Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and one of the men brusquely confiscated my passport. In retrospect, I shouldn't have
given it up so easily.
I say men; they might have been twenty-two. On the side of the road was a ram-
shackle kiosk, a kind of jerry-built guard house with an open window over a counter
that in another setting could have been a snack bar; on the side of it a machine gun was
hanging by a strap.
One of the men entered the guard house and perused my passport with great serious-
ness and a kind of fury, as if the secret of something or other were hidden in it, flip-
ping the pages with a desperate desire to learn something or confirm something, and I
flashed on the scene at the end of
The Maltese Falcon
, when Sydney Greenstreet thinks
that at last he has his hands on the treasure he's long sought, but as he grows more and
more fearful that he's wrong and disappointment sets in, he begins stabbing at the phony
falcon with a penknife. The Vietnamese officer was less than half Greenstreet's age and
maybe a third his size, but he was acting with the same sort of anxiety-driven greed. I
don't know what he was looking for, but he didn't find it.
Still, I was at their mercy; they had my passport and at least one gun. The man with
my passport, who was probably the oldest of the three, pulled a bicycle out from behind
the guard shack and gestured for me to remount and follow him, and we headed back
out onto the road. He left the gun hanging where it was.
The ride took nearly an hour in dwindling light. It was eerie; I was still going in the
same direction, but now as if on a leash. My escort was quiet—we couldn't understand
each other anyway—and I was left to wonder, like a pet dog on his way to the vet, where
the hell I was being taken and why I was being taken there. Is this serious? I thought.
How much trouble am I in? The guy was a cop of some sort, I understood that, but being
arrested by bicycle and taken on a long and rather appealing jaunt through the equatori-
al countryside at pink dusk didn't make me feel entirely like a criminal. The enterprise
took on a whole other degree of loopiness after we passed what looked like a school and
three teenaged girls decided to ride along with us.
This wasn't entirely surprising. I'd seen this behavior before. All along Highway 1,
Vietnamese cyclists, mostly men, spotting a parade of American riders, would infiltrate
our ranks for a close-up look at us, and often they would attempt a conversation, every
one of which began the same way:
“Hello! What you do?”
It didn't take long to realize that the answer meant little to them, so I'd taken to ex-
plaining to each new inquirer that I was the president of the United States, and what
generally happened was that my new friend found this a satisfactory answer and we
would ride together in convivial silence for a while until he peeled away.
