army for many years, and the starting point for a bizarre insurrection led by a woman who claimed that spirits told her to rebel against the government. Thousands believed and followed her, thousands died. Gulu is now filled with Sudanese refugees—so tall, so black, so friendly—escaping their country’s peculiar brand of political/religious/racial weirdness. More walking, more villages, more dust.

I tried finding a way to travel independently to Kidepo National Park, a place I’ve heard lots of raves about. Kidepo is part of a large chunk of savannah and dry scrub country that crosses borders into South Sudan and Kenya. But that’s the rub—unless you’re on an organized safari, getting there requires sitting in the back of a lorry on some nasty roads, getting dropped off well outside the park, and taking your chances on getting inside. I was signed up to be the sixth person on a Kidepo safari at a bargain basement price of $125/day, but the other five (a group of friends) cancelled three days before departure. Grrrrr. Doing the same trip as me, myself and I with a guide would cost over $400/day, and I’m saving for a Good Serengeti Experience.

So I went to Mbale and the well-visited Sipi Falls, which demands another visit after the dry season ends. Gulu and Mbale are both experiencing growth spurts—construction everywhere you turn. But the people in Gulu are coming out of more than three decades of darkness, violence, and pain, so I could feel the optimism while walking down the unpaved streets. Mbale’s energy is much darker, the people there seem weary about everything going on around them. They live much closer to the center of power and corruption in Kampala, maybe that’s what feeds their pessimism.

Between Mbale and Kampala is Jinja, filled to the brim with foreigners and restaurants that cater to them. I had a stack of real pancakes at Ozzie’s, run by a 75-year-old Australian woman who also bakes brownies and apple pies. Had a hero sandwich at a place that would fit in just fine on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Had a burrito at the Source Café, surrounded by quality art for sale. There were lots of opportunities to burn off those calories doing off-trail biking, bungee jumping, horseback riding, jet boating, or whitewater kayaking that I did not take advantage of. On a previous trip I did a 10-kilometer walk from Jinja proper to where I thought I would see Bujagali Falls, a Ugandan icon. I walked through small villages whose residents were very surprised to see a muzungu. My reward for all the dust and sweat was a clear view of a half-mile-wide dam, barely three years old, sitting exactly where the falls used to be.

It was a great trip, ending just in time for the serious rainy season to begin. I’ve got seven more to go days at the Center, then I’ll be getting on a plane and flying to Zimbabwe for the Harare International Festival of the Arts. Looking at the schedule, it’s a lot closer to Bumbershoot than the Vancouver Folk Fest. Lots of theatre and dance, a string quartet doing a different program every day for six days, a Zimbabwean take on a Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s a side of me I haven’t fed for over two years. It will be interesting to see how the mind reacts.

Peace School

I’m only seeing one small slice of this continent, but it’s a good ‘un—Uganda is worthy of its “Pearl of Africa” nickname.

So many firsts the last few weeks. One is teaching kids for the first time—I had a 17-year-old in my Inle Lake class in Myanmar two summers ago, but never had I faced a class of 6, 7, 10, 12 and 13-year-olds until last Sunday.

The mind does what it does so well—worry. When I found out that as part of my volunteer duties at the Uganda Buddhist Center I would be asked to teach Sunday Peace School, the mind spent the week fretting. How am I going to deal with such a wide age range, and such a wide range of English ability? What do I do if the older ones cop attitudes? How do I keep their attention? What if what if what if?

Here’s a picture of the class with Bhante Buddhakkhrita. You can see why the mind was so terrorized—pretty mean looking bunch, eh?

Piece of cake. We did 15 minutes of yoga, then played Concentration with the Buddhist words that I’ll try to teach to them over the next few months. The Concentration game lasted almost 45 minutes, about 30 minutes longer than I planned for. In American bureaucratic education-speak, “the SS were engaged for 45 minutes,” which any teacher or parent knows is gold.

I did one more activity: I taught nine children between the ages of 6 and 13, one of them mildly autistic, how to meditate. I kid you not.

