Easy Ride

In Vietnam the motorbike is king. There are at least 30 motorbikes for every one car. Morning traffic looks like a sea of bikes and motorcycles topped by ladies in face masks and men with keen eyes surrounding a few lone buses and a car or two. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. So it seemed appropriate, when a saucy, sunburned redhead with a bad eye told us about "Easy Rider", that we should hire a guide and take a motorcycle tour of Vietnam's highlands. That's exactly what we did.
If not for the expense- and outrageous $50 per day per bike, the trip would have been a dream come true. But at such a high price, one must raise her expectations, and in that respect our guides fell short. Supressing a million questions for no hope of getting a reasonable answer was a constant problem on the trip. But language barrier aside, it was lovely to sit back (our backpacks made a great back rest on the bike seats) and watch mountains, jungle, farms and towns pass us by.
We stopped quite literally every 15 or 20 minutes and sometimes more. Any roadside activity warranted getting off the bike- men breaking boulders by hand into massive granite bricks, a family feeding stalks of rice into a portable shell schucking mill, a brick factory (the repetive motions of cutting the bricks was absolutely mesmerizing), a silk factory, a gaudy temple, a long bridge made solely out of bamboo and wire. Everything, no matter what it was or who it belonged to, was on the tour map. We walked on private property and our guide explained what was being grown- coffee, silk worms, cinnamon trees, roses, tea. We went into to people's homes who had no idea we were coming and no natural inclination to invite us.
As you can imagine, tramping into someone's stilted bamboo house unannounced and uninvited is pretty embarassing. This sentiment was made worse by our guides pressuring us into taking photos. They seemed quite offended when we didn't snap pictures at every stop. Then again, entering into people's homes and business was absolutely fascinating! I especially loved the silk factory and the rice wine factory/pig farm.
In the silk factory, women soaked silk worm cocoons in hot water to kill the worm, then they removed the little bug (which can later be grilled and eaten- a favorite deliacy in Korea, though seemingly not as popular in Vietnam). With 5 or more cocoons in hand, the women somehow unravelled part of the cocoon, isolating a single thread. The whole coccoon is made of one fine thread that comes from the worm's mouth. The thread is then attached to a spindle on a huge machine that unwinds the cocoon and rolls the silk into large, perfect bobbins. Other machines weave the bobbins into generic-looking patterned silk fabric, and finally the silk is dyed in big tubs.
The rice wine factory was more outrageous. There a family cooked gallons and gallons of rice, then left it in big jugs for three weeks to ferment. After three weeks the rice was already alcoholic, but not very strong. This rice was then strained out of the jugs to feed the pigs. There were at least 2 dozen fat, healthy and moderately drunk pigs in stys all around the rice wine jugs and machinery. Needless to say, the place smelled like shit. After removing the rice, the liquid in the jug (which looked like the Korean beverage makoli) was poured into a hot machine that burned some of the water out, and then through a plastic tube EXTREMELY strong alcohol flowed from the machine and was "bottled". By bottled I mean poured into a thick jug better suited for transporting gasoline or explosive material. The rice wine we bought came in a plastic sandwich bag. Interestingly, the machine that burnt out the water used coffee shells for combustion, a waste product from the coffee harvest that in Costa Rica is usually dumped into the river, completely wasted and producing only an awful smell.
All in all, the tour was awkward and unusaul to say the least, but it gave us a chance to much more of the countryside and daily life in Vietnam than we could have otherwise. At the very end of the tour we rode down from the highlands into Nha Trang beach- the US army's main port during the Vietnam War. All along the road leading from the port up to the mountains the United States sprayed Napalm (poison) to kill the vegetation and thus prevent VietCong guerrillas from hiding in the jungle near the road and attacking US cargo trucks. It was very sad and powerful for us to see the mountains still bald and plantless after 30 years. Beyond the area near the road, you can see dense jungle, but near the road there is nothing but yellowish-green scrub. This grim plantlessness last for miles.