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I don't remember exactly how I found the group hotel. I know I rode on the back of a
motorcycle, an unofficial taxi, driven by some guy who was waiting at the bus station on
the off chance that someone would need a ride. But how my bicycle came with us, I can't
say. It's possible there was a second motorcyclist with a passenger who carried my bike
on his shoulders, à la the bike pirates of several days earlier. I just don't recall, though I
made it safely and so did my bike.
My helmet, however, didn't; it got lost somehow, and that ended up being the source
of lingering embarrassment. There was nowhere in Hué to buy a replacement, but I
wasn't about to continue bicycling through Vietnam's rugged terrain without protection,
so I went to a hardware store and found a construction worker's helmet—a hard hat. I
rode with it for the next ten days. It looked goofy, and it still does: I'm wearing it in the
picture with the water buffalo on the front page of the New York Times .
At the hotel I climbed up on the porch just as a search party was about to depart. The
group leaders had already rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a searchlight so they
could look for me overnight, backtracking over the road toward A Luoi.
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