1/29/2024: The Plan is there is no Plan.
Having little to do for the monthlong Lunar New Year (Year of the Dragon) holiday, and nothing particular to interest me here in Shenzhen, I thought I would travel about a little and see the homeland of Phở. Phởk around in Phởland, as it were. It is my way of driving off the spleen. So, having engaged in next to zero planning, I’ve packed a bag full of loose aspirations to spend the next three weeks motorcycling from Hanoi to Saigon.

The plan:
1). Fly from Hong Kong into Hanoi on Feb 4th.
2). Figure out how to procure and operate an appropriate vehicle.
3). Motor myself to Hoi’an in time for Tet (Feb 10th).
4). Fly from Saigon to Hong Kong on February 26th.

Nothing else is planned. I’ve glanced at a travel book and referred to this guy’s guide. Apart from that, nothing. I have never driven a motorcycle, but I am familiar with driving stickshift, so we will see how that goes for me. I have recently learned that Hanoi is in the North and Saigon is in the South. From this state of near total ignorance, I think I am going to have an absolute blast.

1/31/2024: In Search of the Coconut Monk.
Every trip needs a theme, a goal, a reason.* Reading a little, as I now have, I’ve decided to make this trip a pilgrimage to the Coconut Monk. The Coconut Monk, his Coconutship, is the name of Nguyễn Thành Nam, a man who built himself a temple on stilts on the sea of the Mekong Delta. It’s hard to look at a photo of this man and not want to meet him — he is something like the anti-war peace yogi of Vietnam. Unfortunately, he has passed away to cocoheaven, but not before leaving behind him a cult respected on both sides of the 17th parallel. Cool my brains and soothe my head, educate me, my co-co-co.

*Recall Maxine Speier and I roadtripped the Southwest singularly in search of as many telescopes as possible in the Jetta Propulsion Laboratory. We saw some 60+ telescopes and were so much the wiser for having done that.

2/1/2024 There still is no plan.
I can’t impress this upon you, dear reader, enough: there is no plan. My research so far? I watched an Anthony Bourdain episode about Vietnam. I reserved a couple places to stay in Hanoi and Hoi An. To give you some perspective into my lack of planning: it just occurred to me today I should bring a swimsuit. I was lucky enough to find out I need a visa for Vietnam, which I now have. The new plan is to bring nothing more than my backpack and whatever is allowed as a carry-on. Done. I am not quite sure how I ought to get to the Hong Kong Airport to make my 7:30 am Sunday flight given my standard public transportation doesn’t start moving until 6am. There is no plan.

Day 00 (Saturday) 2/3/2024 Hotel Hong Kong Airport
I’m currently in Futian waiting for my 7pm book club meeting (Borges “The Immortal” if you’re curious). After that I’ll head down to Hong Kong and get to the airport as late as possible (about midnight). The subway system shuts down at 1am and doesn’t open until 6am, so I’ll be sleeping in the airport to make my 7:30am flight to Hanoi. From there I’ll figure out how to get from wherever the airport is to downtown, and begin my search for a bike. Typically cyclists buy the infamous and notoriously unreliable Honda Win, an untrusty steed that needs an oil change every 500km and will surely break down multiple times, which is just the sort of masochism that sounds like adventure to me.

Day 00 (Sunday) 2/4/2024 Crash Landing in Hanoi
Day one in Hanoi was all foreigner tax. Mildly ripped off by a scooter-taxi. None of my electronics would work, so I had to buy costly adaptors. Shampoo exploded in my bag. Many small annoyances and even more awesome food. In my search for a motorcycle for this trip I found an awesome custom Honda Win pictured here, but after traveling nearly 7 miles across the city on aforementioned scooter-taxi to test drive this Honda Win, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to safely operate an persnickety clutch. This was an agonizing decision. Look how cool this thing is ($175):

It killed me to admit defeat. My tiny sense of masculinity had to admit it would be a bad idea to attempt to drive this thing 2,000 kilometers into and out of crowded cities where a hair trigger clutch really is, or ought to be, the least of my worries. You do not want to play with Vietnamese traffic. It’s legendary: these people have sacrificed all their sidewalks to the God of Scooter Parking. Rivers of scooters flow through the city without constant accidents. No one quite knows how but I attribute whatever principle it is that keeps flocks of birds from knocking each other out of the sky. Crossing the street in this country is an act of faith that makes on feel a little like Tilda Swinton in Orbital’s The Box.

So I paid my foreigner tax again, forfeited a small deposit, and went with a rental company and a much newer, much more reliable, semi-automatic Honda Wave that is much comfier and decidedly less badass in every way. I paid more money/pride ($190) to not-own a much lamer bike.

