I’ve spent the last 5 days in the middle of Vietnamese nowhere on the back of a motorbike… In places that are so far removed from ‘civilisation’ you feel like a movie star wherever you go (and make young children cry, simply because you look so monsterous).
The ‘Easy Riders‘ are a group of Vietnamese guys who embrace branding like no one else in this country. If there is one thing about Vietnam, its the ability to go to a market and have every stall sell THE SAME THING for THE SAME PRICE… Every opportunity to be different is ignored or overlooked. You quickly realise that the concept of brands and differentiation are not innate, but taught – and communism doesn’t seem to have led to a nation of innovators.
But the Easy Riders (perhaps helped by spending several years shacked up with US soldiers while the country was blown apart), get it.
The concept is simple, your pack is strapped to the back of a 125cc motorbike, you are thrown on in front of it and the person in complete control of your life takes the handle bars… Then your hoon off into the middle of nowhere, on roads that are sometimes so pot holed, you’d be mistaken for thinking they are recreation of a war zone.
Along the way, you visit the people who make basically everything you can buy… And it’s not quite how you imagined. From insence sticks to silk, every tiny detail is painfully worked on by hand. Quite literally from trying individual pieces of silk thread together before weaving them into the fabric that goes to make your wedding dress, to harvesting and drying the rubber that goes into numerous products to satisfy our hunger for consumption.
We met a woman today who produces (by hand) thousands of insence sticks per day… Each bundle sells for ten cents. We tried to pay her a dollar for 3 bundles and she wouldn’t hear allowing that to happen. The honesty both appalls and humbles you.
Earlier, we sang Karaoke at a bar where I took on a local chap in a dance off. The entire Vietnames crowd had my back because I think they live by the notion that ‘White men cant dance’ (FYI, I wasted him). We played the bamboo piano with an elder in a tribal village that was preparing for a feast and helped them grind rice by hand. We visited other villages where we high-fived children who stroked our arms in delight and commented that our skin wasn’t so bad, while their parents looked on smiling at our attempts at Vietnamese. We dodged dogs and cows who treat the road as their bedroom and share the Vietnamese people’s confidence that being hit by traffic is a matter best left to fate, not practicality… We even experienced a motorbike crash that left my mother on crutches (and dying to get back on her motorbike).
We hung out with a guy at his house when it poured so hard our drivers couldn’t see. He showed us his rice wine brewery, pigs and posed for photos with us while his son played computer games in the shack they lived in. We bargained for bananas, drank 3 litres of Vietnamese wine and heard stories of such misery that I don’t think our brains quite got it. Our guides have lived lives where hunger so intense that sleep is impossible and dangerous occupations are simply the only option for survival. They took us to where they fought in the war, they told us of friends and family they lost to it, of a decade of starvation.
The Easy Riders guide you through their country with a pride you find difficult to understand – given their history and the fact that it has caused most of them decades of struggle and even today, has an economy that means none of them will ever be able to leave its borders. However as they lead you further into the Ho Chi Minh Trail and you find yourself time and time again confronted with people who laugh and chatter while they perform monotonous, manual tasks, you start to realise that maybe happiness is just an attitude and we, in the West are in dire need of changing ours.
If you come to Vietnam, don’t take the comfortable route. There are few places in the world where you will be welcomed with such open arms, and where you will learn as much about the futility of war, the power humans have to overcome extreme odds and the simple pleasure of a smile. 5 days feels like a lifetime and you start to think your life will be forever changed by the lessons you learned while carrening through the Vietnamese country side. When it comes to saying goodbye, you truly feel like you are parting with old friends.
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