Vagabonding

Well, I get up in the morning, pack my things, and what do I find on my bed?  My long-lost key.  I have no idea how it got there as I lost it before I went up to my room.  Perhaps it hitchhiked up to my room in my backpack or something.  Other than a souvenir, it is worthless to me now, since the bike has already been rekeyed. I take off, and notice that my gas gauge is on “F,” which means it is only ¼ full.  I know that I filled it up just a few kilometers before I hit Sam Son, so I damn well know that the dude that rekeyed my bike took the liberty of de-gassing my fuel tank.  He probably thought he was being sneaky by taking just enough of the gas so that it still reads full.  He also didn’t know that you have to take a hell of a lot of gas out of the tank to make it go from actually full to reading just full.  Oh well.  Nothing I can do now. On the way out of town, I pass a few police checkpoints, so I play the “if I can’t see yo...

I get up and leave early, because there is really nothing to see in this town.  As I’m driving, I get questioned by a lot of motorbike riders about my lack of a helmet.  It’s getting a bit annoying, as I don’t like to follow laws that make no sense (i.e., a law that allows you to wear an unsafe helmet that need not even be buckled, and that does not require children under 15 to wear a helmet).  I get to the edge of town, and there appears to be some type of police checkpoint as they have a bunch of people pulled over.  Sure enough, two policemen jump out into the road and direct me to the side of the road.  I’m like here we go.  They ask me where my helmet is.  With a lot of hand gesturing, I explained to them that my chin strap broke, and and . . my helmet flew off my head and and . . . it then went bouncing off the road behind me.  They started laughing along with other people and told me to get on my way.  I was like, really?  That’...

I wake up and immediately take my bike to the mechanic and then take a boat to the caverns.  Because the tour place rents by the boat (and not by person), I hook up with a Vietnamese group, so that we can split the cost.  They adopt me and take me in as their own.  One Vietnamese woman is kind of the leader of the group and she speaks some English, so I can actually converse with her without having to do the whole nodding and smiling thing.  Another older Vietnamese woman is actually from Australia, but was born in Cambodia, and is somehow related to the first Vietnamese woman.  We converse quite a bit, and talk about everything from Australia to lady boys in Thailand.  At times, we had each other laughing in stitches.  The caverns were beautiful, but unfortunately, my camera is not that good, and could not capture their beauty in the low light. After coming back from the caverns, I go get my motorbike from the mechanic who in...

I meet my new tour guide at 9:30am, and he asks me if a French couple can come along with him and another tour guide.  I tell him I’m fine with it as I don’t mind meeting other people. I probably could have bargained him down some, but what’s a few bucks. I drive my motorbike (with the two tour guides carrying the two French as passengers), since I have to go North after the tour is over.  The tour guide shows me how to ride with my backpack without actually putting it on my back.  He puts the backpack backwards in the space between the seat and the dash, and then loops the straps around the handlebars.  Nice.  That is much better on my shoulders and back, and even better on my sore ass.  I guess I could have figured out how to do that myself if I was motivated enough.   We visit a North Vietnamese cemetery, almost all of the graves of which are unmarked.   We then visit an American firebase.  There is an inscr...

I wake up at 9:30am (kind of late for me these days) and head to Dong Ho, which is the city furthest east in the DMZ.  As I previously stated, I wanted to take a bit of a circuitous route to Dong Ho by heading West, then North up the Ho Chi Minh (HCM) Trail, and then East along the DMZ to Dong Ho.   Before I go, I Vietnamese-rig (I made up this term, meaning to fix something, so that it kind of works temporarily, but will never work like new) my helmet.  Although I would rather not wear the helmet, I’m getting to feel like an entitled Westerner when I don’t wear it, so to fit in with the crowd, I do my best to fix it. As I was riding out of Hue, this woman on a motorcycle rode up beside me and asked me where I was going.  I told her I was heading east toward the HCM Trail.  She says that she could escort me to the road that leads to the HCM trail for a small donation.  I ask her how much of a small donation, and she says 200,000 VDN (10 dollars)...