Salt Veins

The road is a blur.

Mountains, rivers, and endless jade-green rice paddies whip by at 70 clicks an hour. Pause to slowly work your way through a herd of water buffalo and then punch it.

There’s always some place to be. Some sight to see. At the whim of a sun that sets at 5, the last thing you want to do is be riding these mountain roads at night. You’d have a better chance of surviving a game of Russian-roulette.

The Russian’s here just call it ‘roulette’.

To this point I’ve spent a month in total on the road.  Two flat tires, a half dozen breakdowns, and I ran into one cow.  Slow, delicious, bastard.

It’s been frustrating at times. Terrifying at others. But never boring.  I suppose that was the point.

A long day’s ride can be upwards of two hundred kilometers. This doesn’t leave much room for introspection or peace. Peace can come at the end of the day over a bowl of Phó and a couple Saigon Green’s, but rarely on the road.  Even arriving at a town at the end of a long ride is not the end of the possible frustrations.

A room must still be found, and negotiated. A trying experience some days when my pride will not allow me to pay ‘white-guy’ prices.  Sometimes dinner can be hard to come by. People eat early, and god forbid you’re in the country looking for dinner past 8pm, you may be going hungry, or simply stuck with the cold communal rice some guesthouses leave out.

These are not complaints however. Simply the inevitable friction of moving from a cush western life to a simpler eastern one. There are bound to be incongruities and some days you just don’t have the energy to try to explain that diet-pineapple Fanta is not Coca Cola (screw it, I’ll have a beer).

There have been few days on the road I regret. Every difficulty is countered by unforgettable experiences, be it a mountain vista, a meal, or a chance encounter with a local, there is always something. A ‘fuck me’ moment that makes you pause and question the uncertain circumstances that brought you to such an amazing and strange place.

Nevertheless, constant movement requires a heightened state of mind. Planning, and mapping, and charting.  How many hours to the next village? Can I make it before sundown?  If that road is washed out, how far back is an alternate route? Will there be gas in the next 40 clicks?  God I hope so.

I’ve become mildy religious for all the time spent praying for a gas station to appear in the middle of nowhere. In fact some of these regions make the ‘middle of nowhere’ look like lower Manhattan.  I once drove for a day and counted three people. A one-legged man asleep in a hammock, an old woman hoeing her garden, and an eight year old boy at the head of a flock of goats.  The rice paddies and my iPod keep me company.

As beautiful and amazing as it can be, it is exhausting. This isn’t some bus tour where you’re chaperoned around in air con comfort, only left to worry if your camera has enough battery left to see the next coffee farm. No, this is a different type of travel. The DIY. Map and a heading.  When it works, it makes you wonder why people do it any other way. When it doesn’t, and you’re soaking wet pushing your bike across some muddy river, you wonder what you were thinking. You could be on some minibus with AC, chatting up the cute Czech girl in the seat next to you. You dumb son of a….

Exhausting.

Physically. Constantly strapping and unstrapping luggage to fill the gas tank. Vibrating down to my bones when the road surface changes to a frequency akin to the mythological ‘brown note’.  Pushing the bike across streams and over washed out roads.  Cranking and pressing worn out controls on my right hand makes it difficult to use chopsticks sometimes at dinner. After a few nights getting looked at funny I have come to carry an emergency fork.

Mentally. For a time I thought I would forget how to speak English. I took to talking to myself in my room like a crazy person just to hear a language not as shrill as Vietnamese (tonal languages are hard on the ears).  Constantly being on guard against scams, white guy prices, and outright theft. Always treading the line between trust and skepticism.

So it was that when I came off the road into the small beach-side town of Mui Ne, on the shores of the South China Sea, that I took it for what it was.

Paradise.

A place to put my feet up for a bit and be lulled to sleep with the sound of the waves just outside my window.

Mui Ne was a tiny fishing village until the first kite surfers arrived. Drawn by the strong winds, and untouched beach, word quickly rippled throughout the community of sun bleached ‘dudes’.   They arrived en-mass, reshaping the town to fit their needs. Fishermen opened beach bars, old women hired out their sowing services to mend torn kites, and a rash of resorts catering to affluent Russians sprang up like palms in the sand.

