Freak Out Hell Van

Since we left Nha Trang, we’ve experienced a lot of firsts. Our first mountain pass, first time riding through a toll booth (no charge), first time crying on the side of the road. It’s been an interesting week.

We didn’t expect to hit mountains until after Hanoi. Maybe the hills we’ve been riding through wouldn’t be categorized as mountains to anyone other than two people who were raised on Long Island and then lived most of their adult lives in Boston. Who knows? All I know is that our East coast legs are tired from all the pedaling. We’ve learned that the word “deo” anywhere on a sign along the highway indicates that a pass is ahead and if that deo is accompanied by anything steeper than a 10% grade yellow warning sign one of us invariably yells out “Noooooooooooooo!”. Truck drivers and rain are the two things we’ve relied on to propel us upward and onward on these inclines. The trucks pull up along side us as we’re slowly, slowly climbing up and all people in the truck not driving hang out of the windows and yell at us and give us thumbs up and clap. We overlook the fact that the same truck drivers regularly come frighteningly close to running us down on flat stretches of the road. We’ll take encouragement where and how we can get it. We don’t know what we’re going to do when we get to the real mountains north of Hanoi and in Laos. Maybe we’ll hitchhike.

Speaking of hitchhiking- we had our first rescue mission this week too. We had been steadily making our way to Hoi An all week. We’ve upped the kilometers we cover daily to about 100. On our last day we had a little over 120. We both woke up illin’ big time. The big D, nausea. One of us suffering from one of these things is a daily occurrence, but both of us suffering from both was a little worrying.



We hit the road, it was windy and a mean sideways rain was falling. At 25 kilometers in I pulled over to puke and told Danielle I couldn’t go on. There was a shack of sorts nearby and I sat down on a pipsqueak sized blue plastic chair beside a little wooden table about knee high. Danielle immediately flagged down a van crammed full of Vietnamese people. The door swung open and a man jumped out and offered to take us for 350,000 dong. The people in the van likely each paid 20,000, if that. Danielle scoffed. I wretched in my little chair while the rain poured in.

The driver got out and took all sorts of money out of his wallet and waved it around furiously. Danielle remained steadfast with her arms crossed. Little kids showed up and started tinkering with our bikes. One put my helmet on. The driver waved the money in my face and I shook my head and pointed at Danielle. Danielle told the driver to leave. Finally he got back in his van and pretended to leave. One of the kids was poking my arm saying something repeatedly in Vietnamese. I just sat there. Then the driver got back out and said OK,OK to Danielle’s price and started unloading the back of the van.

It’s far less ridiculous in Vietnam than it was in Cambodia, but I swear a person must bring at least a few dilapidated card board boxes, an elderly relative and maybe a partial bed frame with them when leaving the house. I don’t know where people are going with all these items or why they need to transport them but they must.

Let me be clear, the van was packed to capacity even by Asian standards before we and all our stuff got crammed into it. I sat on the little chair while the man unloaded numerous boxes, a card table, 5 suitcases, and a large wire basket full of rice crackers. I asked Danielle where we were going to fit. She shrugged her shoulders and told me not to worry because we were in Asia. The driver and his first mate made all the people sitting in the back seat move forward into the middle seats, he then folded down the back seat and piled our bikes on top of each other, stacked all our packs on top of our bikes and shoved everything else in where he could.

Danielle and I sat in the front seat with the driver and a man named Dung. Before we got in Danielle made Dung throw out his cigarette. Little did she know that the van was chock full of smokers who really liked to smoke. When I got in I turned around to face all the poor Vietnamese passengers we had displaced and while they stared at me from behind their facemasks I weakly said, “I’m sorry” in my best Vietnamese which made some of them laugh.

At first I sat on Danielle’s lap but after a while Dung moved over so that he was straddling the gear shift and I slid in between him and Danielle. Keep in mind that both us of were extremely nauseous, I was seriously worried about other possible bodily accidents and I had a fever and the van was barreling down the road at mind boggling speeds, passing every vehicle in its path, horn honking steadily, while multiple passengers smoked and talked loudly on their cell phones. Vietnamese music was blaring and all the while Dung kept the questions coming from my left. “Vietnam you liking?”, “City you living?”, “Danang you going?”

In addition (it doesn’t end there) our driver had an insatiable appetite for passengers. His van was never full. Anyone standing on the side of the road was fair game. He’d blow his horn, slow down and the guy in the back would slide open the side door and yell something determining if the person or people needed a ride. At one point there were the 4 of us in the front, 8 in the first row, 11 in the next and 4 people hunched over standing in the space between the seats and the door. Then there was all our stuff.

After an hour I slumped over the bag that was on my lap and every time the van screeched to a halt I’d open one eye and Danielle would shake her head yes, confirming that we were in fact, beyond all comprehension, picking up another passenger.

This lasted for over two hours. When we got near Hoi An the driver poked me on the shoulder and pointed at a sign with an arrow that said Hoi An was 10 km east. Danielle and the door slider hauled all our stuff out onto the street in record time and I eventually climbed out of the van and crawled up on the cement outside a welding shop where I began to cry like a small child.

After defending me from dogs and bullying border officials, Danielle loaded up both our bikes like a champ waited in the hot sun until I felt like I was ready to ride. We rode slower than ever and I stopped three times, once to squat beside a rice paddy, once to cry while I sat on some cement slabs and locals swarmed and asked Danielle questions and once when we finally made it to town and I couldn’t go on. There, she left me in yet another tiny blue plastic chair and found us a hotel.

We still don’t know what we had or why I had it worse. But we’re better and enjoying Hoi An, a city that boasts 240 tailors, one of whom is busy at work as I write making us 15 items of clothing and 2 bathing suits all for $120.