We touched glasses. I said, “You wanted a little adventure.”
“I also wanted a hot shower and a soft bed tonight. Not to mention a good dinner.”
“You wouldn’t get any of that in jail.” I looked at her and said, “We’ve come too far to make a mistake now.”
“I know. You’re the expert on getting out of here with only hours left before the flight leaves.”
“Did it twice.”
Susan called the cocktail waitress over and in French made her understand we wanted something to eat.
Susan smiled at me and said, “Maybe we’ll come back here in the summer.”
“Send me a postcard.”
She sipped her beer thoughtfully, then said, “They’ll have a fax machine here.” She looked around at the dozen or so people in the lounge. “We can ask one of these Westerners to send a fax for us. Just to say we’ve made it this far.”
I replied, “If we don’t make it all the way to Hanoi with a mission report, they won’t care how far we got.”
“Well… we should at least tell them that we met TVV, and he’s given us some souvenirs.”
“Susan, the less they know in Saigon, Washington, and the American embassy in Hanoi, the better. I don’t owe them anything after the bullshit they — and you — have been feeding me for two weeks.”
The waitress brought a bowl of peanuts and two plates of satay on skewers, covered with what smelled like peanut butter sauce.
“What is this meat?” I asked.
“Don’t obsess on the meat. You have a long walk ahead of you.” Susan stood. “I saw some tourist brochures in the lobby. I’ll be right back.”
I sat there with my beer and mystery meat. Jealous men don’t like their women out of their sight. I’m not a jealous man, but I’ve learned that I shouldn’t let Susan out of my sight.
She returned a few minutes later with a few brochures in her hand, sat, and scanned one of them. She said, “Okay, here’s a little map of Sa Pa, and I see the road to Lao Cai. You want to hear about the road?”
“Sure.”
“All right… surrounding us are the Hoang Lien Mountains, which the French called the Tonkinese Alps… the area is home to an abundance of wildlife, including mountain goats and monkeys—”
“I hate monkeys.”
“It’s very cold in the winter. If we’re hiking, and I guess we are, there are no mountain huts or shelters, and we’ll need rain gear and a heating stove—”
“Susan, it’s only thirty-five kilometers. I can do that in my underwear. Do we have to go through any villages?”
“I don’t think so… doesn’t say… but there are Red Zao tribesmen in the mountains, and it says here they’re very shy and don’t like visitors.”
“Good.”
“Okay… twelve kilometers from Sa Pa is the Dinh Deo Pass, the highest mountain pass in Vietnam at 2,500 meters. On this side of the pass, the weather is cold, wet and foggy. After we cross the pass, it will often be sunny.”
“Even at night?”
“Paul, shut up. Okay… there are strong winds over the pass, but only a few hundred meters down, the weather starts to get warmer. Sa Pa is the coldest place in Vietnam, and Lao Cai is the warmest. That’s good… the Dinh Deo Pass is the dividing line between two large weather systems.”
“Can I speak?”
“No. About ten kilometers out of Sa Pa is the Silver Waterfall where we can ditch the motorcycle.”
“It says that in the brochure?”
She looked up from the brochure and said to me, “They told me in Saigon that this guy Paul Brenner had a reputation of being a difficult-to-work-with wiseass. They didn’t know the half of it.”
I informed her, “They told me in Washington you were a businessper-son who was doing a favor for Uncle. They didn’t tell me one percent of it.”
“You lucked out.”
I said, “Let’s get out of here before we have company.”
We paid the bill, walked outside, tipped the doorman, and got the motorcycle.
Susan said, “It’s cold out here.”
“It’s sunny on the other side of the pass.”
We put on our gloves, leather hats, and Montagnard scarves, mounted up and drove off. We went back into the town, and Susan directed me to the road leading north to Lao Cai.
The dark, foggy road climbed higher into the mountains. The road was paved, but the visibility was so bad I had to keep the speed down to between ten and fifteen KPH.
About forty-five minutes out of Sa Pa, I could hear the crashing of a waterfall ahead, and a minute later we saw the falls cascading from a high mountain off to our left front. There was a drop-off on the side of the road, and I dismounted. I couldn’t see down through the fog, so I picked up a big rock and threw it. A few seconds later, I heard it strike another rock, then another, until the echoes died away. I said to Susan, “Well, as the brochure said, this is where we ditch the bike.”
We left the engine running, and we both pushed the BMW Paris-Dakar off the edge of the road. About two seconds later, we heard it hit, then hit again and again, until we couldn’t hear it any longer. I said, “Good motorcycle. I think I’ll buy one.”
We continued on foot, up the steeply rising road. It was bitter cold, and the north wind was blowing in our faces.
It took us almost an hour to cover the two or three kilometers to the Dinh Deo Pass. As we approached the crest of the pass, the wind began to howl, and we leaned into it and trudged on in silence.
At the top of the pass, the wind was so strong we had to stop and take a break on the leeward side of a boulder. We sat there and caught our breath.
Susan spent a few minutes getting her cigarette lit in the wind. She said, “I need to stop smoking. I’m winded.”
“It should be better on the downslope. Are you okay?”
“Yeah… just need a break.”
“You want my jacket?”
“No. This is a tropical country.”
I looked at her in the dim light, and our eyes met. I said, “I like you.”
She smiled. “I like you, too. We could have a hell of a life together.”
“We could.”
She put out her cigarette, and we both started to stand, then she froze and said, “Get down!”
We both dropped to the ground and lay flat.
I heard the engine of a vehicle over the noise of the wind, and I could see yellow lights refracted in the fog. We lay there, and the lights got brighter as the vehicle approached from the direction we’d come from. I caught a glimpse of a big military truck as it passed.
We lay there for a full minute, then Susan said, “Do you think he’s looking for us?”
“I have no idea, but if he is, he’s looking for two people on a motorcycle.”
I let another minute pass. Then we stood, came around the boulder, and walked on into the wind. I pushed the scarf down to my neck and raised the flaps on my leather hat so I could hear better. Now and then, I looked over my shoulder for lights. The chance of anyone in a vehicle spotting us on foot before we heard or saw them was slim. But we needed to keep alert.
We crossed the crest of the pass, and the wind picked up, but it was downhill now, and we made good time.
About five hundred meters from the top of the pass, the wind became a breeze, and I could actually feel the air get warmer.
Five minutes later, I saw yellow fog lights coming at us and heard the sound of the engine, carried toward us on the wind.
There was a drop-off to our left, and to our right was a narrow stream between the road and the wall of the mountain. We hesitated half a second, then fell into the ice cold stream.
The vehicle approached slowly, and the engine got louder and the yellow lights got brighter.