It was easier than expected. I’d forgotten that four of the kids were nieces and nephews of the head monk and two of them lived at UBC full-time, parented by the monk’s mother (an ordained nun!), so they were all used to watching adults sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed. They actually kept quiet and stopped squirming for almost three minutes. Then I said the three words that most children live to hear—“Class is over”—and they started bouncing off the walls.

I found that Peace School, which is for both children and adults, has many similarities with churches in rural Mississippi. It’s one of many parallels that I’ve noticed between village life in Uganda and small-town life in Mississippi (and I’m sure in other Deep South states), a glimpse of which I got when I lived in New Orleans and took lots of trips to Clarksdale, MS for my country blues guitar education. In rural MS, Sunday church is often an all-day affair, with Sunday school followed by a service that can last two hours or longer and a big church feed.

The Peace School schedule was different—the kids’ part didn’t begin ‘til 1 and lunch started at 3—but the quantity of food was the same: manioc, cassava, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, rice, beans, peas, oxtail meat piled high on every plate. Somehow a leafy vegetable got in there, maybe by mistake.

I knew that Bhante’s plan was for the adults to listen to a 60-minute CD of Dhamma taught by an American teacher. I’d already listened to it, and I knew that the talk had a lot of cultural stuff that non-native English speakers might not understand. After the stomach bombardment of complex starches, I wondered how anyone was going to stay awake for a 45-minute meditation, let alone the Dhamma talk.

We never made it that far. I didn’t know it, but one of the visitors that I had chatted with earlier was a princess—not the type that I’ve dated several times in my life, but an actual member of the Ugandan Royal Family (which one I don’t know—if I understand rightly, there are several in different parts of the country). She carried her regal bearing very well. Her bodyguard carried an AK-47 automatic rifle.

The CD teaching was postponed for another day so that Bhante could make a speech, mostly about me as the new volunteer and her as visiting Royalty. Then the sangha left the meditation hall and surrounded the princess as she planted a tree before everyone got in their cars to fight the eternal traffic jam in the nearby capital city of Kampala. I went to my room to spray on my nightly dose of 30% DEET to ward off the battalions of mosquitoes who descend on my juicy white skin every evening at dusk.

First day of Peace School, Lindemann Reign, was a success.

So much more to tell, but I want to get this message off while I’m in the vicinity of decent wi-fi here in Entebbe, where I spent Christmas Eve and Day. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to y’all, I hope that the solstice parties and Jews-and-orphans turkey dinners and family visits all went well.

Some more pics:

The view from the front of the meditation hall.

Peace School, day 1.

The Princess plants a tree. See the guy on the right with the dreds? His legal name is Elvis, he's from Tanzania. He and I met at an Entebbe guesthouse and became guitar-pickin' buds. He very interested in meditation and Buddhism.

My very first Catholic mass, at the monk's family home in Entebbe.

 'The Mens' at Bhante's family reunion.

 A well that the center has donated to the local villagers so they can have clean water.

 A Ugandan Buddhist monk with a snowball on his head.

Not With a Bang . . .

No brass bands, no hosannas, no Certificates of Completion. Just a bus ride from a town in Myanmar’s eastern frontier to the border, followed by a sweaty walk into Thailand carrying a backpack, daypack, and guitar. Unless something unexpected happens, Myanmar is history.

Let’s see, I flew into Yangon on February 25, 2013, spent two months in Thailand, three in Vietnam, exit visa dated October 5, 2014, that makes 14 months in Myanmar, enough to get a good feel for the place.

If I add up all the time I spent in meditation centers it comes to nine months, which was unexpected when I left Seattle. Three months, yes, not nine. And because I’m a Westerner accustomed to self-flagellation and expectations of perfection, I feel like I should've made much greater progress. Which is comical because that’s what the practice is all about—looking at those kinds of thoughts, realizing how empty they are, and letting them dissolve while the next thought moment arises and conditions the next.

With U Hoai, Vietnamese American sayadaw (abbot) of a meditation center in Myanmar.

