by Kim Dinan
“Man we were newbies,” said Brian. “I’m almost embarrassed to think about those first months on the road. We were so awkward…”
“I’m not sure that’s really changed much,” I said, remembering our recent night in the prayer room. We’d made so many mistakes and embarrassed ourselves, but we’d also stretched our boundaries, individually and together, and learned to trust the world and the people in it, including ourselves and each other.
For the next two hours we talked over the highs and lows of our time traveling. The moon made a slow crawl across the sky, and I looked out over the ocean and squinted at the stars. They were arranged in foreign constellations of which I had no attachment. The stars of my life back home, the stars I’d camped under as a teenager and wished upon as a child, were half a world away.
It is so important to travel, I thought, in order to see the world with fresh eyes. A friend of mine, after returning from a very long trip of her own, had told me that traveling had humbled her because it had shown her what a tiny piece of the earth she actually occupied. Traveling had humbled me too, a hundred times over, and continued to do so on a daily basis. Bolong and his turtle sanctuary humbled me. Sleeping in the prayer room humbled me. Even my dislike of Bali humbled me because it had shown me, once again, that life, and the degrees to which we lived it, was very big, and I was very small.
“We should get to bed,” I said. “We’ve got to get up early to catch that boat.”
Brian nodded. “But first, a toast.” He raised his beer above his head and then clanged it against mine. “To this incredible life.”
“To this incredible life of ours.”
The following day we boarded boats, taxis, and airplanes—another long journey that eventually led us to Glenn and Michele.
Vietnam
Chapter 18
Brian and I stood at the intersection of two busy roads, sweat beading down our necks, and watched the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City pulse. The weaving motorbikes reminded me of a colony of leaf-cutting ants we’d seen while hiking in Peru, individual specimens that moved in unison as if controlled by a solitary mind.
I could not get over the things the Vietnamese hauled on their motorbikes: hundreds of bunches of bananas, enough helium balloons to send a child lofting toward the clouds, livestock, entire generations of family. It was impressive and intimidating, since Brian and I would be joining them—not on motorbikes, thank God, but on bicycles.
The traffic light turned red, and a hundred spewing motorcycles puttered to a stop. We stepped into the crosswalk and sprinted across the street, cut across a tree-lined park, and pushed our way through the glass doors of a modern high-rise hotel. A blast of cold air blew my hair back as I stepped inside. Looking around at the sparkling lobby, my eyes landed on the marble desk where two men in suits stood at attention, ready to offer their services.
Quickly, I inventoried the people milling about, searching each face for the ones that I knew.
“Hey!” Brian yelled and pointed toward a bank of couches and overstuffed chairs. I swiveled my head in the direction of his gaze.
“Oh my God, is that Michele?”
Beside her Glenn popped up from a cushioned chair, a magazine folded in his hand. “Whoa,” I said. “Look at Glenn!”
“You made it!” I screeched when we reached them, wrapping them in a hug. “You guys look amazing. Wow! I hardly recognized you.”
Michele deflected my fawning. “You guys look great too.” She stepped back to smile at me. “You look happy. Did you find the hotel okay?”
“Yes, it was easy.” I shook my head, still hardly believing my eyes. “How was your flight? How do you feel? Are you ready for this trip?” When excited, I had a habit of becoming annoyingly overeager. I held up my hand. “Wait, don’t answer that yet. Are you guys hungry?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” said Glenn.
Down an alleyway lined with a rat’s nest of electrical wires and neon lights that flashed like the Las Vegas Strip, the four of us dipped into a pho restaurant and settled at a wobbly plastic table that faced the street. Vendors walked by selling everything from illegally photocopied books and three-dollar sunglasses to plastic tubs of mixed fruit. They stopped at every outdoor table trying to sell their wares.
“So, how was your flight?” asked Brian.
“Oh, very enjoyable. So much legroom, such great food,” joked Glenn, and began to recount the details. Sitting back in my chair, I stole another glimpse at Michele. She looked like a different person than the last time I’d seen her. Her blue eyes were the same, her fair skin and freckled face and blond hair the same as always, but everything else had transformed.
