The alarm goes off at four in the morning and the beeping sounds more like laughter. It’s laughing right in his face. He’s not going now. “Pouring” doesn’t describe the type of rain we’re hearing. It sounds like we’re sleeping under a tin roof beneath Niagara Falls. The water is incessant; constant like a faucet. He’s not starting his journey now. He’ll have to wait.
In Vietnam the natural is only a little more foreign than the unnatural. Walking the busy, buzzing streets feels like being in a bee hive– motorbikes zoom around you, cutting in an angle into oncoming traffic, barely missing you. Like schools of fish, hundreds of Vietnamese on motorbikes make sharp turns simultaneously. One moment you’re looking at their backs and the next you’re looking at their sides.
Ho Chi Minh is the city we’re starting from– “we” meaning my family away from home. It’s me, my friend Jessie, Pete who we met at the start of our travels and have been with since, Generous George, nicknamed for his giving heart, and Mekong Max, nicknamed for the wounds he let fester in the Mekong.
The first time I met Mekong, I rushed him in a tuk-tuk, shivering and shaking, to the hospital. As he looked at me wide-eyed and desperate, his mouth slightly ajar, I told him he probably had the dengue fever.
“But it’s alright,” I said. “You should be fine.”
Meanwhile, I couldn’t get the lyrics to a Dylan song out of my head:
“When he died
I was hopin’
That it wasn’t contagious”
He didn’t die. And that’s how I got the nickname Dr. Dengue.
So there’s five of us. Jessie, Pete, Generous, Mekong, and Dengue, and we’ve all bought motorcycles. And we’re traveling Vietnam from south to north.
Of course, with our limited budgets, the haggard, made-in-China pieces we were able to talk off the ledge of a twenty-story building aren’t the most reliable. They come with missing mirrors, downhill starts, and spare parts, “just in case.” So we come anticipating break downs and stunted trips in the blister-hot sun as sweat drips from our noses and hope diminishes. It’s also the beginning of the rainy season here and when it’s not raining, the world resumes its underwater effect, melding the straight lines with sweltering heat.
While watching a program of three men attempting the same feat, one man cursed the lightening while acknowledging its dual purpose– his headlight was out. By the end of the trip he said he’d done something like 1000 km on a bike, 100 on a train and 50 on his face. So far we’ve been lucky though and only had a few casualties to account for: two people with three muffler burns.
Then again, we start tomorrow.