by Chris Tharp
Like the two previous days, the ride started out perfectly. I was winding through wide valleys punctuated by colossal mountains. It was dramatic country, reminiscent of scenery found in the American West. I made it about an hour down the road—which was pretty typical for the trip—before I hit my first patch of trouble: there was a large dip, and I was heading back up a pretty steep grade. I had the bike opened up at a good speed, when the engine suddenly started to scream. A terrible high-pitched noise wheezed from the engine. I lost compression and a lot of power, and then the bike just died. I had luckily cleared the top of the hill and just coasted it down, pop-starting it near the bottom. This managed to fire the engine back up, but now it sounded weak and unwell, and I was now getting less than half the power I was before. This was also accompanied by a thick blue smoke belching out of the tailpipe. I was burning oil.
I chugged up a big rise and began to coast it on the other side, spying a village below. I pulled into the gas/mechanic hut and had them get a wrench to check the oil. The cap was so encrusted with petrified dirt that it was impossible to unscrew by hand. The mechanic—an ancient geezer with a baseball mitt of a face—undid the cap and peered into the smoking oil chamber, which was now totally empty. He shook his head and pointed.
“No,” he said, displaying the extent of his English.
I bought a liter of oil which he poured back in. He then pushed down on the kick-start with his hand to pump it through. As he did this, a full stream of oil oozed out of the engine casing. He did it again and looked closely. There was a massive crack. The bike had been leaking oil for a long time and I hadn’t spotted it. One of the men who now gathered around mimed a rock jumping up and hitting the casing, causing the crack. The mechanic threw up his arms and now shouted, “NO!” Evidently, I was fucked.
I looked up the empty road to the small mountains in front of me. I estimated that I had seventy or eighty kilometers until I hit the main highway taking me back to Thakhek. From there, it was another ninety to the town. But within twenty kilometers was the town of Ban Na Hin, which was the site of another dam and gateway to the seven-kilometer-long Kong Lor limestone cave, a popular backpacker stop. Surely this town would have a more sophisticated garage. If I could get the bike there, I thought, I could have the leak patched and still possibly make it back to Thakhek.
So I bought five more liters of oil, started the bike, and putted it down the road and up the mountain, blowing fat ribbons of smoke out the back like the loser of a WWII dogfight. Once the smoke cleared up, I knew my oil was gone, so I’d pull over and pour in another liter, praying that I had enough lube to get me to the next stop.
And I did. Soon, the town of Ban Na Hin appeared. It lay in a verdant valley at the base of a mammoth mountain. I coasted down and wheeled it into the first mechanic’s shop I saw; in this case, he was a young man in his very early twenties. It took an hour for him to replace the casing, and it set me back twenty bucks, no small repair fee in impoverished Laos.
The oil leak was now fixed, but I was afraid that the damage was done. My fears were confirmed as I rode out of the town, spewing smoke oily smoke and feeling the bike struggle to do its most basic job. On level roadway, I was fine. The bike sounded sick but it still went. It was only when I tried to climb the mountain out of the town that the bike bogged down and died on me once again.
So I turned it around, hit neutral, and allowed gravity to do its work. I had not gotten very far up, but enough to where I was picking up significant speed on the way back down. And it was here where I was revisited by a previous demon: the footbrake failed yet again, only now my wounded bike was screaming straight down the foot of a mountain.
Luckily, I did not die, nor was I even hurt; I managed to get the bike down by putting it into low into gear and zigzagging back and forth along the road. This slowed me down enough to reasonably pop-start the thing. From there, I limped it back into town back to my ace mechanic.
This mechanic was more enterprising than the first one who had fiddled with the brakes. He at once busted out the welder and went to work, fixing the brake problem once and for all. When pressed down with my foot it felt solid and firm. I knew it would now hold.
