The Road To Vietnam

Complicated, trying, exhausting, frustrating, arduous, depressing, all adequately describe our experience trying to enter Cambodia at Poipet. Vietnam on the other hand was much like riding our bicycles through a McDonalds drive thru minus the Big Mac. However, in true Cambodian style, our journey to the border crossing at Ha Tien was anything but smooth.

We left our hotel at 8 am with explicit instructions from the owner to “ride that way, when you see pagoda, turn right down dirty road and follow telephone poles all way to Vietnam.” These directions were accompanied by the typical hand gestures we’ve grown accustomed to interpreting. One hand held straight out slowly curving to the right, kind of like Moses parting the Red Sea with one hand. “No more than 14, maybe 15 kilometers.” he said confidently.

We had spent the previous two days riding up a mild, but steady incline and battling wind so strong it almost doubled our time. Toward the middle of the first day, when the heat was so bad and the wind was so brutal that we were both close to giving up, a man pulled up beside us on a bike. He had one leg and was carrying a home-made prosthetic device in his left hand. He nodded and pointed at our bikes and smiled manically. He said something again and again to me in Khmer. The only word I understood was bicycle, bicycle. He took off grinning and I followed, laughing. He was traveling faster than I had all day simply by pushing his right pedal hard when it made contact with his right foot. Soon we were side by side laughing with each other in the red dirt heat. He spoke loudly and emphatically to me and I repeated everything he said, nodding as if I understood.

We raced.

He moved ahead, I caught up and then sped forward until I was spent and suddenly there he was beside me, laughing and waving to people on the side of the road. He gave once last uproarious laugh, leaned over, slapped my arm and then just as quickly as he appeared he was gone, vanishing in a cloud of dust down a side road waving and laughing. And then we were together again, Danielle and I. Wondering if it had really just happened. We continued on renewed and have thought of him so many times since.

So we were tired and sore after pushing on those two days, but we were looking forward to a quick ride to the border where we’d catch a ferry to Phu Quoc Island, where we planned on floating in turquoise water and drinking Saigon beer.

The sky was dark when we left, ominous would better describe it. By 8:15 the wind was howling and huge black clouds were spitting out bright lines of lightening at rapid intervals. Within minutes we were caught in a monsoon deluge. We took cover at the closest shelter, a gas station run by the miserable wife of a pig farmer. We stood around the gas station for a while - wait - maybe I should explain what I mean by gas station, because by now this seems normal to me,, but three weeks ago I was confused.

A gas station in Cambodia is one of two things; a shack with a tin roof containing one or two fifty-gallon metal drums full of gasoline with a type of siphoning system attached to the top or an umbrella shading a wooden stand holding anywhere form 15 to 30 two liter 7-Up bottles full of gas.

We pulled in to the 50 gallon shack type and stood under the tin roof inhaling gas fumes and listening to the pigs squealing in the barn behind us while the wife of the pig farmer glared at us from under the cover of her blue umbrella.

It wouldn’t let up and eventually we decided to just get out of there seeing as we weren’t welcome anyway. We geared up in our little flimsy plastic ponchos and headed out to brave the storm. We pedaled and pedaled, soaked but happy to be rid of the awkward pig farmer and his inhospitable wife. We kept our eyes peeled for a pagoda.

We passed on high up on a mountain, no dirt road there. We passed another near a stream, nothing. We passed multiple dirt roads with telephone lines but not a pagoda in sight. Finally we saw a pagoda and a dirt road. No telephone poles, but we just took it. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the people living on this road were down right shocked to see us passing by. There was so much rain the road was like a river, emptying water from rice paddies on one side straight into the paddies across the street. We pedaled passed small crabs and fish stranded in huge puddles. There were frogs all over the place. Thunder was clapping and still, through the din Cambodian children were screaming, “Hello, hello!” to us. Whenever we saw an adult we’d point ahead of us and scream over the wind, “Ha Tien? Vietnam?” Everyone shook their head, yes!

After 6 or so kilometers we were dumped out onto a paved road. The same road we had been on the afternoon before on our way into town. Our little detour saved us about 2 kilometers of riding, but added who knows how much time due to the crude riding conditions.

It was still pouring. We felt defeated. We continued on. 5 kilometers later we see a pagoda and a dirt road lined with telephone poles for as far as the eye can see! We are overjoyed. We follow it into nothingness. The most nothing we’ve ever ridden in. There are rice paddies and nothing else. Not even a water buffalo or a screaming child. The wind is so strong it nearly tips us over at times. The mud is thick. My bike slips in it but I catch myself. We ride like this for almost two hours. It is painfully slow. Occasionally a moped passes. The landscape is mostly baron. There are huge thatched sheds and what appear to be abandoned fish farms all around us. Then we’re in a mangrove swamp for a long time.

Are we heading to Vietnam? The telephone poles say yes. After 35 kilometers we reach a town, dirty, red mud everywhere. We eat soup with mystery meat at a teeny tiny table , both balancing on a wooden bench suitable for first graders while two teeny tiny ladies wearing the typical conical Vietnamese hats eye us suspiciously.

Everyone laughs at us but we’re tired and covered in a thick layer of red mud and are sick of being laughed at. How are we funnier than the entire family who just rode thorough town on a motorized soup cart, the 9 year old daughter asleep beside a huge bowl of bean sprouts? How are we funnier than the man I almost had an accident with who had at least 40 huge aluminum pots piled so high on the back of his bike they towered above his head?

The hand gestures indicate that the border is ahead. We plow on. Right through the drive thru into Vietnam. Where we hope edible food is plentiful and the roads are paved.

This dream turns out to be true. As soon as we cross the border the road is paved. We stop to ask directions to the ferry to Phu Quoc. Two men get out of their hammocks and find they don’t have the language to explain to us where the ticket office is. They get on a moped and gesture to us, then to them, then off in the distance, Moses style. We get another moped escort. Right to the ticket office. The boat had left already so we spent the night in HA Tien and ate our way through the night market like two little pigs and the food was DELICIOUS.