“I’m so glad to finally be here,” Michele said when Glenn had finished his story. “This trip has been a long time coming.”
“Have you been training?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Glenn. “We’ve been biking and hiking and running.”
“I can tell!” I felt myself blush, embarrassed to be putting so much emphasis on their physical appearance, yet unable to ignore how much they’d changed. The last time we’d seen Michele and Glenn had been at our going away party. In the year and a half since then Michele had lost one hundred thirty pounds, and Glenn was nearly eighty pounds lighter.
“We feel good,” said Michele. “But we’re still worried about those mountain passes!”
“You and me both. The only bike I’ve been on in the last two years is a stationary bike at a hotel gym back in Argentina. After riding it for forty-five minutes my butt hurt for a week.”
Michele laughed. “I’m sure you guys will be fine.”
“We’ll power through. There’s a support van, though, right? If we can’t hack it?”
“Even better,” chimed in Glenn. “There’s an entire bus.”
Later that evening we boarded that bus with our Vietnamese tour guides, Hao and Chien, and the seven other Americans with whom we would be spending the next two weeks.
Scooting down the aisle, I took a seat behind a man with graying hair and his very pretty wife. Brian sat down next to me. We’d introduced ourselves to them earlier, during our tour orientation in the lobby of Michele and Glenn’s hotel, but I’d already forgotten their names. The man swiveled past me and reached for Brian’s hand. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Eddie and this is my wife Renee.” Beside him, Renee smiled like a beauty queen. “We’re from Louisiana. I’m a lawyer, and ol’ Renee here works for me.” He elbowed her in the ribs. “Don’t ya, babe?”
Brian pumped his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Where ya’ll from?”
“Portland,” I said. “Oregon.”
Eddie flipped his eyes toward me, looking annoyed that I’d had the nerve to speak, and turned back toward Brian.
“Beautiful place,” he said. “Whatcha all do up there?”
I slid my gaze toward Brian, curious to see how he’d handle this one. My eyes fell on his unkempt beard and ratty T-shirt emblazoned with the faded red image of Ganesh. Without thinking, I touched my own wild hair that had grown from its original pixie cut into a sort of winged ’80s style. I’d stopped noticing our appearance a long time ago, but now I saw us through Eddie’s eyes. We look homeless, I thought, before it occurred to me that actually we were. Eddie probably wondered how in the world we could afford such an expensive tour. Maybe he thought we were Silicon Valley start-up millionaires?
“Well,” said Brian, “I’m not working right now. We’re traveling full-time.”
“Oh, really?” Eddie barked. “What are you, rich?”
I snorted and stared at Eddie’s skeptical face. “No,” replied Brian. “We saved our money and sold all of our stuff, and then we quit our jobs so that we could go traveling.”
“Huh,” Eddie said and furrowed his brow. “How unique.” He turned back to his wife. “Did you hear that, hon
ey? They quit their jobs so they could travel.” His voice grew louder for emphasis. “Must be nice! But some of us have gotta work for a living.”
My hand fell to Brian’s knee and I squeezed. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. Eddie had just nipped at my Achilles’ heel, and Brian knew it. “Don’t say a word,” he hissed.
Eddie certainly wasn’t the first person that had expressed his disapproval of our decision to travel. Before we left, my mom had begged me to buy a bigger house with our savings. Various others had questioned whether we’d inherited money or won the lottery. More than once I’d lamented to Brian about how backward I thought it was that our culture accepted that people spent lots of money on houses and new cars and buried themselves under mountains of debt but that saving up a modest pile of cash and then spending it on traveling could be considered irresponsible and selfish.
I knew how lucky we were. And after traveling to places where people struggled for basic human needs like shelter and clean water, education and safety and food for their families, things I’d never had to worry about, I felt it even more profoundly. I knew I was privileged beyond belief, simply because of the random luck of my birthplace. But so was Eddie. So was anyone who’d ever questioned our motives.