So it was back out of town and up the mountain. This time, I just kept the bike in first gear, and it did not die. It climbed, gaining a bit of speed, the engine running with basic competence. At the top of the mountain was a turnout and scenic vista, indicated by a sign. I stopped and scanned the landscape. Limestone spires rose straight into the sky from tops and sides of surrounding mountains, creating panorama of rock towers. However, this fantastic scene was marred by a thick blue haze hanging in the air. It was the dry season, the time of year when the farmers burned their fields. This was going on all over the country, covering the land under a choking layer of smoke that irritated the eyes and burned the nostrils.
At this point, I closed my eyes and attempted to block out the scenery. The surroundings now were secondary; my entire will was focused on maintaining the health the bike’s engine, which was growing worse by the kilometer. I was still moving forward, going, but I could feel the power weaken and the engine’s croak intensify. At one point I even ran out of gas, but managed to push my rapidly dying machine into a village for a fill-up. By the time I made it to the road to Thakhek, the bike was in its death throes, barely moving. Undeterred, I took a left on the two-lane highway and opened up my throttle all the way, which, in fourth gear, added up to what must have been no more than fifteen kilometers an hour. I pressed on like this in foolish desperation before the bike finally died, this time for good.
*
The last eighty kilometers to Thakhek were covered in a Japanese pickup truck. After the bike’s demise, I stuck out my thumb and secured a ride from local man whose name I never got. We loaded the metal carcass into the back of his truck and rode together in silence. Even if we had spoken each other’s language, there was nothing to say. The look of defeat on my filthy sunburned face, combined with the husk of the machine in the back, said all that was needed.
They took the bike back at the rental agency with little hassle. The English-speaking man was there in person this time—no note necessary—and though he was shocked at the state of both the bike and me, he handed over my passport and I handed over his keys.
“This bike is no good!” I said. “It leaks oil.”
“Hmmm…” he chewed on his lip. “We fix before.”
I guess I unfixed it.
Back at the Travel Lodge, I related my war stories to those present at the campfire. I sipped my Beerlao and described gory detail after detail. The pack of travelers gathered around me listened on in with a mixture of pity and awe.
Late in the night, as I wobbled from the beer, Inga and Steve rode in, looking defeated. I had not seen them on the road that day.
“We tried to ride out to the Kong Lor Cave,” Inga said. “But Steve got a flat tire. We were almost ten kilometers into the countryside on a tiny dirt track with no villages around at all to get it fixed.”
“So we pushed it back to the town with the dam and had it done there.”
“By that time, it was getting dark, so we just rode back.”
“Well, it could have been worse.” I shrugged. All the Belgians could do was laugh.
When I tell people about the trip, about the plague of breakdowns, most lament my awful luck. What had I done to deserve such a lemon of a motorbike? How had I accrued such lousy traveler’s karma? I choose to look at it another way: the mechanical failings, the engine trouble, the string of obstacles—these forced me to stop along the way in places that I would have hardly glanced at otherwise, blazing on down the road. I spent time in these villages and got a glimpse into the lives of regular people going about their days. The problems on the trip made me sit back, relax, and slow down, which is great, because Laos is a country best viewed in first gear.
MOSCOW ON THE SOUTH CHINA SEA
Vietnam, 2013
In F. Scot
t Fitzgerald’s short story, “Babylon Revisited,” Charlie Wales returns to the Ritz Bar in Paris after a many-year absence. The bar is empty and his old drinking buddies are nowhere to be found. The party is most definitely over; Paris of the early twenties, with American expats guzzling away countless carefree nights, is gone, never to return. For Charlie Wales, coming back is a bittersweet experience at best.
It’s never easy to return to a place you once idealized. The incongruity between your memory and what you actually see can be too much to take, a dizzying dissonance that sours your insides and makes you grab for the nearest railing. It’s like your friend’s son who was a cute little boy ten years ago and who has now grown into an acne-plagued, apathetic teen. The kid used to love you but times have changed. Your old tricks and charms are of no use; he’s simply moved on and no longer wants anything to do with you.
