Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
too, disappeared, around the other side of a hill, and once again my feeling of solitude
was complete. I didn't mind it; it was a little bit thrilling, actually, and I felt confident
and purposeful, working hard up hills and coasting happily down, certain that I'd reach
my destination later that day in triumph.
I was some hours into the journey when the roadbed began to deteriorate, the pave-
ment giving way to dirt, then pebbly gravel, and finally, abruptly, on a very steep pitch,
to a mass of sharp, broken stones, as if a chain gang had just been through with pickaxes
to break up a wall of boulders. I had to dismount and walk, maneuvering the bike on
foot, up and down hills, on potentially ankle-breaking terrain.
It was midafternoon and, as usual near the equator in late January, the temperature
was above ninety degrees. In my haste to get going that morning—foolish, foolish—I
hadn't replenished my supplies, and was down to a few gulps of water in a single water
bottle and some fig cookies that had begun to spoil. I hadn't been through a village since
A Luoi and there was no trace of one in the vista ahead of me. My friends in Hué had no
way of knowing where I was. And it occurred to me to be frightened.
But I wasn't. This will sound disingenuous, I know, because it is easy from the per-
spective of safety to scoff at danger, but I was jazzed. I don't mean excited or happy—I
mean, I was
concerned—
but vividly alert, able to think with striking focus and clarity,
imbued with whatever inner strength I needed to keep panic at bay. In addition, I felt
physically strong; weariness gave way, however temporarily, to vibrancy.
Why this was the case I don't know; if you had laid this situation out to me before it
ever happened, I'm sure I would've said something like “Oh shit” and imagined myself
in total freakout mode. Yet even as I understood that I didn't have a clue about what I
was going to do, I felt, well, competent.
Which is why it doesn't even embarrass me to reveal how I got out of this pickle:
after three hours of nothing on the road—no cars, pedestrians, other bicycles, wagons,
or mules—a blue bus appeared, its engine grinding, its wheels crawling over the split
rocks, and I got on.
Another monkey man clambered up to the roof and strapped down my bike with
brisk efficiency, and three hours later, just at dusk—after the road became paved again,
after we stopped at a village where men were squatting around a motorcycle with a dead
boar tied across the back, after a ferry ride across a river—the bus arrived in Hué.
