Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
all of the Vietnamese we encountered in our three weeks there, we were likely the first
Americans—maybe the first white people—they had seen since the evacuation of Amer-
ican troops on April 30, 1975.
There were about sixty of us all told, with varying abilities as cyclists, ranging in age
from twenty-three to seventy-four, nearly all Americans, about a third women, and sur-
prisingly (or maybe not) ten or twelve returning veterans of the war. It was way too large
a group for such a wacky enterprise; our daily mileage was generally between eighty
and a hundred miles and by late afternoon our caravan might stretch for thirty miles
or more. The tour organizers, who were well-meaning and competent, were nonetheless
overwhelmed by the logistics of feeding, housing, and keeping track of so many people
in a third-world country with a stultifying bureaucracy and a nascent service economy,
where almost no one spoke English and the local language might just as well have been
gibberish. It was a wild three weeks.
Among the journey's dozens of surreal, eye-opening, completely unforeseeable epis-
odes was the kidnapping of my bicycle by bike pirates. It occurred early in the trip, four
or five days along, maybe three hundred miles south of Hanoi as we rode the country's
main thoroughfare, a not entirely paved road called Highway 1. This was in an especially
rural area, with many miles between small villages, where the road was narrow and often
muddy and sometimes didn't include the luxury of a bridge across a stream. You took
your shoes off and carried your bike.
It had been a long ride that day, beginning in early morning—the distance from hotel
to hotel more than a hundred miles—and late in the afternoon, with maybe twenty-five
miles to go and sunlight waning, the tour group's support bus came up behind me and a
few others and scooped us up to take us the rest of the way. I got on grudgingly; I never
like to miss out on the end of a ride, but I had dawdled that day, was close to bringing
up the rear of the caravan, and it was late.
The bus was about the size of a regular city bus, but it had luggage racks on top and
back doors that opened like a van's, which were used to load bikes into a space where
several rows of seats used to be. Up front it still had seats for maybe thirty people. A
dozen or so were already on board when I got on, and we started chatting amiably about
the day's ride. Out the window, the road dipped down along a hillside and at one point
crossed a stream through the streambed. In trying, later on, to figure out what the hell
had happened, I recalled the bus slowing down to go through the water and the rear end
of the chassis bumping the bank as the bus climbed out. At the time I took no notice.
A few miles later, however, we were rattling along, and I looked out the window and
saw two motor scooters had pulled up alongside the bus. One of the riders was holding
something in one hand and waving it, gesturing with it. It was a bicycle pump, and after