But places, as well as people, change. Some travelers get caught up in the silly fantasy that their traveling experience is or was somehow that much richer and more original than the next guy’s—as if they have some sort of monopoly on backpacker cool. It reminds me of the archetypical hipster (so despised these days) who rolls his eyes when you mention a certain band that you like, only to sigh and mutter that he was into them “way before they became big.” This sort of snobbery and one-upmanship goes against the underlying reasons why many of us travel, but it doesn’t stop this phenomenon from being widespread. I remember being in Thailand some years back and drinking a few beers with a seasoned Aussie traveler. When I told him that my next stop was Cambodia, he launched into a tirade about how he was there in the mid-‘90s, when you could “buy bricks of ganja in the Russian Market.” He described the permissive, anarchic nature of the place “back then,” but how everything had changed, and now the whole country was “overrun with yahoos.” Was he including me in that generalization?
To be fair, Mui Ne wasn’t some pristine, undiscovered Eden when I first showed up some eight years ago. This long stretch of beach girding a bay beneath a sleepy Vietnamese fishing village had already made it onto the map. Some hotels and resorts had been built, along with the open-air seafood restaurants and kitsch-filled gift shops that inevitably accompany such development. Middle-aged European travelers and hard-core kitesurfers had already arrived, and without a doubt there were those who revisited then and complained that the place had already gone to hell.
But at risk of sounding like the “been there and done it all” traveler douche: the Mui Ne of eight years back was a different place. It was much quieter, with less traffic rumbling down the one road that connects the fishing village with the small city of Phan Thiet, and as a result, with the rest of the country. There were fewer cars and buses, and no proper taxis. The streets were dark at night, with just the odd unlicensed motorcycle taxi zipping around in search of customers looking for a ride and maybe a cheap bag of weed. Many local families still lived on the shore and fished the waters from round boats woven from thin strips of wood—literally floating baskets (a few are still left, but their days are surely numbered). There were far fewer overbuilt resorts and hotels crowding the water’s edge. There were fewer people and less commerce, and of course it was cheaper, but one factor looms high above the rest with regard to now and then: there were practically no Russians.
*
Our double-tiered sleeper bus pulled off the barreling chaos of Vietnam’s Highway 1 and rolled through Phan Thiet. The first things I noticed were the many new ATMs. Eight years ago, there were none to be seen; it was a strictly bring your own dough affair. The whole of the town gleamed more brightly than before (I remembered it as a drab place reeking of rotting shrimp), and I could see many new cars on the road. The bus eventually left the confines of the town and crossed through the fish and shrimp farms situated on its edge, chugging up the large rise that separates the town from the narrow beach leading to Mui Ne. We could see the big cemetery on the hillside and the concrete spire of the war memorial at the top. Below, to our right, was the South China Sea. I looked to the left, to note what kind of new development had gone through since my original visit. I cringed as I saw a sign for a golf resort—easily the most loathsome sign of “progress”—followed by a complex of half-built holiday homes. The project appeared to have been abandoned at least a year ago.
As we rode on into the tourist area along the beach, I noticed the many shops, restaurants, and tourist agencies on side of the road advertising exclusively in Cyrillic. This seemed strange.
“Wow,” I said, turning to Minhee. “There sure are a lot of signs in Russian.”
She raised her eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say, Why should I care?
I kept my eyes on the roadside, taking in every sign we passed. A few were in Vietnamese, but the majority was still in Russian.
“Maybe this is just the Russian area of the beach,” I said, hopefully.
“Who knows?” Minhee said.
“Well, I don’t remember a lot of Russians last time I was here.”
“What about those guys underneath us?” she said, switching to Korean, making sure they wouldn’t understand. She slowed down to make sure I did. “I think they’re Russians.”
I focused my ear onto their conversation, and the tones growled forth were most definitely Slavic in origin. Oh, shit. The Russians aren’t coming. They’re already here.
