Beggars? They looked like extras in Revenge of the Mummy.
Susan yelled at them as we drove past, but some of them actually got their hands on us as we accelerated up the pass, and I had to weave around a bunch of them in the middle of the road.
I reached the crest of the pass, and we started down to the coastal plains. The bike skidded a few times on the slippery blacktop, and I kept downshifting.
Below, I could see that the flat rice paddies were flooded up to the dikes, and small clusters of peasants’ huts sat on little islands of dry ground. There were more pine trees here than palms and more burial mounds than I’d seen in the south. I recalled that North Vietnam had lost about two million people in the war, nearly ten percent of the population, and thus the countless burial mounds. War sucks.
An hour and a half from the mountain pass, we approached a large town. I turned onto a dirt road and drove until I got the bike out of sight of the highway.
Susan and I dismounted and stretched. We also used the facilities, which consisted of a bush.
I took the map out of the zippered leather pouch and looked at it. I said to her, “That town just ahead is Vinh.”
She informed me, “That’s a tourist town. We can stop there if you want to make that phone call to the Century Riverside.”
“Why is it a tourist town?”
“Just outside Vinh is the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh.”
“And there are Westerners there?”
She replied, “I don’t think many Westerners care about Uncle Ho’s birthplace, but you can be sure Vidotour does, so the place is a must-see. Also, it’s about halfway between Hue and Hanoi, so it’s the overnight stop for the tour buses.”
“Okay. We’ll stop there and get Uncle Ho T-shirts.”
She opened a saddlebag and took out two bananas. “You want a banana, or a banana?”
We ate the bananas standing up and drank some bottled water as I studied the map. I said, “About two hundred klicks from here is a town called Thanh Hoa. When we get there, we need to look for a road that heads west. Take a look. We need to get to Route 6, which takes us to… well, it’s supposed to take us to Dien Bien Phu, but I see that it ends before it gets there… then there’s a smaller road to Dien Bien Phu.”
Susan looked at the map and said, “I don’t think that last stretch qual-ifies as a road.”
I said, “Okay, let’s take off the Montagnard stuff and try to look like Lien Xo on a pilgrimage to Uncle Ho’s birthplace.”
We took off the tribal scarves and the leather hats and stuffed them in a saddlebag.
We mounted up and drove back to Highway One.
Within a few minutes, we were on the outskirts of the town of Vinh. On the right was a painted billboard, and I slowed down so Susan could read it.
She said, “It says… ‘The town of Vinh was totally destroyed by American bombers and naval artillery… between 1965 and 1972… and has been rebuilt by the people of Vinh… with the help of our socialist brothers of the German Democratic Republic…’”
“That’s a real tourist draw.”
As we entered the town, it did indeed look like East Berlin on a bad day; block after block of drab, gray concrete housing, and other concrete buildings of indeterminate function.
A few people on the street glanced at us, and I was having second thoughts about stopping. “Are you sure there are Westerners in this town?”
“Maybe it’s off-season.”
We came to a Y-intersection at a park, and Susan said, “Go left.”
I took the left fork and, as it turned out, this was the street that took us to the center of town, another Le Loi Street, on which we made a right turn. I wondered how she knew that.
There were a number of hotels on the left side of the street, and none of them would be mistaken for the Rex. In fact, I’ve never seen such grim-looking places, not even in East Germany, and I wondered if the East Germans were playing a joke on the Viets. In any case, I saw tour buses and Westerners on the street, which made me feel better.
I said to Susan, “Maybe you can try the call from one of these hotels.”
She replied, “I have a better chance of getting through from the post office. Also, if I can’t get through by phone, the GPO will have a fax and telex.” She added, “You can’t choose your long-distance carrier here.”
We drove around awhile and spotted the post office. Susan got off and walked directly into the building.
A few passersby gave me a glance, but thanks to Uncle Ho, I didn’t attract too much attention. After about ten minutes, a yellow jeep pulled up beside me with two cops in it. The cop in the passenger seat was staring at me.
I ignored him, but he yelled something at me, and I had no choice but to look at him.
He was saying something, and I thought he was motioning for me to dismount, then I realized he was asking me about the motorcycle. Recalling that foreigners were not supposed to drive anything this big, and knowing that the BMW had Hue license plates, I said in French, “Le tour de Hanoi à Hue.”
The cop didn’t seem to understand, and quite frankly I don’t understand my own French half the time. I repeated, “Le tour de Hanoi à Hue,” which didn’t fully explain why I was sitting in front of the post office, but the cop in the passenger seat was now speaking to the cop behind the wheel, and I could tell that the driver understood something.
The cop in the passenger seat gave me a hard, cop look, said something in Vietnamese, and the yellow jeep pulled away.
I took a deep breath, and for the first time in my life, I thanked God that I passed for a Frenchman.
I was going to dismount and go find Susan, but I saw her coming out of the post office. She jumped on, and I drove onto Le Loi Street, which I’d figured out was Highway One, and within five minutes, we were out of Vinh. A sign on the side of the road said in about a dozen languages, Birthplace of Ho Chi Minh; 15 Kilometers. I said to Susan, “Want to see the log cabin where Uncle Ho was born?”
“Drive.”
We continued north on Highway One.
Susan said to me, “I couldn’t get through by phone, so I telexed and faxed. I had to wait for a reply.”
“Bottom line.”
“The book hasn’t arrived, or so Mr. Tin said in his telex.”
I didn’t reply.
She said, “But the book is worth about fifteen bucks to a backpacker or a tourist who doesn’t have a guidebook… and we’re not there… so, it’s possible that Mr. Tin did get it, and it’s now for sale. That’s a lot of bucks here.”
Again, I didn’t reply.
Susan said, “There was a message, however, from Colonel Mang. For me.”
I didn’t ask what it said, but Susan told me. “Colonel Mang wishes me a safe trip and hopes I enjoyed the photographs.”
I didn’t reply.
She added, “He also said he noticed bathing suits in my apartment, and he’s sorry I forgot them.”
We approached the turnoff for Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace, where two mini-buses of Western tourists were turning in. I pulled over and took Susan’s camera out of the backpack and snapped a photo of the sign, in case this film wound up in the hands of the local police. I said to Susan, “I got the once-over from a couple of cops in a jeep. I convinced them I was a Frenchman on a cross-country motorcycle race. My Parisian accent impressed them.”
“The North Viets have some positive feelings for the French.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. But in Hanoi, you’ll see middle-aged men wearing berets, and it’s still très chic to speak a little French among that age group and to affect French manners and read French literature. In Hanoi, they consider the French to be cultured, and the Americans to be uncouth, materialistic, war-mongering capitalists.”