But hey I’m on vacation. Stress less.

Then I went to drown my sorrows in food and cocktails, with great success – I met some French/Canadians for this venture. They were kind enough to convince me not to buy Kaneda2 (the red bike). Also, apparently Hanoi built a whole coffee/bar district on active train tracks.

So day 1 was all about getting screwed figuring out which way is up, currency, transportation, not sleeping, sim cards, and the catastrophic failure of all my electronics simultaneously, all rewarded by extremely good food.

Day 00 -2/5/2024 (Monday) – Hanoi: Obama, Tony, and me.
Today my mission was to procure myself a good bicycle helmet. This mission failed, because GoogleMaps simply does not understand Hanoi and is generally out-of-date. Fine. So instead I went to Bún Chả Hương Liên, where Anthony Bourdain and Barack Obama had a meal back in 2016. 10/10 – one of the best meals I’ve ever had for five dollars. Made me reflect on how much more money I would have had to spend in order to eat McDonalds and well-done steak.

After that I just walked all over the city. I found St. Joseph’s Cathedral (cf. Instagram), which is definitely an object of the anthropocene. It has made me think a bit about writing something on anthropocene aesthetics — in this case, the air pollution of Hanoi has painted the Cathedral in a patina of scum, which, strangely, makes it more beautiful.

I sought out a few of the amazing rooftop bars to see the city from a height, and was greeted with a gray smoggy sky that continues to paint St. Joseph’s. I found a good wine bar and made friends with an Aussi before heading for Banh Mi 25 at an unseasonable dinner hour (like cappuccino after noon, such food is meant for breakfast or lunch). Wonderfully, Banh Mi 25 has a secret bar in the back, about the size of a jail cell, fit for three or four bar stools at most, called Bilancia (Balance/Libra) Hidden Bar, where it was just me, my banh mi, and the bartender behind his tiny, tiny bar. Tomorrow we set out on a motorcycle I don’t really know how to ride.

Day 1 (Tuesday): 2/6/2024 Hanoi to Ninh Binh
Distance: 136km
Time: 4hrs
Stayed at: Haolu Ecolodge Homestay Commune

Today was a day of revelations.

I learned that Vietnam is longer than California. Driving it on my 110cc Honda Wave on frequently crowded roads means I am very often not exceeding 40km/hr. In other words, we’re doing this trip at 25-30 mph!

I learned that Google really doesn’t know anything about Vietnam, and that any time it estimates is off by a factor of 2-3x.

This slow speed is further exacerbated by the fact that I am avoiding major highways. So you can drive the length of California in a day and a half if you really gun it on the interstates, but here in Vietnam, we’re riding Big Sur the whole way. The most direct route from Hanoi to Ninh Binh is about 100km and takes about two hours in a car. At my speed and route (avoiding highways – 132km), this took me about 4.5 hours.

This pace was further slowed by my abecedarian motorcycle skills. Learning to drive a motorcycle in Hanoi is like learning to surf in a hurricane.

There is no way in hell I will be in Hoi’an in time for Tet. This trip will require some serious re-orienting. But that’s okay because we never had a plan. And it’s hard to complain from my hostel in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage Cite, Trang An, the “Ha Long Bay of the Land,” the first and only dual (cultural and natural) world heritage site in Southeast Asia. The Trang people must have Karst in their souls. Stayed an an amazing hostel: Hoalu Ecolodge Homestay; it’s right in the middle of the park.

Day 2 (Wednesday) – 2/7/24 : Ninh Binh to Gió Lào Eco Lodge
Distance: ~250km
Travel Time: ALL DAY.
Stayed at: Gió Lào Eco Lodge

Shortcut through the villages, many many villages (on the 45), many of them swamped with people selling New Year’s stuff (lots of oranges).
Then onto the Ho Chi Mihn trail
Ended up at the eco lodge. Note to self: always stay in eco-lodges. This one was Polynesian themed and it was fantastic. Met a fellow named Pierre who bought a bumblebee yellow Win to head to Hanoi for 15 million and I was more than a little jealous of that bike.

Day 3 (Thursday): 2/8/24: Hoi An: A New Hope (Gió Lào Eco Lodge to Đông Hà)
Distance: 341km
Time: All day (8am-7pm)
Stayed at: Random house-hotel.