And that they were. My naïve hope that the Russian tourists were confined to just one area was shattered as we pressed on into the heart of the tourist strip: there were even more signs in Russian, easily outnumbering any in English and even giving those in Vietnamese—with all of its strange accent marks and vowel addendums—a run for their money. It was clear that the Russians were more than just a significant group in Mui Ne. They had taken over.
Russia and Russians were very much on my mind at the time, as I had just finished Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Gary Shteyngart’s much more contemporary Absurdistan. I love heady Russian writers and studied the Russian drama masters in college. In many ways I have a great love and respect for Russians, especially their contribution to the world cultural canon. Their weighty influence cannot be denied, and I tip my hat.
But… (Oh-uh! After the disclaimer, his true bigoted stripes come out) I am a child of the Cold War, indoctrinated and mind-forged during the hardline years of Ronald Reagan’s America. And while I never remember being overtly taught to hate Russian people, I don’t recall any great love being kindled for them, either. I also can’t help but wonder if all of that propaganda I was subjected to boiled my brain and turned me for the worse. I’ve met some great Russians and swapped stories and drunk to the happiness of both nations, but for me and many other Westerners, there is still something alien about them, despite our obvious cultural and racial similarities. Often, when I pass by groups of Russians in Korea or anywhere else, a distrustful reptilian voice often hisses in my head:
Fucking Russians.
I know this is a racist or at least hyper-nationalistic instinct, and no, I’m not proud, but from the expression on many of their faces, I can’t help but think that they’re thinking the same of me.
After scoring a palatial hotel room for a great price, Minhee and I walked down the strip toward the area of beach where the flurries of kitesurfers gather to do their thing. Mui Ne is a world-class kitesurfing destination, with calm, warm waters and plenty of tropical wind blowing in. She wore a pink button shirt, jean shorts, and fake Ray Bans, the powerful breeze blowing her long black bangs across her face. We strolled in the late afternoon hand in hand, passing Russian after Russian after Russian. Some were leggy blonde beauties holding hands with young, cut Adonises, while others were older bulky women, walking with hulking, furry-backed men stuffed into tiny Speedos. Many of these men were always shirtless; most were wondrously obese. They seemed to revel in displaying their distended guts and man tits. Their shamelessness almost commanded a kind of respect; these fat guys were there to enjoy themselves and out to impress no one, practic
ally daring you to make a snide comment or give a look askance. And nearly all of them smoked, all the time, even while standing in the shallows of the sea or pool.
The food had changed as well. Sure, I spied a couple of Russian restaurants, but as we came closer to kitesurfer central, which acted as the kind of “downtown” of the tourist strip, I noticed that the usual “point and pick” barbecue seafood places near the beach were a much different beast. Sure, there were more of them than before, but they also had been altered and pumped up—made more “extreme.” Not only were the usual fresh fish, clams, prawns, and huge lobsters available, but the whole menu selection had taken a bizarre turn toward the exotic: live soft-shell turtles languished in tanks, along with snakes, frogs, eels, and whole crocodiles roasting over coals on the spit. These were smaller creatures—not the behemoths that inhabit the waters of the Nile or Australian billabongs—but crocs nonetheless. Was this freakish, reptilian turn of culinary events the result of all of the new Russian visitors? Or was it the Chinese, who were also now out in force? Was the supply creating the demand, or was it the other way around? This was anyone’s guess, but it was clear the days when a simple grilled barracuda, a handful of scallops, and a few spring rolls fit the bill were far behind.
After an hour of walking, we reached the kitesurfing beach. The sun was low in the sky and the late afternoon wind blasting mightily. We took off our shoes and looked out at the hundreds of kites gliding through the air. They were attached by thin cables to wetsuit-clad humans who gripped the guides and rode boards that sliced through the surface and the waves. The more accomplished kitesurfers captured big gusts and were lifted high off of the choppy water, only to come down in a smooth, effortless descent.