Hanoi to Hue - March, 2015

The Unbearable Liberation of Being

Leaving Hanoi was an overload of emotion.  On one hand, you are saying goodbye to all of your friends, your daily routines and pleasures, and a lifestyle which you spent 2 years getting comfortable with.  On the other, you're leaving behind all of that and disappearing (with no internet or contact to anyone) into a world of uncertainty - a raw, abdomen-squeezing  excitement that many people may never experience.  At that moment, you feel a distinct sense that you no longer exist to anyone on earth that is not right here right now; nor they to you.  The liberation of breaking the connections that modern technology has worked so hard to create.

Chi

Before leaving Hanoi with Chi, I thought that I would be more or less "showing her the ropes" of this kind of travel.  It turned out quite differently - she was way more hardcore than me, she was rough, fearless, and loving every minute of it.  From Hanoi to Hue took 16 days and we never once got a room, even though a budget room here costs about $5.  We slept in Buddhist Temples, random forests and war cemeteries.  On one windy afternoon Chi fell pretty hard coming down a dirt track and got all bloodied up and I said we should get a room to relax.  Chi wasn't having it - we strung up a tarp to block the wind and slept under an idyllic bridge in Ninh Binh province.

Thai Binh

We were invited into a farmer's home in Thai Binh, he gave us a little hut to sleep in, a fishing rod for a little lake, and he fed us with amazing fish and a local delicacy for breakfast: Pig's blood steamed in a bowl with peanuts...

One Hell of a Church

After a couple ferry rides we found ourselves in Nam Dinh province and one of the first things we saw was a small crowd of men killing, torching, and shaving two large white pigs, right there on the sidewalk alongside a small canal.  A young boy was collecting blood from one of the pig’s slit throat in a bowl and we were reminded of breakfast.  We cycled the rest of the day along that canal and noticed an uncanny amount of churches – something not common in Vietnam, especially the north, where religion is not encouraged and even Buddhist temples are relatively rare.  Around 6 p.m. we entered a church hoping to ask them if we could camp under one of the buildings small awnings, even though it was Saturday night and I explained to Chi that there would be lots of bustle early Sunday morning.  We entered an area that looked like a great spot to camp and smiled at some of the children who were playing in the parking lot and we sat down and waited for an adult to notice us.  Over the last six years I had slept in many religious buildings – mosques, temples, pagodas – but this would be the first church.

The first one to come to us was a young man on a motorbike and we told him a brief story about our travels and he left to go tell the priest, whose house was next door to the church.  The priest came over dressed in jeans and an open button-up shirt with his chest exposed on a stylish retro motorbike.  In his fifties, he didn’t talk much or make eye contact, but he seemed nice enough and insisted we come to his house and have tea and sweets and talk for a while.

The three of us sat on a mat on the floor in his living room where he began ordering his wife and mother to fix the tea and cakes.  The priest told us to call him “Ong Chu” (a rough translation might be “Godfather”, a name more typical in a Vietnamese mafia than a priesthood), and his accent was quite different from what I was used to in Hanoi so he spoke mostly with Chi.  Of course, we said we were married – as was our habit – to avoid any awkward situation, especially, we thought, with a religious family.  I sat there quietly listening while Ong explained to Chi that, “Oh, yes, there have been a great many foreigners passing through this church, mostly Germans or Russians who come by car… to, you know, worship Christ and have tea with me.  They usually leave, you know, some small donation of one or two hundred USD or something, you know something small,” with a desultory wave of his hand.  Chi and I looked at each other after Ong’s last little remark – something didn’t feel right.  He went on to point to the small bridge over the canal, “Did you two cross that bridge?” “Uh, yes, of course.” “Oh well I paid for that bridge last year, it cost the church nearly forty million VND! (about $2,000),” he smeared a big, proud grin across his face.

Later Ong’s younger brother, also apparently a priest, came over and he ordered his sister-in-law to go to the market and get some scallops to grill for dinner.  This brother was wearing an imitation leather jacket and he had no facial hair aside from four or five long black hairs growing from a mole on his chin.  He took us over to see the inside of the church, which struck me as gaudy and dusty with stale air.  Along the wall were cement niches with graphic, bloody cross-bearing Christ statues.  Chi had only ever been in Buddhist temples before and the bloody sculptures of a man being tortured left her with a contemptuous smile, “Was he…from Europe?” she asked me looking at the blue-eyed statues. 

