Travel Diaries #34 - Chicken
Back to Vietnam: A motorbike scavenger hunt, breakdowns, a feast and a hunt for an elusive meal
Welcome to Travel is Dangerous - a newsletter with essays and stories about travel and what it does to us. Subscribe Now for free regular updates.
Kamikaze
The Namduro 250: a three-day scavenger hunt by bike around some of the most remote parts of Vietnam. Organised by a couple of enterprising ex-pats, the aim was to try to make it to as many listed checkpoints (various geographical locations pinpointed on the map, often with instructions like ‘play a game of pool with the locals at the bar; buy some corn on the cob off the lady at the crossroads, etc.), and complete as many stated challenges (cross a river on your bike, pull a wheelie, buy a toy for a local kid, help someone having bike trouble). At the very least, participants were urged to make it to the destination each evening in one piece.
The event sounded like fun on paper, though I rather naively assumed it would attract a modest number of niche motorbike afficionados and travel enthusiasts looking for some travel-buddies for the weekend. Inevitably with hindsight, squadrons of assorted petrolheads, adventurers, madmen, lunatics, hedonists, weirdos, misfits, curious travellers and various degenerates both local and ex-patriate alike, left Hanoi in their droves on a Friday morning, their groups no doubts disintegrating and falling to pieces before they’d reached the head of the road.
We left on Saturday: My good friend Kieran and I linked up with a couple of strangers who also hoped to catch up with the others. The road to Hòa Bình is the dustiest in the world, all passing trucks with their bizarre idiosyncratic Dukes of Hazzard horns, magic carpet bus drivers, fruit-toting ninja ladies on Honda Leads and cigarette smoking labourers whizzing by in flip-flops and green army helmets. Hamlets ebb and flow and it takes hours until you’re really out of Hanoi; every time you take the same highway back in you end up in a different part of the city.
A non-descript junction took us up into the hills approaching Pù Luông. We pit-stopped for photos and iced coffees, played football with children, took turns riding each other’s bikes – some of them wrong ones which wound through mountain villages before disappearing into haystack hills. Gaggles of geese marched across the road forcing us to stop in a line; Kamikaze chickens flew right across our faces at the most inappropriate of times, one of them even clocking me on the helmet as I whizz past.
It’s a remote part of the country and the roads narrow past blinking locals, normally undisturbed by the peculiarity of foreigners, particularly those with the dark-skinned French-Caribbean complexion of our new friend and riding buddy, the Parisian Thomas. We eat noodles for lunch at a crossroads restaurant and stretch out in the sun. Kieran attracts laughter, pointing and photography because he’s wearing a full-suit homemade Evil Knievel outfit. Thomas told us about one time he travelled to Ba Vi National Park near Hanoi; some local children – and maybe even some adults – ran alongside his bike making monkey gestures and noises.
It was pitch black by the time we got down the canyon-like gravel track to the villages on the valley floor. Driving past barely lit houses and grassy ditches, a mosquitoes-flickering-in-the-headlights kind of night-time vibe, they don’t sting but they do catch in your eyes, as we dodged more chickens on the road. It seemed to be a regional peculiarity that I couldn’t remember encountering elsewhere in the country, such an abundance of free-roaming birds on the road, or at least ones with so little awareness of passing traffic, as attracted to our bikes as the insects.
I figured they weren’t used to visitors either.
Feast
A feast of as much chicken and rice as we could eat, and a seemingly bottomless supply of cheap beer, awaited us in Mr Ba’s that lasted precisely as long as it needed to, impressive considering the number and competitive drinking habits of the guests. The stories of the weekend’s adventures, over more drinking and an equally infinitesimal well of rice wine, had gone on well into the night. Near misses. Countless breakdowns. Night-time driving. Rescue mission. Wheelies on countryside death roads. Playing chicken with truck drivers, who’d tend to go the wrong way down the highway. One guy had driven at high speed straight into a pile of gravel that had been dumped on one side of the road and done a front flip over the handlebars of his bike; they’d flagged someone down and thrown him onto the back of a flatbed truck to be driven back to the hospital in Hanoi with a dislocated shoulder. Many of the group of 50 had only got in well after dark, some had to be rescued and towed up the hill with ropes. Having only taken a few wrong turns and turned a four-hour journey into eight, it seemed our splinter group had had a relatively straightforward day, bar the odd chicken with a death-wish.
In the morning sun we died a thousand deaths; one for every movement under the blaze of the jungle sun. Fried rice and eggs on the veranda of Mr Ba’s, fishing through discarded boxes of Thang Longs and hassling for lights in between bites.
One of us had to break down: it was Thomas. His matt black custom Honda, beautiful to ride, only made it halfway down the steep mud track from the homestay. In daylight we could see the potentially cliff drop on one side of the winding forest path, better that we couldn’t see it as we lurched up it in the dark the night before.