Am I a better person? I believe so. Am I the same? Without a doubt. I still get angry, depressed, and confused, but I am much less likely to react to those mind states the same way as in the past. At least sometimes. I'm more likely to view them as temporary--for you fellow Buddhists out there, as dukkha, anicca and anatta. For everyone else, those Pali words roughly translate into “unsatisfactoriness,” “impermanence” and “no-self.” Sometimes I immediately view them as impermanent sad/mad/egad thoughts, other times I need a few minutes, but I'm not as likely to go over the edge as consistently as I'm accustomed to.

(For you non-Buddhist buds out there, a great little book is “What the Buddha Taught,” by Walpola Rahula. Only 90 pages, you can get a free pdf copy here. I’m not trying to convert anyone, I just needed the opportunity to share a poem I wrote:

Walpola Rahula

Ain’t no one more coola

Walpola Rahula

Did well in his schoola

Walpola Rahula

He’s nobody’s foola

Walpola Rahula

Walpola Rahula)

Am I the same? Without a doubt.

Dad, why didn’t you tell me I was going to have all these sexual fantasies in my 60s, without the goods to do anything about them? You were probably too tired working and paying for three kids. Damn, I thought I’d get rid of them eventually, but nooooo. The first week of this latest retreat I did not need Viagra, magazines, or the Internet. I thought about changing my name to Randy. It only lasted a week, but it set the tone.

I'll try to explain what for me was the high point of my practice in Myanmar, maybe the high point of my entire time here.

In a nutshell, there are five concepts usually referred to as "spiritual faculties": sati, samadhi, viriya, saddha and panna. I'll let you look up four of them if you're interested, the only one I'll define is samadhi, frequently translated as "concentration," but some teachers prefer "stability (of mind)".

With practice, it is possible to use very little effort to watch thoughts arise and dissolve without feeding them. The more experienced you become, the more you can watch thoughts come and go 24/7. At my current level I fall in and out of mindfulness, and need to constantly remind myself to return when I fall out. It's just repetitive practice.

The first teacher I spent time with in Myanmar speaks about achieving samadhi to the point that it is difficult to not meditate--that is, meditation becomes the default mode. Whenever I heard him say that, my immediate reaction was, "That's for others, not me, I can't imagine myself getting there."

I had a 4-5 day period of samadhi in the middle of my last retreat that surprised me. It wasn't 24/7, not by a long shot, but whenever I sat down on a cushion I found it easy to enter samadhi, and when I did my walking meditation it did not completely disappear, as it tends to do.

Now, that still leaves many hours of the day without stability. Breakfast and lunch were times of constant forgetting. When one of the teenagers who work at the center played his pop music really loud on his radio, those were times of forgetting. But when I caught myself I quickly fell back into samadhi, which surprised me again and again.

I consider that the high point of my 14 months in Myanmar. Pretty exciting, eh? Woo-hoo!

It didn't last.

For the final two weeks of my retreat I returned to my usual default mode. The first week after leaving the center I reacted to several little things: I got snubbed for a volunteer teaching position I was interested in. I tried changing my website domain registration from Network Solutions to another company--anyone who has dealt with Network Solutions will understand my frustration. For some reason my version of MSWord removed the "Spelling and Grammar" check function (a very important tool for someone with an online editing business) and replaced it with a generic and worthless "Dictionary" function. The back-breaking straw was a story I read in the NY Times about how the Governor of Louisiana blatantly pulled off a legislative end-around to block a lawsuit to get oil companies to pay for the damage they've inflicted on south Louisiana wetlands.

Rage. Not just annoyance, rage. The old outrage circuits that have been conditioned and reconditioned for decades roared back, laughing and saying, "We've been waiting for you to end this retreat nonsense." I know that it is possible to have all of these experiences with a sense of equanimity, I'm thoroughly convinced of that. They're minor, they're empty. But not me, not now, not without more practice.

Am I the same? Without a doubt.

Walpola Rahula

He’s nobody’s foola

Why can't I be coola

Like Walpola Rahula?