From across the aisle an older woman leaned forward in her seat and chimed in. “Well, I think what you are doing is wonderful. Pat and I took six months off when our kids were young and traveled all around Europe. We made so many wonderful memories.”
The man, presumably Pat, shook his head in agreement. “And the best part,” he said, “is that our kids are lifelong travelers now.”
I smiled toward Pat. “I bet they are.”
Eddie piped up. “Well, I for one couldn’t do it. I’d miss my creature comforts too much.”
Brian turned to face Eddie. “We missed those for a while, but we don’t really miss them anymore. Honestly, we don’t have a single regret.”
“I believe you,” said Pat from across the aisle. “Traveling is the best investment.”
• • •
The following morning, ten minutes into our three hundred-mile bike ride, we approached a traffic circle plopped right into the convergence of four main roads in Da Lat, a largish city in Vietnam’s Central Highlands region and the starting-off point of our bicycle tour. My mind flashed back to India. I hadn’t thought I’d be wistful for the protection that my busted down rickshaw provided, but now that I’d returned to chaotic Asian roads without even a doorless metal frame to protect me, Sunny suddenly felt like the pinnacle of automotive safety.
“Ah!” I screamed as I bicycled full-speed into the whirl of traffic and managed, somehow, to slip into an open space between the cars and motorcycles. I shot a quick glance toward Brian as he pedaled along beside me. He had a giant smile on his face. “This is stupid!” I yelled to him over the roar of the traffic, but the sound of my voice was swallowed up in the thrumming of all of those engines. I had not known it before traveling, but Brian’s threshold for life-threatening activities was much higher than my own.
In front of us our tour guide, Hao, a twentysomething Vietnamese man with bulging quads, held up his arm to signal our exit from the traffic circle. Steering my bike toward the offshoot while sweating with anxiety, I popped out onto a much calmer two-lane highway. Taking deep breaths, I tried to quell my pounding heart as we followed Hao away from the city and onto deserted country roads. Beyond them, the Valley of Love stretched in green patches toward the horizon and the pine trees of Lang Bian Plateau stood as straight as arrows.
We followed the empty road in a long arch back to Da Lat and stopped for a late lunch at a local restaurant on the outskirts of the city. We took seats around a long plastic table at an open-faced restaurant run by an older woman that stirred and clanged big blackened pots in the back of her shop. A cat purred and circled our ankles. “Lunch will be ready soon,” announced Hao. I sat back in my chair and tried to position my weight in a way that soothed my already aching butt.
The woman emerged and dropped steaming bowls of food in front of us. Hao looked at me, “Kim, yours is vegetarian.” I glanced down at a mix of greens and tofu in a fragrant yellow broth.
Eddie looked up from his meal with a pinched face. “Is this gonna make me sick? How do I know this was made with clean water?”
Hao smiled and spoke in a tone that I imagined hostage negotiators used, straightforward but sympathetic, hiding their true feelings. “Don’t worry Eddie. We will only eat at restaurants with the highest level of cleanliness.”
“Hmph,” grumbled Eddie as he glanced back toward the open kitchen.
Katherine, a high-maintenance tax attorney from Chicago, leaned across the table to look into my bowl. “What have you got?” I tilted the bowl in her direction. “That looks better than what I have. Hao!” she yelled. “I want what Kim’s eating.”
“Kim is vegetarian,” said Hao. “I’m sorry, I did not know that you are also vegetarian. I have missed this on the paperwork.”
“I’m not a vegetarian,” said Katherine. “But I don’t want the chicken. I want what Kim’s eating.”
I glanced around the table, embarrassed by Katherine’s demands. The others were dipping their big plastic spoons into their bowls, avoiding Katherine’s gaze.
Hao walked into the restaurant and came back with a vegetarian meal for Katherine. She took it without even a thank-you. Beneath the table, I stomped Brian’s foot. “Ouch!” he said. I threw my eyes toward Katherine. “I know, it’s bad.” He took a sip of his soup. “Just ignore her.”
“That’s going to be hard,” I said through clenched teeth.
