Epic Vietnam Journey (Day 6-Quy Nhon to Hoi An)

I wake up early, and as usual I skip breakfast and head for the road.  I decide to take a little different route than what googlemaps tells me, since it seems much simpler than the googlemaps route, and besides, I’ve already traveled part of the googlemaps route a few times already when I was trying to go through Quy Nhon to get to the 1 highway.  I guess I wasn’t as lost as I thought I was the previous day.  Anyway, before I take off, I study the map a bit harder than usual for landmarks and such, as I have learned that I can no longer rely on names of roads and road signs.  Sure enough I get to fork in the road with no signs or names, and I just take the right fork as it is going in the general direction.  I remember that the correct road also goes by a big lake to the right, and I do see that a few kilometers down the road, so I’m on the right track.  The 1 highway cuts inland for quite awhile, so it gets especially hot and I’m sweating like crazy. I do remember that the 1 highway cuts back to the ocean after 150km or so, and it was a good thing I remembered, because I came to another fork in the road with no signs eventually, so I take the right fork knowing that it heads toward the ocean. Correct choice.  I see this beautiful stretch of ocean for about 1km and then don’t see the ocean until the end of leg of this trip.

This ends up to be the longest leg of my trip as I was riding for 7 hours (300km) to get to Hoi An.  At the end of the trip I had much difficulty staying seated and would often stand up on the foot pegs of the bike as I’m driving down the road at 60km/hour in order to cool off and get blood back into my buttockal area.  Brutal.  I’m sure people were wondering what the hell I was doing, but at that point, I didn’t care.  I was hurting.  I also get a sunburn on my scalp.  That’s a first.  

The only misfortune I had on this trip was that my horn (and eventually my head lights) went out.  Driving in California, a horn is not very useful, but here, it provides a safety feature that is only second to brakes.  Because driving here is so chaotic, drivers use horns a lot (probably too much) to announce that they are coming on your left or right, and you need to get out of the way.  It is not considered rude here to beep your horn.  Unlike in New York or other places in America, where sounding a horn means get the hell at the way or you are a freakin’ idiot, sounding a horn in Vietnam is more like courtesy.  So I don’t mind beeping my horn.  I eventually get the horn and head lights fixed for 150,000 Vietnamese Dong, which is about 6 bucks.  

I also almost get into a few wrecks along the way as usual.  This taxi cab driver decides to pull a U-turn right in front of me.  I had to slam on my brakes and veer around his front bumper.  I do so while giving him stink eye.  This other guy decides to cross the road while I’m doing 60 down the highway.  Usually, they will either walk faster, walk slower, or stop so that they don’t get hit.  This idiot does none of these—just keeps walking as if he was taking a damn stroll in the park.  Too boot, he was pushing a wagon with a 10 foot stick coming out the back of it, so he took up the entire lane.  I had to veer into the oncoming traffic to go around him.  I fantasize to this day about turning his precious stick into splinters as I plow through at 60km/hour.  The list goes on and on, usually culminating in a surprised look by the perpetrator when I’m just about to hit him.  I don’t know why they are so surprised.  Most do not have survival instincts here.  I don’t think anybody’s mother here has ever told them to look both ways (hell, even one way would be good) before going into the street.  It just amazes me.  Someone should do an anthropological study here on whether survival instincts in humans are an inherited or learned trait.  I think it is the latter.

Besides pondering about the lack of survival instincts that have obviously not been instilled into Vietnamese drivers, I notice a disturbing trend that Vietnamese litter a hell of a lot.  Many times, I’ve witnessed Vietnamese tossing garbage into rice paddies and water ways.  Seems a bit short-sighted.  But I don’t think the Vietnamese local governments do anything to lessen littering, as there are virtually no outdoor trash cans in Vietnam.  There have been a couple times where I have been walking around with something that I wanted to throw away, but couldn’t, because I couldn’t find a trashcan to deposit my trash.  At least one time, I just politely laid a food wrapper or whatever I had into a gutter somewhere.  Seems like when you meticulously place garbage in a gutter, as opposed to thoughtlessly tossing garbage into the gutter, it doesn’t seem like littering.  It’s more like decorating the gutter with art.

As I have been doing since Nha Trang, I pass many policemen who never think to even hassle me about the lack of a helmet.  It’s almost like they just don’t want to deal with Westerners, and Vietnamese rules do not apply to them.  In fact, one of the women in my volunteer place in Hanoi was hit from behind by a police car as she was driving her motorcycle.  The police car kept going, leaving her lying down in the street.  So, I guess they would rather leave you alone than hassle you.  If they only knew that I had a bottle of Baileys in my backpack ready to give away to the first policeman that stopped me, it might be a different story.  It probably cost 3 days their salary.  He would have been a hero bringing that bottle home to his wife, girlfriend, or both.   

Hoi An is a quaint unassuming fishing village with beautiful scenery, including immaculate beaches.  It does cater quite a bit to tourists.  It’s not as bad as other parts of Vietnam, but people do accost you constantly about buying their goods and services.  They are very nice about it, but still, it can’t get quite annoying.  I meet some friends here, and we go and have dinner and drinks at the beach.  There are makeshift tables all over the beach that have been set up by street vendors who provide you with the dinner and drinks.  The vendors provide us dinner, but I provided the drinks in the form of a bottle of Baileys. It would actually be a pretty good set up for a romantic date, as everything is dark, except for the candle on the table.  The lapping waves are a few feet from you and because there is not a lot of air/light pollution, you can actually see the milky way.  The only problem is that the police come by around 10 or so and kick everyone off of the beach.

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