Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THOUGH Rebecca and I have begun to adjust to the physical demands of the bike trip, the social transition
has been less smooth. We've gone from us-against-the-world—or at least us-around-the-world—to spend-
ing most of our waking minutes as part of a collective. The tour group made an overnight ride in shared
cabins on a Vietnamese train (skipping over some ground we could never have covered quickly enough on
bikes), and most mornings we're crammed together in the close quarters of the support van as we head to
the start point of our next cycling leg.
After the first few days, the group splits into cliques. The two older Aussie women stick together. The
four Australian lads form a frat boy posse and take Yukihide the triathlete into their fold.
Meanwhile, Rebecca and I have hit it off with the Canadian couple, Tim and Kim. They're about our
age, and they're clever and funny traveling companions. Kim's a doctor; Tim's a photographer. They're
both excellent cyclists, and Kim keeps pace with all the boys despite the fact that she insists on biking in
flip-flops. We generally sit next to them at meals and when we ride in the van, and we'll sometimes double-
date when the group is in a larger city and splits up for a night on the town.
Thus we're a bit chagrined when, halfway into the trip, we board the van one morning and find the two
of them seated far apart. “Do you not like each other?” Rebecca asks. (Rebecca views tact as a confusing
obstacle. Best to trample right over it and see what happens.) The estranged couple replies with awkward
murmurs, looking out their separate windows. They utter not a single word to each other for the rest of the
day.
This continues into the next day, and the next. We get no explanation. The tension between them is un-
comfortable for the group, but we can only imagine the couple's own discomfort—forced to sleep in a
shared bed each night, yet unwilling to talk to each other all day. We see contempt in her eyes and acute
embarrassment on the tips of his ears.
When we happen to be biking alongside each other one afternoon, out of earshot of Kim, I delicately ask
Tim what's going on. Cycling side by side is a wonderful context for a conversation—staring out together
at the road, matching your sentences to the rhythms of the pedals—and Tim and I have chatted a lot over
the course of the past few days. But today, all Tim will say is, “I tried to bury the hatchet, and it got buried
in my back.”
And then it ends, as mysteriously as it began. One morning we board the van and Tim and Kim are sitting
together again, laughing as though the rift never happened. That night, at an expat bar in Hoi An, our tour
guide, Scott, sidles up to Rebecca and me just as we're finishing kicking ass in a foosball match against
a pair of Israeli backpackers. “Do you know what the deal was with those two?” he asks in his Australian
drawl. He nods toward the Canadians. We glance over and see them happily canoodling in a booth on the
far side of the room. “No clue,” I say to Scott.
Scott proceeds to regale us, a bit too gleefully, with tales of relationships gone awry on his tours. One
poor fellow was planning to propose while on a tour with his girlfriend, and even enlisted Scott's help in
setting up a romantic sunset dinner. Then the chap learned that his gal had been secretly getting it on with
another guy in the tour group.
Rebecca and I have had occasional arguments since we left D.C., but they've all been trifling and
brief—generally over in the course of an afternoon. Still, I'm glad whatever flare-ups we've endured have
occurred far outside the hothouse atmosphere of a package tour. The group dynamics of these things are
strange enough as it is.
Which gets me wondering about Scott. He's been leading these tours for ten years now and lives his
whole life inside their bizarre bubble. It seems like a job that, if you do it too long, might permanently warp
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