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.