Two boring hours followed by two amazing hours of mountains on the road to Phong Nha (I said nah on my Hue to get my Hoi’On.
Up and down some amazing mountains — at many points no one on the road but me, and then though these river valley beds with huge Karst mountains on both sides.
Many many miles covered today.
Chased by an angry dog.
Learned a lot about the Ho Chi Minh trail and Ho Chi Minh.
Đông Hà is not much of a city and everything was shut down for Tet. I did, nonetheless get shepherded to a streetside house-restaurant where they fed me chicken and rice. I then asked for the salad the guy next to me was eating: turned out it was a salad of fetal chicken eggs, who knew?

Day 4 (Friday): 2/9/2024: Hoi An – Tet Eve (Day 1)
Distance: 207km
Time: 8am til 3pm.
Stayed at: LaCasa Hoi An

I made it Hoi’an! About 1000 km at an average speed of what exactly? I’d guess under 45km/hr. It’s been a ride.
Rained hard all morning. Super cold and sopping and stingy at certain speeds. Weather on one side of the mountain is not the same as on the other — you’d go from rainy stingy shitty weather –then through a tunnel and — SUNSHINE!
Got told I couldn’t go on a fast-route and had to take a detour over the mountain to Da Nang. It feels like there is some sort of law in Vietnam that forbids bikers from taking the fast high ways and insists we all take the windiest scenic-iest route. Turned out to be the best detour ever, amazing Mario Kart ride up and down the mountain.
I’m much more confident on the bike. Made it to my absolutely beautiful 20$/night hotel for Hoi An (LaCasa). Took a shower. Handed over my dirty laundry. Proceeded to have a blast at Tet — met a bunch of god folks who run the Hanoi and Saigon tourist Instagram accounts and seem to be quite successful at it. It is exceedingly easy to meet people on this venture, especially with the overall spirit of the New Year.

Day 5 (Saturday): 2/10/2024: Hoi’an Post-Tet (Day 2)
Distance: 0
Time: 0
Stayed at: LaCasa Hoi’an

Spent today doing work that needs meet deadlines. Had to finish writing the narrative for a Radcliffe application. Very nice to do it in the Venice of Vietnam. Hoi’an is truly the jewel of Vietnam.

Day 6 (Sunday): 2/11/2024: My Son to Son My [Quang Ngai]
Time to leave Hoi’an. Stopped by the temple of My Son before heading to Son My to see the My Lai memorial. I didn’t make it in time so instead I went to my hostel and will check out the memorial tomorrow. Tomorrow is Vietnam Day.

Day 7 (Monday): 2/12/2024: Quang Ngai to Quy Nhon
190 km
5 hours travel time.
6:30am wake-up to watch Taylor Swift win the superbowl and own the pubs.
https://www.vietnamphotosbyrbm.net/PhotoIndex_a.html
Duc Pho
All along the coast: lots of great beaches, mountains, windy roads, fast straight-aways, sand dunes, and even a Cervantes-esque windmill landscape.
My Lai memorial
Duc Pho basecamp

Day 8 (Tuesday): Quang Ngai To Nha Trang (stay at FUSE Nha Trang)
210km
8 hours travel time.
Stayed at: FUSE (Nha Trang)

Today was a long haul but included a kilometer long rickety wooden bridge that was something out of Indiana Jones. Most of the trail was along the beach so it was hard to complain about much.

Arrived pretty late to Nha Trang, which even more overcrowded than Hanoi and was terrible to get around. 20+ minutes to travel a kilometer in city limits and just so many people bikes everything crammed. I hated it here and ducked out at 8am the next morning after some ill-advised late-night Karaoke.

Day 9 (Wednesday): 2/14/2024 Nha Trang to Dalat
135km
6-7hrs of travel
Stayed at: Mr Peace’s Backpacker’s Hostel (Dalat)

Back to the mountains: this was a good one. Vietnam is full of these microclimate zones. Today I ascended a hot dry jungly mountain, entered a thick cloud at the top, and the descended into a cool pine forest on the other side.

The tops of my feet I super sore from motorcycling. Holding your food at brake-ready starts to get at you. Finally got my oil replaced — I was supposed to do it at 1000 km but I made it more to 1500. It’s a new bike so I don’t think it noticed any issue.

Da Lat is an awesome city. All the street vendors had excellent food, though my favorite was essentially a deconstructed Banh Mi (see photo). After negotiating a workaround at my over-booked hostel (I split a private room with a couple backpacking from England – a good deal for them since I basically was only in the room for a ten minute shower and 5 hours of sleep) – I trekked across the city to find the Maze Bar. The Maze Bar is, in and of itself, worth a trip to Da Lat. It is a huge property, and hard to describe. It is five stories above ground, two stories below ground, and then, somehow, when you get to the top, there is another three stories of outdoor rooftop garden space that culminates in a giant, glowing moon. The entirety of it is built to be one colossal maze, so there you are, tipsy on whatever, weaving, climbing, ducking, hitting your head, as you negotiate this Escher-meets-Labyrinth-esque space. Its built mostly out of rebarb wire and cement and has a Disneyland ride quality to it, and I would hate it if it were at Disneyland, but I love it here. I stayed there most the night, and you should too, should you ever find yourself in Da Lat.

