Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ments from loudspeakers mounted throughout the town. In Khe Sanh, the government
got you out of bed in the morning.
By midmorning, our hangovers not yet banished, we had reached the Laotian border, ex-
pecting to flash our papers and pass on through. That didn't happen. The border guard
took our passports and the signed papers that Wally had collected for us and disap-
peared into a back office for an hour and a half.
This was my first encounter with Communist bureaucracy, an awesome roadblock to
progress and human engagement, and I suppose it was an instructive experience. I un-
derstood that this is what the forces of the American political right are always railing
against, that overregulation and big government are going to reduce American life to this
sort of perpetual gridlock.
Albert and I cooled our heels on the roadside, growing more and more impatient,
approaching the guard several times and being motioned away, and finally Albert just
bulled his way past the guy and into the back office, where we found several men in
uniforms listlessly performing what seemed to be routine tasks and chatting idly among
themselves. One of them, remarkably, had been one of our hosts at dinner the night be-
fore. We waved but were met with a dismissive gaze.
Albert began to yell, expressing a kind of do-you-know-who-we-are, Ugly American
sort of indignation that made me both embarrassed at the display of hubris and grateful
for his willingness to push our case. It's impossible to know whether anyone understood
anything he was saying, but it was clear the men were completely nonplussed. I sud-
denly understood that the idea of impatience had been drummed out of the Vietnamese,
that to them what Albert was doing was incomprehensible, completely exotic, though
our friend from the night before attempted to explain it to his colleagues as something
more quotidian. He made a gesture, raising a hand to his mouth and tipping it, suggest-
ing a glass:
The guy's drunk
.
In any case, Albert's outburst didn't do any good. We waited for a while longer—it
got to be past noon—and then it turned out we were missing a signature or a stamp
or something, and if I understood correctly, with the papers we had we could leave the
country but wouldn't be allowed to reenter it.
Stranded, more or less, we explored Lao Bao, a river village nearby, and came upon
a rice farmer who had rigged up a paddle wheel to redirect river water into his paddies.
In order to drive the wheel, he had built, essentially, a wooden bicycle; he sat on a seat
and pushed pedals, which turned the wheel, which pushed river water into an irrigation
ditch, a delightfully pragmatic Rube Goldberg device. Both Albert and I got on it and