Chi and I were then taken back to Ong’s house and given a loft bedroom above the living room, which we tried to refuse, saying that we preferred to camp outside, but the priest said no, we were his guests.  While Ong and his brother were grilling scallops and drinking glass after glass of rice liquor, Chi and I kept making eyes at each other, mostly because the two men had some of the filthiest mouths we had ever heard, “that mother fucking cunt owes me money still…scattered fucking cunt” and things like that constantly and without a blink from any other family member.  I got up and went behind the house to take a cold shower before dinner.

When I came back and sat down next to Chi she whispered something to me in English so it would not be understood by anyone else.  I thought she said, “They said they want me,” or something of that nature, and I was livid with anger and on the verge of screaming at those crooked priests and putting them in their place.  Chi realized I misheard her and she calmed me down and said, “No, they said they want money.”  This did quell my anger a little; anyway it was something we had already suspected since sunset.  After the sandy, overcooked scallops and some beers Chi and I again tried to convince Ong Chu to let us camp outside, explaining that we were travelers cycling around Vietnam on a low budget and not in a position to make religious donations at the moment.  He was unable to hide his annoyance when he heard that we would not be giving him money and he made remarks about the cost of beer, liquor, and scallops.  I said, “Yes, sir, but please remember that we asked for none of it, it was all offered by you and we thought it was offered out of kindness, not for money.” “But you are a foreigner,” he countered, not at all embarrassed about what I said, “and foreigners are Christians, don’t you want to help support our local church here?”  And I went on to tell him that actually, I am not a Christian, “my wife and I are both Buddhists,” I lied.  By now his face was pig’s-blood red and he sat back and grinned at his brother and I imagined that he was telecommunicating something like, “these two  fucking cunts.”

Chi and I asked to be excused from the living room and go up to our bed, despite it being only around 9p.m.  Ong didn’t seem to object, or notice us at all anymore, and so we locked our bikes outside next to a fenced in group of muddy ducks suffering through their short lives without any access to water, and went up to our bed.  We lay there reading and writing in our diaries, but we could hear everything said in the living room below, plenty of “fucks” and “cunts”.  Ong called some friends over and soon there were five or six men beneath us playing cards, gambling and motherfucking each other.  At about midnight Chi woke me, she thought she heard them speaking about us, we listened...  A few minutes later there was a soft knock at our door.  I answered the door and it was Ong and his brother holding a piece of paper and a pen and they told me to turn the light on.  When we first arrived Ong had asked Chi for her address in Hanoi – ostensibly, to see how close she lived to his relatives there – and this address was written at the top of the paper.  Underneath was scrawled something like:

We, Mike and Chi, agree to return to x church in Nam Dinh and make a generous donation…

I felt really indignant and refused to sign it or let Chi get out of bed to sign it.  “We’ll talk in the morning, we are sleeping!” I pleaded with them and practically shoved them out of the room and latched the door.  Ong went downstairs and lit the paper on fire in a bowl and shouted up to us so that we knew what he was doing.  After a moment of silence things down there began to return to normal: a group of men drinking and gambling.  We were exhausted, we tried to sleep.

Hours later we woke up and they were still cursing and gambling in the living room below, it was about five a.m. – still dark.  Ong then threw everyone out and began dressing in his priest’s robe to go give mass.  “What a fucking nightmare of a church,” Chi and I agreed.  The two priests left and we were left alone in the house with the wife and mother who were cleaning up after the men.  Also, we were worried about the safety of our bikes – Ong telling someone to steal them or slash the tires seemed very plausible.  We went downstairs and the wife told us that Ong Chu wants us to stick around until lunch, but we said no, thank you very much, but we really must be going.  We told her we planned on cycling west, not south; for fear that Ong would somehow be able to harm us if he knew where we were going.  The bikes were still there, right next to the tortured ducks.

The wife was upset we were leaving and she even apologized for her husband.  We told her that everything was okay, there was no problem, and we really just needed to get going.  We unlocked the bikes and loaded on our saddlebags and waited a few minutes until we heard some choir music coming from the church.  Then we quietly re-crossed Ong’s little bridge and pedaled away from that parody of a church as fast as we could. 

“Baby oi,” Chi said later on as we ate noodles some forty miles south of the church, “we can stay in Buddhist temples from now on, but please no more churches, Okay?”  “Okay, baby, I know.”