I happened to arrive at the end of my rope. After a rough couple weeks on the road I was willing to overlook it’s shortcomings, of which there are many.

I have come to despise Russians, and like Nha Trang, this place is lousy with them. Consequences of losing a war I imagine. If we’d have won, maybe we would enjoy the same cheap direct flights that Muscovites do.  Loud, boorish, and constantly enveloped by a vodka haze, they throw around the money here and as such are treated like red faced gods.  Thankfully they tend to stick to their resorts and Russian restaurants.  Sitting around eating Pierogies and talking about snow or something.

Drunk Russians aside, the place was a dream. I happened upon a cheap bungalow (Hong Di) that was all of ten steps from the beach.  For $11 a night I got a fan, a shower, and a bed that was constantly filled with sand. I loved it.  My window overlooked the beach a mere five steps away, and my room came equipped with a comfy day-bed for napping in the sun.  Not exactly the Ritz, but all things considered it was a palace with all conceivable necessities and beach-luxuries within easy reach.

Location is always a tricky thing in a strange place. You never know where the good areas are, or where the hangouts might be until you’re settled in. At that point it’s usually too late and you’re on to the next, but this place was different.

I had landed smack in the nexus of Mui Ne, what nexus there is for a town so small, and set about to make the most of it.

After taking in both ‘sights’ on offer; red sand dunes, and white sand dunes…leaving both a hot sandy mess, I resigned myself to not feel bad about wasting away the day beachside.

Mornings consisted of a simple breakfast of Banh Mi Op La (Runny eggs with a baguette). A swim. A jog. A book. A coffee. Lunch, some simple fare from a street side stand or fruit from a vendor (mango, dragon fruit, and mini-bananas being staple).  Another beer. Another coffee. A book on the beach under the shade of my favorite palm tree.

I read.  I probably read more books in my time at Mui Ne than my entire five years working at a library. Embarrassing? Perhaps. But just because you work in a hospital doesn’t mean you sit around all day hooked to an IV eating Jello.

1776, Dick Cheney’s bio, No Country for Old Men, American Psycho, Old Man and the Sea.  A book on Holocaust doctors which was so depressing I went to Chelsea Handler’s book in search of a laugh but found only the forced one liners of a sad Hollywood B-lister. It was so bad I went back to the Holocaust book.

When bored I would while away my afternoons with the kite surfing instructors. A brown, lean, boozy lot, their schedules and livelihoods tied with the wind.  No breeze meant no surfing, and no business. So the only business left was to see who could drink the most without dying from ethyl alcohol poisoning. The drink of choice: Happy Water. A rotgut rum made from locally fermented sugarcane. (Beer at $.60US being too costly for afternoon drinking)

Now ‘happy water’ is like anything produced from a cottage industry. There can be massive fluctuations in flavor, color, and most importantly strength. What you can down like water one day, hits you like a punch to the liver the next. But generally $1-3 got you an Aquafina 1.5L bottle of a yellow-brownish liquor that pairs amazingly well with beach grilled scallops.  I still generally wait to see if anyone around me has gone blind before talking my first belt.

At sundown people would gather wood and palm fronds and build a bonfire.  With cold Saigon lagers, and a fire for warmth, there were few nights under the stars where I wished I was anywhere else.  Maybe it’s the salt water in my veins, maybe it’s the beautiful women that tend to inhabit these places, but I feel most at home, most at peace, when i’m by the ocean.

Perhaps Mui Ne reminded me of my home in the Caribbean.  They shared many similarities; power outages, Rum, living and dying with the ebb and flow of tourist trade.  But in the end, as with most things, it came down to the people.

When folks set out for a beach vacation they tend to adopt a more relaxed attitude. They seek a change that comes with the simple salt life.  Hoping that they can become completely different people than they are at home, if only for a few days.

Danish, Dutch, French, English, Kiwi, it was like the UN of people who wanted to get drunk on a beach. My kind of people.  Just when I would tire of my books, or the simple offerings of the local restaurants, a new and interesting set of people would breeze in and the place would burst to life again.  Quick and intense, relationships spring up overnight only to be torn apart the next day as people pressed on north or south.

Fast friendships and passionate affairs borne out of sand, and sweat, and sweetened with rum.

The type of place you could wake up and find yourself an old man.