Day 11 (Thursday) 2/15/2024 Nha Trang to Mui Ne
166 km
6 hours of travel
Stay at Mui Ne Hills Backpackers (Mui Ne)

Apart from Day 1, when I was white-knuckling this motorbike out of the cycle-cyclone known as Hanoi, this was far and away the worst day of travel. It started with getting out of Da Lat, which was an annoyance because there were a lot of people driving very poorly. I then pointed myself south and headed back towards the coast with a bit over 3/4ths a tank of gas. This is when the misery started. For the first part, the road was uncharacteristically bad, and after going up a huge mountain, I spent a third of the day negotiating a slow windy lumpy downhill drive. I didn’t realize that the gas station I saw near the beginning of this journey would be the last one I would see for eighty two kilometers. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Fuck that.

So the entire time I was becoming increasingly concerned about running out of gas. Finally, I found out why you don’t use your front wheel brake when the ground is sandy: you will skid out. Thanks to my jeans and fake leather jacket, I only had some minor scrapes in exchange for this valuable lesson. Once off the mountain, I had another long stretch of extremely boring landscape on the way to the coastline. It was all super hot as well. When I finally made it to the coast I was met by awesome sand dunes, but also gusty wind that brought stinging sand and compromised bike balance.  But I made it to Mui Ne. Tomorrow onto another beach town.

Day 12 2-16-2024 (Friday) Vung Tau Beachtown (Surfer Hostel)
178 km
Travel Time: 5 hrs
Much of this drive was quite beautiful along the beach but a fair bit of it was a bit run-of-the-mill. No major events. Vung Tau is a huge beach town — lots of foreign influence. The beaches are very crowded — I’m currently holed up on a rooftop bar (Ibis) typing this now and catching up on email. Tomorrow: Ho Chi Minh at last.

Day 13 2-17-2024 (Saturday) Vung Tau Beachtown (Surfer Hostel) to Ho Chi Minh [The Like Hostel]
Took me most of the day to get here — one needs to take a ferry to get into and out of Ho Chi Minh. Checked into the hostel and put in for a second round of laundry. This is a very good hostel – cool, cheap water, decent bathrooms. Ultimately I didn’t do much today except get my stuff together and check out the “party” street.

Day 14 2-18-2024 (Sunday) Ho Chi Minh – War Remnants Museum
War remnants Museum was intense. They had replicas of tiger cages and prison chambers and torture techniques and a Real Live Guillotine, which, when you see one in person, you realize how sickly and inhumanely theatric it is. It’s not about putting someone quickly to death, it’s about putting on a show. The War Remnants Museum tells us the last Vietnamese man to be executed by guillotine was in the 1960s.

The exhibit that got me the most is they have a prison door with a little hatch you look in. What they don’t warn you is when you look into the dark prison chamber — your pupils adjusting from the Vietnamese sun — they have a too-realistic ghastly etiolated prison dummy sitting in there. I jumped back from the door and just started laughing. A couple French tourists looked at me queerly and I told them there’s no rational response for what they are about to see through that hatch.

The plaques were very poorly written — they have an emotionally over-the-top tone that suggests that they have not been updated since the museum’s name has changed from it’s previous iterations (first “The US and Puppet Exhibition House,” then “The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes,” and finally “The Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression” before settling on “War Remnants Museum”). The focus was squarely on South Vietnam (Saigon) as, of course, a puppet government of the US with no legitimacy, which of course is an understandable failure of academic impartiality. The lack-of-subtlety imbues the exhibition with a level of authenticity: you can hear the trauma in the tone. The plaques scream: “DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID?”

In many places, the museum employed effective use of American language against us. Our Constitution. Excerpts from the Declaration of independence. The Geneva Conventions. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The message is clear: “There is no way to square this circle, you American hypocrites.”

A whole new set of Vietnamese martyrs I’d never heard of before, and their stories seem questionable. On one plaque we learn that the American military tortured a Vietnamese spy by progressively amputating more and more of his legs some dozens of times before they gave up in exasperation “He is too strong for us! He will not break!” The idea of the American military ever saying such a thing in a formal context seems dubious — I hope that’s also true for the torture methods.

They put the figure at 3 million dead Vietnamese and another million or so casualties. I don’t think anyone is especially certain of this number.

