Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
slender, maybe fifty miles from the sea to the Laotian border, and I wanted to cross it,
to visit Khe Sanh and from there to make a day trip into Laos. I'd come all this way as
a reporter and hadn't left the safety of the group; this was my opportunity to be intrep-
id. Another cyclist, an older guy from L.A. whom I'll call Albert—retired—decided he
wanted to go with me.
In Dong Ha, Wally scurried around to arrange the appropriate papers that would let
us leave the country, and Albert and I arranged to rejoin our fellow cyclists in Hué—it's
pronounced sort of like “whey,” as in “curds and whey,” but with a breathy “h” at the
front—about fifty miles south. We packed a little food, a change of clothes, and took of
for what turned out to be the most vivid, event-filled four days I've ever had.
Albert and I rode to Khe Sanh on a serene road through woods and misty hills. A
gregarious fellow—a loudmouth, actually—game for anything but not always capable,
he was an enthusiastic cyclist but not a strong one, and it was slow going, though
not unpleasant. We passed a kind of quarry, piles of white stones alongside the road
where children played and women in cone hats were pounding the stones into gravel
with sledgehammers. At midday, we climbed up to a ridge and came upon a village, a
handful of lonely shacks looking over a lush valley. One of the shacks was a café of
sorts—two rickety wooden tables, dirt floor, a roof of matted reeds—so we stopped. And
as happened just about everywhere we went and every time we dismounted, the local
residents flocked to us, smiling, eager to touch our arms, to be photographed. I've never
seen more stunningly beautiful children anywhere than I did in three weeks in Vietnam.
The proprietor of the café was a shy, attractive woman probably in her thirties, wear-
ing dark slacks and a man's light-colored shirt with a white frill sewn onto it. (My
memory is so specific because I have a picture of her in front of me.)
