Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
10
My War: Bike Pirates and an Armadillo
T
The trip to Vietnam came about in the fall of 1994 when a small tour company based
in Portland, Oregon, placed an advertisement in the
New York Times Magazine
with the
headline “Cycle the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
I was working on the
Times
's metro desk at the time; it was a year or so after I'd re-
turned from my first ride across the U.S. I was bored with my assignments, and I think
the paper's executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, knew it. One afternoon he came by my desk
and dropped a copy of the magazine on it, folded to one of the back pages where he'd
circled the advertisement in black pencil.
“Interested?” he said.
The trip took place in January 1995, just a few months shy of twenty years after the
fall of Saigon and ten weeks or so before President Clinton announced the resumption of
diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam.
The itinerary was ambitious, three weeks and twelve hundred miles from Hanoi in the
north to Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon was renamed by the Communists after the war, in
the south, with stops in some of the war's memorable sites—Hué, Da Nang, the tunnels
at Vinh Moc where hundreds of people had lived underground for years at a time—and
side trips possible to Khe Sanh, where the famous bloody siege took place during the Vi-
etcong's Tet Offensive launched at the end of January 1968, and along the Ho Chi Minh
Trail, the network of tracks through the jungle used by the North Vietnamese to ferry
supplies to its guerrilla troops.
We were not the first American tourists in Vietnam after the war; President Clinton
had lifted the American trade embargo the previous year, and Vietnamtourism, the
government-subsidized tourist agency that supervised our trip, said that between eight
thousand and ten thousand Americans had visited since then, though most were on
cruises and didn't venture far from the seacoast. We weren't even the first bicycle tour-
ists—the organizers of our tour had made the trip the previous year. But for virtually