Other riders from the group chundered by, offering their sympathies in twos and threes, keen to get on the road back to Hanoi. More relieved it wasn’t them, there’d been enough casualties the day before.
We left the bike and went into town, me threatening to keel over with Thomas on the back, the disintegrated sprocket and locked wheel meaning no-one could move his bike even if they tried, though no-one would try.
Water wheels in the stream, makeshift bridges provide shortcuts to otherwise inaccessible elevated rice paddies. We found a mechanic’s shop down the road, and inside a jovial guy who looked like a mechanic. I stretched the limits of my Vietnamese to explain to him what we needed, convincing him to follow us back up the mud track, him following with his box of tools.
He set to work, figured out what he needed, and headed back to the village to his shop to get the missing bits, which in this country may have been an appropriate spare part, or may have been a piece of metal that was close enough in shape to the original as to do a job.
The sun got hotter, a laser-sighted satellite dead overhead finding its way through the canopy of trees. Silence this far up into the jungle. The passing of time out here slow and disjointed, it had nowhere to be. We needed to be leaving for Hanoi, though once we’d surrendered to the situation; time started to move backwards. No noise from passing bikes, every now and then the only sound up here that of a timeless chicken’s crow.
If you’re enjoying reading, then why not share this post?
None at all
We needed food. I left the mechanic a note in childish handwriting – we’ve gone to get food in town, we’ll be back in 20 minutes. Up and down the country roads again until we spotted a roadside restaurant, with a typical sign outside – gaudy fonts, bright colours and fading photos of a bowl of rice and a cooked chicken.
The guys loitering inside looked a bit bewildered as we filed in, ordering the simplest thing we could that we knew they’d have: chicken and rice. Confusion ensued; despite it being the most basic of conversations, they didn’t seem to understand, though one of them disappeared into the kitchen. We sat down and drank the warm beers they’d offered us from an unplugged Coca-Cola shop fridge, chipped glasses but without the usual ice. They took their time bringing our food – I told the mechanic we’d only be 20 minutes – the day was boiling hot and the fan only pushed more hot air into our faces, the large dusty room reminiscent of a schoolhouse had windows but no glass, only bars.
Eventually the guy came down to the table with three small but heaped plates of fried rice, and his iPhone, sheepishly held outstretched indicating there was someone on the line. On the other end of the line, a woman’s voice. I held it to my ear and she began to speak. The man left. On the other side of the world you often come across a peculiarity of cultural differences: someone who speaks English fluently and with great accuracy, though you still don’t have a clue what the hell they are talking about, the cultural chasm too vast.
I got enough of her point: the man was apologising. He had called his English-speaking friend or acquaintance – everyone in Vietnam ‘knows a guy’, whether for mechanical or bureaucratic or translational purposes – to help us understand. They had rice. But they had no chickens. The woman continued, we spoke for several minutes, her English was on point though I catch little of what else she’s trying to say. Though eventually it dawned on me.
Not only had they no chicken for us to eat, to serve with the rice – the man was trying to tell us that he and his family didn’t have any chickens at all.
Dead
On Monday morning I caught up with Kieran and Nico in work. Hailing from somewhere between Venice and the Dolomites, like all Italians Nico was very Italian. Always impeccably dressed in fitted shirts and brown leather shoes, at lunch break coffee loungeabouts he’d explain that cappuccinos were only for breakfast, that a pizza is a light Sunday evening dish, and the correct way to wear socks. He rode a Vespa which always broke down, and after transporting 90kg of cheese to Vietnam after a Tết visit home – for personal use – he had had the spark to begin a side-hustle importing cheese and distributing it to various Italian restaurants and pizzerias around Hanoi.
Nico had only gotten to the homestay hours after us, despite having left with the rest of the group that morning. His 30 year old two-stroke Vespa had taken him over mountains and through rivers, before finally being towed up the hill to Mr Ba’s in the pitch black. We reminisced about the adventures of the weekend, the crashes and the near misses, the wrong turns and the breakdowns, and the euphoric adrenaline-fueled sense of camaraderie that had been conjured up amongst the group and our hosts over food and rice wine at the home of the indefatigably welcoming Mr Ba.
All I could do was laugh when Nico admitted he’d also had several near-misses like mine with the Kamikaze birds of Pù Luông. His drive back to Hanoi had been eventful and long: more breakdowns for him and his group of friends. At one point on the dustiest road in the world, realising there was something catching on his front wheel, he’d pulled up, dismounted and inspected under the mudflap to find what was holding up his bike: blood, feathers and the blackened, rotting carcass of a dead chicken.
If you enjoyed this, then Subscribe Now for more of my travel writing
Feel free to leave a comment or hit the like button
Gavin, I'm enjoying reading and re-reading the details of these adventures, filled with hot days on Earth and celestial features like satellites and time moving backwards, and down to the connecting item of the place that ran out of chicken and the vespa that had one stuck under its wheel.