Hanoi to Bangkok - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 67

your conception of travel. A classic permanent drifter, Scott tells us he hasn't been home to Australia in
years. He also says he hasn't taken a single day off from guiding in the past six months.
On the plus side, he gets to ride a bicycle through various beautiful destinations, date cute Vietnamese
women, eat delicious food, and go out on the town night after night. All of which seems delightful, if ex-
hausting.
Every two weeks, though, he's forced to meet a fresh batch of total strangers. He must immediately be-
friend every one of them—whether he likes them or not. Because they're paying him.
As a result, Scott has developed an ability to be all things to all people. He flatters each of us in targeted
ways. When he finds himself in conversation with the yuppie Canadians, he dusts off his trove of inform-
ation about Vietnamese history and culture. Later that night, when he's out with the Aussie blokes, he
morphs himself into a hearty drinking buddy—talking sports and matching the lads beer for beer.
He's not allowed to show boredom, though he's done this exact same trip at least six times before. He's
never allowed to be tired, cranky, or unsociable. He's on stage every moment of the day.
By the end of the tour, his scatter of strangers will have transformed into a flock of friends. In fact, it's
happening right now. We've stopped for the night in an old French colonial guesthouse. Tim has lit a fire
in the cozy library on this chilly evening, and one of the Australian boys has produced a bottle of whiskey.
We recount some of the vivid moments we've shared. We realize we've grown fond of each other's quirks.
It's a lot like summer camp. We even promise to keep in touch when we return to our real lives.
But this is Scott's real life. At the end of the two weeks, he'll say good-bye and promptly wipe us from
his memory. The last night of the tour will be a warmhearted, maudlin affair. And then morning will come,
a new group will arrive, and Scott will start from scratch—with a stilted icebreaker dinner where he'll strive
to learn everyone's name. The next day, he'll take the tour group to the Ho Chi Minh Museum and pretend
like it's not the fifteenth time that he's been there.
The wonderful thing about extended travel—the whole lifestyle, with the come-and-go friendships and
the rootless freedom—is that it breaks you out of ruts you've carved in your everyday life. But when you
never stop traveling, travel itself becomes a rut. At some point, you're no longer gaining a richer perspect-
ive on your life. It's more like you're running away.
AS an American who's watched pretty much every Hollywood depiction of the Vietnam War, I find it dif-
ficult to gaze out on the rice paddies and thick jungles here without picturing a platoon of camouflaged
soldiers marching through, or an olive green chopper chockachocka-ing down to pick up wounded. I'm
trying to stop. Those things happened forty years ago. Vietnam is now one of the world's fastest-growing
economies—a place where people look forward, not back.
Still, the history is all around. We've visited Ho Chi Minh's war bunker. We've cycled through Hue, the
old citadel town that saw a brutal, monthlong battle in which more than two hundred Americans and five
thousand Vietnamese died. We've been to China Beach, in Da Nang, where American servicemen took
their R&R.
I've been reading a copy of Michael Herr's Dispatches —the ultimate you-are-there take on the Vietnam
War, based on Herr's work as a correspondent for Esquire . (I bought it from a street vendor in Hanoi for
about forty cents. It's a fake: a stack of photocopied pages bound together in a vague approximation of a
paperback book.) There's a passage where Herr describes rolling into Hue in a military convoy. “Hundreds
of refugees held to the side of the road as we passed,” he writes, “many of them wounded. The kids would
laugh and shout, the old would look on with that silent tolerance for misery that made so many Americans
uneasy, which was usually misread as indifference. But the younger men and women would often look at
us with unmistakable contempt, pulling their cheering children back from the trucks.”