Cycling Vietnam

My route across Vietnam turned out to be perfect: I stayed off of main roads and spent most days surrounded by beautiful mountains. Nearly 1,500 of the 1,900 kilometers were spent on Ho Chi Minh road, which mostly follows the path of the infamous 'Ho Chi Minh trail' used by the north Vietnamese as a supply route to the south during the American war...

Special thanks to 'The villian' (aka Muddy knuckles) for giving me a Nikon D200 that he found in the backseat of a cab in Manhattan. It's a big digital SLR and, though it's cumbersome and fragile, it's proving to be an indispensable travel tool. After countless youtube tutorials on digital photography I'm beginning to understand how to properly use it and get some really great shots..

As i pedaled through village after village day after day I saw the never ending process of gathering hay in the morning, shredding it, drying it on the roads in the afternoon, and raking it into piles and burning it in the evenings.. I have no idea how this benefits anyone? For fertilizer? For charcoal? Just for fun?

A lonely man working rice fields

How could a person possibly kill someone else?

 

A question I often ask myself and try to understand has new meaning after a crazy couple of days in the mountains of northern Vietnam. It began when I met a seemingly harmless guy around my age on the side of the road somewhere in Nghe An province. We exchanged basic questions and I thought something wasn't right when he said that he had lived in several major Vietnamese cities and when I asked what he did for 4 years in Saigon he replied 'Uh I just hung out, uh I mean I worked.'

Eager to end our conversation I put my map away and got back on my bike, he began to follow me, very close to my back wheel, and after a few minutes I began to get annoyed and asked him to leave me alone.

'My house is just a kilometer away..' he kept saying, '..do you want to come to my house?'

'No', I said angrily, at which point I honestly thought he was gay and, being from a conservative culture, was looking for an encounter with a foreigner. I thought to myself 'I'll put up with him for another kilometer then I'll get angry and he'll go away.'

Moments later I was climbing a small hill when I felt a tug on my hip and, as he sped past me grinning, I realized that he had stolen my small camera from the pack on my waist. After a moment of rage, mostly angry at myself for not knowing what he was up to, I let it go and decided it was another lesson learned and an opportunity to exercise some control over my emotions.. After that I would be riding along and catch myself drifting into violent daydreams of how I could've nudged his bike and caused him to fall or how i should have searched nearby villages in search of him or his motorbike. I remember thinking 'Wow I can't believe the dark thoughts floating around in the depths of my mind over such a petty incident. What the hell is wrong with me?'

For the next 2 days I kept to myself, not talking or meeting many people, and just pushed through the mountains towards Hanoi. On the last day I was climbing a pass at around 9 am, still with 160k to Hanoi and the sky showing signs of rain, I got my second flat tire of the morning on a desolate bridge about 30 meters above a rocky river bank. While fixing the flat a homeless man with no shirt and ripped pants came walking past. With no other person in sight I hoped he would leave me be and just keep walking, but he began to touch my up-side-down bike and my bags prompting me to angrily broaden my shoulders and yell at him to get the hell away from me as firm as I knew how to in Vietnamese. He surely had some screws loose and as he kept touching my bags and laughing provocatively I cornered him on the bridges edge, a couple of feet from the long fall down to the rocks, and I thought to myself in a rage 'I'm going to through this guy off of this cliff! Do it! Do it!'

Seconds later I regained control of myself and I couldn't believe what I had almost done. As someone who refuses to kill cockroaches and mosquitoes (I even try not to step on plants when I camp!) why in the hell was I having homicidal thoughts in such a petty situation? How is my mind capable of going against such an ingrained moral belief? I watched the man feebly stumble down the hill talking to himself and jumping in front of occasional motorbikes and cars and I thought to myself: 'How could I possibly have lived with myself if I'd done what I had almost done?

Did the man who stole my camera give me enough negative energy to override all of the positive experiences of the journey and give me the capability to do something horrific? If so then what would I be capable of after having much more extreme and cruel things done to me?

I haven't gained a justification for humans doing terrible things, but rather moved towards an objective understanding. I have tremendous respect for the powers of the subconscious and it's dominance over our conscious minds. Though we usually define ourselves by our conscious thinking, we are often defined by others by actions committed by our subconscious.


*Please feel free to share your thoughts and views on this topic either in the comment box below or in an email, I'd be very interested to hear them!


On a lighter note, here are some more photos:

A misty morning

Milky rubber drips from the stripped bark into a small bowl

I came across this abandoned runway up in the mountains near Vinh, a local guy said it's where the Vietnamese MIGs would take off to attack American ships off of the coast.

A group of cows enjoying their morning hanging out on the highway..