Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pedaled away; it was hard work—water is heavy—and we marveled at the leg power of
the slight man who was probably older than either of us, who had built it and put it to
use.
Afterward, we drank a couple of beers in a café and went swimming in the Sepon
River, where we were joined by dozens of kids, and I have a photo of Albert, grinning,
stark naked and dripping wet, surrounded by them. At some point we had decided we'd
return to Khe Sanh for the night and then proceed the next day to the village of A Luoi,
where our map (already proven not entirely reliable) showed another guest house.
It would be about a sixty-five-mile ride, backtracking east for a bit to the Da Krong
Bridge, crossing the river, and then proceeding south on a road of uncertain quality.
From A Luoi it would be another sixty or so miles, over what looked to be some moun-
tains, to Hué. Fortunately, we didn't have to worry about the weather—it was ninety
degrees and sunny every day—because everything else seemed a little dicey.
The Da Krong Bridge was part of a contested supply route during the war, part of the Ho
Chi Minh Trail network, though I don't think I knew that then. A one-lane suspension
bridge about a hundred yards across, it had simple frame uprights—pictures on the web
indicate it has been rebuilt in a more elaborate modern mode since then—and a paved
surface, but on the other side the road turned to dirt and wound into the lush green
hills. Frankly, it looked forbidding, though it's true I was a little excited. I didn't have a
clue what we were in for.
We climbed slowly. Albert was a plodder to begin with, and his stomach was a little
queasy. It was hot; the sun was burning away some early clouds. As we followed the
road up, a gradual but definite ascent, it snaked around hillsides, and at one point the
slope of a hill fell away sharply and treacherously to our right into a deep valley. It was
remarkably quiet and I was aware that we hadn't seen anyone, or a trace of anyone, since
we'd left the bridge.
A few years earlier, I'd worked for a while on the night rewrite desk at the
Times
, and
I'd heard the old-timers talk about the days of hot type, when brief articles—a paragraph
long—were often used to fill out columns on the jump pages of news stories. A staple of
the genre was known as the bus-plunge story; somewhere in the world, invariably the
third world, a bus had toppled of a road into a ravine, and dozens of anonymous people
had been killed. You probably remember the headlines: “Bus Plunges in India, 31 Dead.”
“Twenty Perish in Philippines Bus Plunge.”
This was where we were riding: bus-plunge territory.