Greetings from a hotel room in the town of Mae Hong Son in northern Thailand, where I'm nursing a sore throat and bronchial infection (caught while riding a motorcycle over surprisingly cool and damp mountain passes) and scouring the Web for a volunteer teaching position in an Ebola-free African country. I'll bet there's one with my name on it.

  My Born to Be Wild side, in Vietnam.

I'm Great

Last night I got my first invitation for a late-night impromptu hotel/dorm party in many years, with my new friend Duc from the hotel across the street with good wifi knocking insistently on my door at 1 am to tell me that I am great, not just great, but really really great, and even though he’s not making any money off of me, he still thinks I’m great, and he wants to introduce me to his friends down in the so-called lobby of my hotel (actually a parking space for the guests’ motorcycles plus a reception desk), including the woman he says he loves but who is married to his best friend (one of 10 or 12 best friends I’ve met in the past 48 hours), and to show them that I am great, really really great. And I’m thinking he must be drunk, but no, he’s hanging all over me and I can’t smell any alcohol, although his breath could stop a Clydesdale in its tracks, and I just want to go back to bed but I feel obligated to act like I’m great in front of his friends as well as my hotel owner, who has dropped in on the tea party. It’s all great and I’m great and Duc is the only one besides me who speaks any English at all, but it’s pretty shaky and he just agrees with everything I say because I’m great. He makes a lame joke about how his friends are married but they sleep in separate rooms, and they don’t understand what he’s talking about, but I follow with the equally lame observation that she has a wedding ring on her finger and he doesn't, and that gets a much bigger laugh than it deserves, and then I point to the hotel owner’s ring-less finger and I feel like Robin Williams doing a HBO special bringing the house down. Then they start talking in Vietnamese, but I don’t get any feeling that they’re talking about me, and when Duc notices that I’m not part of the conversation he falls back into default mode, which is telling me how great I am. It takes me 45 minutes to escape, another hour to get back to sleep, neither of which is great, and the next morning when I stumble into his hotel at 7 to use his wi-fi he’s crashed out on the hotel lobby couch. Which is great for him but I’m moving on down the road to the next cheap hotel on my 110cc-motorcycle-with-the-mystery-gearbox Vietnam tour, and it looks like it’s going to be a misty rainy chilly day at 6,000 feet and higher. Great.

Connection and a Death

Yes, I do get lonely sometimes.

It makes sense. In Vietnam I am often the only foreigner in the hotels I stay at, and I spend many hours on my motorcycle moving between them. Conversations are mostly with Vietnamese with the same level of English as my Vietnamese, or with much younger travelers breathlessly telling me all about themselves.

When I’m on top of my meditation (which is less and less the further I get from my extended retreats in Myanmar), I automatically look at emotions like loneliness as mere mind states. If you’re around me and hear me say the word “Blip,” that’s because I’ve noticed a mind state, and I’m noting it.

In Myanmar I was always eating breakfast and lunch with dharma friends and engaging in intense discussions about things like blips. In my Bangkok guest house it was a crap shoot, sometimes I’d luck out and meet someone who had something to teach me if I listened closely, other times I could only think of the Grateful Dead lyric, “Please don’t dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothing new to say.”

About three weeks into my Vietnam journey I headed toward Ba Be National Park, in the north-central part. I found www.babenationalpark.com.vn, which connected me with Mr. Linh, who runs a homestay inside the park. He’s a hustler in the positive sense of the word, making the effort to learn English and paying for a nice-looking website. He runs group tours, and when he invited me for a two-night, one-day tour of the park with eight others who were driving up from Hanoi, I figured it was a chance to take a little edge off of my isolation.

Here’s three pics. Although it's a national park, they've decided to let the villagers who have lived there for many centuries keep their homesteads and fields. They're also allowed to catch lake fish for sale.

  

You can go here to see more professional images. Prepare to be gobsmacked.