The next day we rode up Hon Giao Pass, the longest mountain pass in Vietnam, and flew down a twenty-mile hill on the other side. Ahead of me, I could see the silhouettes of Michele and Glenn, zooming faster than I dared to go. Brian was miles ahead of them, shooting with kamikaze speed toward flat ground below.
There were so many big things that I wanted to talk to Michele and Glenn about, but I’d begun to feel anxious that our highly-structured tour wasn’t going to give us any time alone. Before our trip started I’d spent an entire day sifting through photos and putting together a PowerPoint presentation of yellow envelope recipients to show them. I had photos of the kids from La Bib, Veronica and her family, the rickshaw mechanic in Pune, and the rickshaw driver in Hampi. I had shots of the dogs we fed in India and the boys in Nepal who were collecting money for their school. I had a photo of the young monk who’d shown us his monastery, and one of the baby sea turtles at Bolong’s sanctuary. I didn’t have a picture of the waiter from Germany or the boy who’d slept in our rickshaw or of the mangy dogs I ran with from the rescue center, but I had their stories, and I intended to tell Michele and Glenn all about them if only I could find the time.
Lifting my eyes from the road, I stared at the surrounding mountains. In the distance a tall, skinny waterfall cascaded off the ridge of a foggy cliff, and clouds settled in the shadowed caverns between the tree-topped peaks. The mountains were beautiful and ominous against the low gray sky. A car passed closely on my left, and my attention snapped back to the road. Suddenly I felt very aware that I was made of bones and blood and hurtling down a mountain pass on two inflatable tires with nary a guardrail to prevent a plunge toward death. Clenching the brakes, I slowed to a comfortable crawl.
At the bottom of the pass, the group had gathered around our parked bus. Snacks and drinks were piled in a cooler, and both a dog and a monkey were begging for bananas. Our bus driver handed me a bottle of water and offered to hold my helmet. “Oh, no thank you, I’ll just hang it from my bike,” I said, trying to shake the uncomfortable feeling of being catered to.
The road flattened as we cycled toward the coast. We rode past shrimp farms and rice fields. Farmers, bent at the waist beneath conical hats, squinted at us, expressionless, as we rode past. I was hyperaware that t
he bicycle I rode cost more than those farmers probably made in a year. What did they think of us, in our florescent spandex, snapping photos of them from the saddle without even bothering to slow down?
The dirt road we were on ran through a smattering of small villages with tiny tin-roofed houses lined square with the dusty curb. Children ran out to high five us and, sometimes, to throw rocks. When I raised a wobbly arm to slap hands with an elementary aged boy who stood on the brim of the road, he smacked me so hard I nearly lost control of my bike. Smaller children waved and shouted to us from the open windows of their concrete homes.
“What are they saying?” someone called to Hao.
“They are yelling Hello Mr. Whitey!”
The children smiled, the adults glared, and I could not tell if they liked or resented us. The differences between my life and theirs was stark, and I longed to stop my bike and sit down for coffee at a local shop, to put myself in a position where I might have a genuine interaction with one of the people I saw working the fields or staring from the doorways. But I was insulated in our caravan of tourists and felt, more than anything, like a voyeur. As a traveler, I’d only ever be passing through, but I wanted to slow down and stay still long enough for the country to make an imprint in my bones. As we cycled on, I knew I missed something that could only be learned by stopping.
That evening a colorful, rickety fishing boat took us to our accommodations on a spot of land called Whale Island. The breeze off of the water was cool but saturated with humidity. Waves crashed against the shoreline, Christmas songs played from the outdoor veranda’s loudspeaker, and a fake pine tree sparkled with lights.
Brian and I unpacked our bags in our beautiful thatched roof bungalow and set out for a hike around the island, following a dirt path upwards and scrambling over rocks. When we arrived at an outcropping of boulders that overlooked the ocean, we sat down side by side and looked out at the water. Clouds had rolled in and dulled the sky, but a magnificent sunbeam broke through them and illuminated a patch of sea like a spotlight. Mountains rose up on the distant shore and a stiff wind blew around the leaves on the coconut trees.