The photography is brutal. We were definitely waterboarding people. We definitely didn’t see ourselves as liberators. We definitely did not see the Vietnamese people as human. This was about killing. My Lai seems a pretty small example. Bob Kerry can also fuck himself. Phil Crane is dead and surely in hell. William Calley Jr, who is still alive, will burn in hell. I learned my birthday is on the anniversary of My Lai.

What was most surprising for me was that simple fact that we lost that war, we accomplished nothing, we lost a fraction of American soldiers in comparison to the number of Vietnamese people lost, and the utter devastation and deforestation of nearly 50% of the land in Vietnam. And yet somehow it is the American people who are infinitely more damaged than the dioxin poisoned generations of Vietnamese living today. I’ve not met a single Vietnamese person who holds a grudge against me, American Tourist in search of the Coconut Monk, coffee, and dac biet.

The idea of bombing this country is something that is on a level of such incomprehensible megafoolishness, now or then. And we didn’t just bomb them, we sent a bunch of children into guerrilla warfare versus a bunch of seasoned veterans who had just spent nearly a decade teaching the French the same lesson they would teach us. This whole thing could have been resolved through cultural exchange. And look what the result of the war ultimately is today: precisely that— cultural exchange. I’m here right now doing just that. Compared to Vietnam, America has hardly healed from losing its soul in this war.

And finally, a minor point that really bugs me as an Art Historian: we leveled the Champa Empire. All those ruins of Champa temples are UNESCO World Heritage sites today. It’s as stupid and senseless as Napoleon blowing the nose of the Sphinx. We might as well bomb Machu Picchu.



Day 15 (Monday) Ho Chi Minh/ WORK DAY
[Peer-review that article; ExSchool app; update job market; send postcards]

Day 16 (Tuesday) Phoenix Island, Coconut Monk

Day 17 (Wednesday) ?? Can Tho?

Day 18 Thursaday ??? Can Tho? More Delta? Delta river tour?

Day 19 Friday Ho Chi Minh [Still Hideout or try another?]

Day 20 Saturday Ho Chi Minh

Day 21 Sunday Ho Chi Minh

Day 22 Monday – Flight to Hong Kong

I need to come back to do: 1) Hue, 2) More Hoi’an 3) Way more Hanoi 4) Motorcycle all the north 5) Return to Ninh Binh for more time in the Trang’an park. Ha Giang loop and Ha Long Bay

I need to re-read moby-dick.

Too much time sitting on a motorcycle listening to ones thoughts or podcasts with to many to write down and not one of them probably worth it except maybe: I think I wrote this as a benchmark for being an active, engaged human being — a reminder to myself to always get on the motorcycle and go until you die. I think I very much need to re-read Moby-Dick. I’ve always said I most associate with the character Stubb, but I think this deserves re-visiting what that means. Plus I have a paper I’ve been meaning to write on Moby-Dick for years now, so I might as well revisit that (The Golden Doubloon compared to the Golden Record!). Finally: it’s been about ten or so years since I’ve read Moby-Dick cover-to-cover. I’ve always said one should re-read tis book again and again at different points in one’s life, and here I am, at a different point in mine.

I think my biggest epiphany is the ways I’ve grown more and less flexible in my middle age. But overall, I think I was better at just about everything else when I was younger.

Other rules:

Traveling from North to South is better. More people go from South to North, so it is easier to get bikes, sell bikes, etc., and I think traffic is a little less.

Traveling during Tet is not a problem. It often means less traffic.

This roadtrip can be done multiple different times with radically different outcomes. Do you want to go along the coastline? Do you want to go up and down the mountains? Choose-your-own-adventure.

Anyone who gives even the slightest hint of a thought of a thought of concern about the healthiness of sweetened condensed milk should be SHUNNED.

Do not ever say no to gifts or food. I don’t care what your dietary restrictions are, how full you are, how many epi-pens you’re gonna need: you eat it. You eat it, and you like it.

A course on happiness. A course on death.

Vietnam. It grabs you and doesn’t let you go. Once you love it, you love it forever.” – Anthony Bourdain

Tiny Mekong Delta rainbow lizards everywhere.

Beer is warm and served with ice 

Coffee is everywhere and not because of Starbucks
shoes off but you will be prepared with a tiny pair of equally grimy slippers at most hostels

“I just wish that more Americans had passports”

Coconut monk links
https://oivietnam.com/2016/12/the-coconut-monk/
https://vietnamnet.vn/en/explore-the-strangest-religious-shrine-in-vietnam-E119821.html
https://scootersaigontour.com/strange-things-about-coconut-monk-in-ben-tre-vietnam/