I was first to arrive, in the early afternoon, and I spent about an hour chatting with Mr. Linh, his wife, and his four-year-old son. A wonderful hour spent with a happy family. The homestay was pretty rudimentary, but it’s all about location, location, location, right? I was in a park that is on par with Yosemite and the North Cascades.

My tour-mates showed up while I was exploring a nearby cave. Three French, one Dutch and his Romanian girlfriend, a Sicilian living in the U.K., and two Vietnamese. I hit it off with Yves, a 70-year-old Frenchman who could, and did, talk about any and all subjects that came up. By the end of the following day, the rest of us were taking turns giving each other breaks from his cheerful, informative, and sometimes overbearing monologues.

The next day we spent seven hours getting in and out of a boat to do brief walks through villages or caves, and ended the day with a short but very steep hike to what the U.S. Forest Service used to call a “scenic climax.” We went back to the homestay, showered and ate, and segregated ourselves into three groups: the foreign tourists drinking beer and tea around one table, a group of Vietnamese men feasting and getting loaded on rice wine at another, and the Vietnamese women gossiping, taking care of the kids, and generally doing whatever needed to be done.

It was a peaceful tableau destroyed in the time it takes for two small motorcycles to slam head-on into each other.

All I saw out of the corner of my eye was a young man zipping by, emerging from the darkness on one side of the homestay and disappearing into the darkness on the other. He was going too fast, but that’s just part of the Vietnam scenery, so it didn’t seem exceptional to anyone. A second later there was that repulsive sound of two objects crashing head-on. Not the heavy-metal crunching sound of two cars, but the crackling sound of cheap plastic parts disintegrating from the impact.

Everyone ran toward the accident, we foreigners keeping our distance, not being in a position to do anything but add to the confusion. In the slivers of illumination from flashlights I could see the motionless form of the young man who had sped by, and my only thought was, “He’s gone.”

Along the side of the road there was a frantic search for the other motorcyclist, who had flown off into the trees along the side of the road. The wails of the searchers told me that they knew the victim. It was Mr. Linh’s wife, dying no more than 50 yards from her home, where her son was playing with a friend. If she was in her 30s, it was just barely.

Inconsolable, Mr. Linh picked her up and carried her toward the road, screaming for someone to get the van that the foreign tourists had ridden from Hanoi. Blood was streaming from her external injuries and mouth. From the brief glimpses I got, she likely died immediately from massive head trauma, hitting a tree or one of the two-foot concrete pylons that you see next to most highways in Vietnam. She was not wearing a helmet.

Perhaps acknowledging that she was already dead, the van driver was slow in arriving, first recruiting other men to move the half-dozen motorcycles blocking his parking spot, and letting the engine run for a minute before putting it into gear. A screaming Mr. Linh placed the body in the van and they drove off. Several older women from the neighborhood wailed and collapsed in grief. When I gazed back at the male motorcyclist, he was standing under his own power.

People wandered back to the homestay, where they rehashed the facts as they perceived them, with Yves dominating bilingually. After a while I went to my room and did what I currently believe is the best thing to do in these situations: a Buddhist practice called powha, which ends with the line, “And through the power of her death, may she benefit all sentient beings, living or dead.”

If there was any grief in the minds of the Vietnamese in the neighborhood the next day, they sure hid it well. I heard a surprising amount of laughter. The foreigners, though sober about the previous night’s event, were also in a good mood while saying our goodbyes.

  

They left in their van, which made me the only Westerner still in the homestay. Mr. Linh’s father, a bit older than I, took me by the arm and invited me for some tea. We tried to converse. I watched as he took one hand and ran it up and down along his arm, and then touched his head, and then touched his heart while he talked. It’s hard enough to say something meaningful in your own language in such situations. I said something about rebirth and the feeling I got from spending an hour with his daughter-in-law, while touching my own heart. Then we sat quietly.

Leaving Ba Be, I remembered what an old Tibetan Lama once advised a group of Western students to do every evening before sleep: if you have a water cup, turn it upside down by your bedside. And put out the fire, there’s no need to waste the wood in case you don’t wake up. You just don’t know.

Vietnam at 30 kph

If I had the gumption, I’d recruit a couple of fellow travelers to take video shots of me on my 110 cc mongrel motorbike. I’d put on a pair of bad shades and let the wind blow through my few remaining hairs, though you wouldn’t be able to tell without an extreme closeup. Then I’d download a version of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” from the original soundtrack for Easy Rider, and put it in the background.

But I don’t have the gumption, so you’ll just have to use your imagination. Here it is:

It’s a piece of junk, with parts taken from at least three different brands of motorbikes over its lifetime. But it has one great quality: it doesn’t go very fast. I suppose if I wanted I could crank it up to 60-70 kph or more, but I want to nurse its little engine all over northern Vietnam and down to Ho Chi Minh City, maybe 2,000 kilometers, so I cruise at 30 kph. That’s about 20 mph.

$230, I knew you were wondering. I’ve spent another $100 on various repairs: re-welding the luggage rack, new chain and sprockets, new rear brake assembly. A mechanic in Cat Ba ripped me off big time doing those repairs—a foreigner tax—but I got some entertainment out of it, watching the neighborhood and the goings on at his shop during the three hours it took to do the work.

Things evened out a few days later with a major act of kindness.

When I left Cat Ba there was a thunderstorm of Biblical dimensions that broke just as the ferry was pulling into the dock, so even with rain gear the bike and I got drenched in the 200 feet from the boat to the covered waiting area. Something electrical got wet, so when I finally did hit the road, it ran like shit.

I spent an unplanned night in Bai Chay/Ha Long drying everything out. The next day on the way to Quan Lan Island the bike ran tip-top for a half hour before it started coughing and choking again. In Vietnam you are never more than five minutes away from a repair shop. A mechanic, his wife, and his toddler son lived in this one. Not in the back of the shop, not in an adjacent room, but in the shop itself. Their only pieces of furniture—a bed and two chairs—were surrounded by greasy motorcycle parts. Their kitchen was outside, under the roof that covered the main work area. The kid and I hit it off big time right away.

According to the mechanic, the reason the bike was running like hell was that I had run out of gas, a thought that at first embarrassed me to no end, but after contemplating it for a while, I didn’t think that was the reason. I heard plenty of sloshing at the bottom of the tank.

It didn’t matter. He proceeded to take apart, clean, and reassemble my carburetor (sounds more complex than it really is), adjust the throttle, clean a filter, and do a bunch of other minor tweaks that made the machine run almost the way it’s supposed to. And he charged me 50,000 dong, plus another 20,000 for a liter of gas in a plastic water bottle from the mom-and-pop store next door. About US$3.20.

I said, “Fuhgeddaboudit, buster, you’re taking at least 100,000 dong for being so kind, here, you have a wife and a kid and you live in a garage and I’m actually going to give you 200,000 dong because my sayadaw tells me that generosity is a big factor in achieving enlightenment.”

He wouldn’t take it. “Come on,” I acted out in my best body English, “You have a child, take the money.”

Nope. He said something that my imagination translated as, “It wouldn’t be right to charge you for just running out of gas.”

“But you spent 15 minutes making all of these adjustments.”

“Nope, wouldn’t be right.”

I tried giving his son the 200,000 dong bill. He gave me a beautiful toddler smile, but ultimately refused the offer. He didn’t even bother putting it in his mouth to see how it tasted. His mama shook her head and said something that I imagined as “Nope, that’s not the way we do things here.”

I tried for several more minutes before giving up, and felt the rush of energy that comes from being on the receiving end of a kind act.

Note to self: Take every possible opportunity to make others feel that same rush.

The other time I tried to give a tip and was refused was in Hanoi. I took six 90-minute lessons in spoken Vietnamese from a 21-year-old college student named My (“mee”) and another teacher who substituted on the day My couldn’t make it. Here she is:

In addition to teaching me Vietnamese pronunciation, she made recordings of all the drills we worked on, a list of about 50 phrases I wanted to learn, and a list of words for practicing the six Vietnamese tones. All during her final exams week.

Lessons were $12 each, most of which went to her employer. I tried to tip her $10, but she absolutely refused. (She also said, “Another guy your age tried to do the same thing.” Harumph.)

Back to the motorcycle. Yesterday I relearned a truth about this part of the world: if a highway project runs out of money or otherwise has to be suspended, the construction company is in no way, shape or form responsible for making the unfinished section drivable on a temporary basis.

So I had a great day until 1 pm, taking an early morning ferry from Quan Lan past limestone islands that are part of the Ha Long chain, then eating a bowl of pho bo in an outdoor waterfront restaurant while watching the action on the main pier of a fishing village. I bought a couple of still-warm baguettes and hit the road for Lang Son. I had good highway for a change, so I let myself cruise at the wild speed of 40 kph for a while, still slow enough to let me gawk at über-green terraced farm fields and surrounding jungle, getting occasional waves from women doing the back-bending labor of rice planting.

Then wham, I hit somewhere between 1 and 2 kilometers of this:

Goopy soupy. No signs, no detours, no way to get around this mess, no choice but to slip and slide and cuss and spit and slip and slide my way through it. It was on this stretch of Highway 4B that I discovered another great quality of my motorbike: it’s small enough that a 60-year-old geezer with strong legs but very little upper body strength can pick it up after it’s fallen over in a lake of mud. If I had anything larger than 110 cc, I don’t think I could have done it.

It only took me about 20 minutes of manhandling the bike to go this short distance, but I was one whupped puppy when I pulled up to the hotel in Lang Son three hours later.

The Born To Be Wild 110 cc Vietnam Motorcycle Tour moves to the northwest for the next couple of weeks, skirting the Chinese border under grey skies that only break for an hour or two every afternoon. I cannot read Vietnamese, so there actually may be enormous signs on the highway saying,

Construction in 5 km

Extremely Muddy Conditions

Foreign Tourists on Small Motorcycles Discouraged

I will blissfully forge ahead.

No Mayonnaise, No Love

Wow, this is a first. 

I actually walked into a hotel, past the clerk-less front desk, and all the way up to the second floor before I realized that I was in the wrong one. Please don’t tell my Myanmar sayadaw, who tirelessly reminded me that I should maintain awareness from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep at night. And it was not, I assure you, a senior moment.

No, it happened on Vuon Dao Road in Bai Chay, which is where most visitors to Ha Long City stay. Ha Long Bay is the top tourist attraction in Vietnam—“world class,” as visitors are constantly reminded. “United Nations recognized,” “World Heritage designated.” And way overdeveloped.

One section of Vuon Dao Road has 13 hotels lined up next to each other. Each one is 7 stories tall and maybe 20 feet wide. I read somewhere that the reason why Vietnam has so many buildings with those dimensions is that some long-forgotten royal bureaucrat came up with the idea of taxing buildings according to their widths. The furniture in the hotel I wrongly entered was essentially the same as in my hotel. But the stairway being on the opposite side of the lobby should have been a clue.

It’s low season in Ha Long. Most of us Euro-American tourists are gone, and the Vietnamese only come on weekends, if at all, so all of these cookie-cutter hotels are empty. A nice room with a/c, hot water, and a veranda overlooking Ha Long Bay goes for $8-$10.

That sameness is the reason for my admitted ambivalence toward Vietnam during my first two weeks here. I know that attitude won’t last. So far I’ve only done the Old Quarter in Hanoi, Ha Long, and Cat Ba Island—three of the country’s most heavily touristed sites. What I’m feeling is a touch of the blues one gets as a constant target for tourism workers who are understandably desperate for some off-season cash.

No thank you, I don’t want a package tour. Please, really, I don’t wear pearls, and I don’t have a spouse, so I don’t want them. Sorry, no, I just ate, I don’t need more food. No thanks, I don’t need a guide today. Uh-uh, really, I don’t need a motorcycle taxi, I’m fine walking the last 150 feet to my hotel. And no, I don’t want any boom-boom, I’m not buying today.

Who am I kidding? I’d love to have some boom-boom. I’m male, I’m not dead, and the Vietnamese population is young, vibrant, and beautiful. I’m not that kind of Southeast Asian tourist, but the pimps don’t know that, they just see a solo male who might be looking for some.

Bangkok is famous for that stuff, but its sex tourism system has been in place so long that you can easily avoid it. There’s a hotel in Bangkok that I would love to stay at, The Atlanta. The price is not that much more than a guest house, but it has two swimming pools, a good restaurant, and a beautifully remodeled interior that is often used as a film set. The owners forcefully give the positive message, “No Sex Tourists Welcomed At This Hotel.” (Check out the website, where they explain why.)

The problem is, it’s in the district that has the most sex tourism stuff going on. (It was built long before American soldiers from Vietnam arrived en masse for some RnR.) I went there in the middle of the day to check it out; it was easy to imagine what the neighborhood looked like at night, all lit up with hostess bars. For someone who loves taking late evening strolls to check out street life in an Asian city, it’s the wrong ‘hood.

I was never approached to buy sex in Myanmar, where 90% of the women demurely wear ankle-length longyi. And by staying in a quiet guest house on a quiet lane next to the quiet Chao Phraya River, I was never a target in Bangkok.

Then I flew to Vietnam, where the locals have trouble pronouncing “ge” as in “scrooge,” so I was offered several “mas-SAH boom-booms” within the first few hours of my arrival. The typical pimp is a motorcycle taxi driver.

OK, it’s part of the scenery in Hanoi, bright lights, big city stuff. But I wasn’t expecting come-ons in Cat Ba, the main town on an island that is promoting itself as an ecotourism destination, with kayaking and hiking in a national park.

Wanting a late-evening snack, I stopped at a street vendor selling bahn mi, those little Vietnamese sandwiches on baguettes that represent one of the country’s greatest contributions to humankind, another being Vietnamese-style coffee. She was dressed like a farmworker, with thick clothes to protect her from the chilly humid air and a scarf wrapped around her chin and head, on top of which sat a conical hat.

She looked happy to have a customer. She carefully put on her plastic gloves, cut open a baguette with a pair of scissors, and lined the pocket with some pork and parsley. Pointing to some cut cucumbers she asked, “You want sa-la?” Sure. Then she picked up a plastic squeeze bottle of chilli sauce and looked at me, and I shook my head yes. Before she laid on the sauce she leaned toward me and said, sotto voce, “You want boom-boom me?”

I wasn’t expecting that, and my reaction was to laugh, not so much because of the offer, but because she felt it was necessary to lower her voice when the nearest person was a good 50 feet away.

I said no, and she just kept going on with her bread-and-butter business, making my bahn mi. Then she picked up another squeeze bottle that contained some white stuff that I assumed to be mayonnaise. She showed it to me to see if I wanted any, then leaned toward me and asked again, “You want boom-boom me?”

I waved my hand in rejection, shook my head, and said, “Hold the mayo, no boom-boom.”

She saw two potential foreign customers walking by, so she took my 20,000 Vietnamese dong and focused all her attention on them: “You want bahn mi? It taste very good.” It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized she had charged me double the going price of a street vendor bahn mi (about 90 cents versus the normal 45).

As the 70s disco hit constantly recommended, “Do the hustle.”

Today I’m in a fog-enshrouded fishing village named Cai Rong, killing time until tomorrow morning’s 90-minute ferry ride to Quan Lan. The island is at the northern end of the long line of limestone karsts that start near Han La Bay, southeast of Cat Ba Island. Quan Lan is just starting to feel large-scale development pressure. I’ll spend a few days there, working on starting a good daily writing habit (heard that one before, eh?), taking some beach walks, and practicing my Vietnamese phrases. Here’s one:

Tôi muốn thay dầu: “I want to change the oil.”

Useful should you ever take a motorcycle ride around Vietnam.