Biking through Vietnam lived up to my environmentally friendly travel aspirations. Although we moved almost every night, it was only to bike 40-80 km very slowly through the Central Coast of Vietnam. Our guide, Ky, went absolutely above and beyond to make sure we saw the details of rural Vietnam, the temples, the houses we were passing by. We were able to see inside people’s homes, to see the mounds of chilis, painstakingly grown gardens (flourishing despite the crushing heat), tiny drying children’s clothes, and miniature shrines that look like multicolor jukeboxes topped with jade frogs and laundered stacks of dollar bills. It was day in and day out of bowls of noodles for breakfast, Vietnamese coffee and fresh lychee snack, and some new strange meal to taste for dinner. If you ever want to bike through Vietnam, I could not recommend this trip more highly. Between the tuna eye soup and the cotton machines whirring as we passed them, it really allowed us a window into Vietnam that most tourists do not see. Biking allowed us to slow down and really see the rows of bright pepper plants, winter melon, tomatoes, eggplant, lotus flowers, fish nurseries, shrimp ponds, oyster lakes, and the multitude of people that cared for their rice paddies every day. Learning about our guide’s life (his family, his son, his perception of how the Vietnam War has shaped modern day Vietnam, politics, the healthcare system, the hidden massacres of the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam war) gave us so much more insight than I would have had just traveling from hostel to hostel. Biking is also fantastic for deep conversation.
I strongly believe that biking is the best possible reflection and processing time. The rotational movement of the bike somehow lends itself to the best spiritual brain processing time. I just pedaled along, marveling at the sights around me, thinking my little thoughts about all the insignificant (and significant, somehow simultaneously), things in my life. Biking is one of my greatest joys, and so it was unimaginably joyful to pile three joys on top of each other: biking, exploring a beautiful new place, and being with my mom.
Above: Gloves that say POWER on them, found on a very old woman who was collecting bottles to sell at the Basalt columns. I loved her gloves, and paid her for a picture.
Biking with my mom was especially meaningful, particularly because I heard so many stories of her life that somehow, I’ve never heard. Apparently, my great grandfather owned 200 coconut trees in Malaysia. This particular variety was very tall, which made them especially dangerous, as the rats would crawl up and undermine the structural integrity of the coconuts and towering bunches of leaves. At 15, my mom went to live with him and his third (?) wife for the summer, and all the memories came flooding back to her while she was in Vietnam. As she described Malaysia, I found myself picturing the deadly green snakes that looked exactly like papaya leaves, the small boat they would take to the island as they peeled rambutan, and the steaming congee her grandfather’s wife would prepare for her in the morning. She told me about how when Vietnamese immigrants landed in San Francisco after the Vietnamese war (when she was in elementary school), they were so poor that they couldn’t afford to eat, and they began trapping and killing the squirrels from Golden Gate Park. The city had to launch an enormous education campaign centered around the message, “Please do not eat the squirrels in Golden Gate Park.” She told me stories of her work-related travels as well. My mom is an absolute badass of a woman. She has helped set up clinical trial sites all over the world, in some very remote and perilous places. She is a force of nature, willing to swim anywhere, to brave the tide of oncoming traffic, to weather some extremely uncomfortable moments when traveling. I am incredibly grateful to have inherited her strength and tenacity to power through days and days of biking in interminable heat. She has also taught me how to respect people that are very different from myself, how to have many different passions, to be open to discovering new things about myself, to celebrate the beauty of sexuality, and to be unwilling to compromise my own sense of who I am, even if it makes other people uncomfortable.
There were some themes of womanhood on this Vietnam trip that I just wanted to mention, on the note of admiring and respecting my mother. I’ve just learned about so many men—killing, worshipping, fighting—and I’m a bit over being told that I can’t go into temples because menstruation is unclean, and that I am somehow damaging the temple? And so, we honor the women and female goddesses I’ve learned about on this trip. First, the entirely female army, formed by one of the last Nguyen emperors, Thinh Nanh, who created this army for only a year, and then immediately disbanded his own creation. But it was a time in which a woman could be something other than a concubine or a peasant. In the Forbidden Purple City of Hue (pictured below), three moats separate the forbidden city from the civilians living outside its’ walls. (Notably, the last emperor of the Nguyen dynasty was born in 1913, became emperor at the age of 13, and was the 13th emperor, and so appears to have been triple cursed, and is not honored as an emperor because he allowed the dynasty to fall). Next, Lady Buddha Danang, the tallest Buddha statue in Vietnam. Although I couldn’t find much information about her, one very unreliable source on TripAdvisor claims that she is the protector of Danang and has the power to re-route typhoons away from the city. The last is the Goddess Durga, the slayer of the water buffalo demon (Masishasura). We visited the Hindu temple devoted to her in Nha Trang on the last day of our trip. Durga is made up of devas that assembled into the mountains and combined their divine energies. She is said to be associated with protection, strength, motherhood, destruction, and wars (in that order, on Wikipedia). She is believed to unleash her divine wrath against the wicked for the liberation of the oppressed. I love that she can be all those things: a mother, a harbinger of destruction, and a liberator of the oppressed. It means that I too, can be many disparate things at once.
Other thoughts that I’ve had but I’m not sure how to work them in together:
· My best friend Mariah had some very wise words for me: “Being a worthwhile human being is about showing up in the unsexy moments. It is about seeing the suffering of the world, and knowing that you have to do something to change that suffering. Looking at the suffering of the world and choosing to look the other way is just not an option.” I just may be losing all my respect for people who have every opportunity to do something that improves other people’s lives (even in some small way) and choose to just make piles of money and sit in their ivory towers. Destiny is about living with values and purpose. Destiny is something you find on your own, no one else tells you that you have a destiny. And destiny isn’t just about you, or your ego, it is about how you shape the world in a way that improves the quality of life (in some way, through providing a service or through art or through teaching) of strangers, people that you have no connection to. These places that I’ve traveled are beautiful, but they are also painfully impoverished, and extraction of natural resources by the US and Europe (and devastating war) are largely to blame. How do we rectify these damages when so many people are so willfully blind?
· I have started to believe in the consciousness of all living things and it is changing how I interact with the world. I’ve been reading several books on Buddhism, and I have had moments while biking where I’ve felt completely enveloped by the natural world. It has brought me to tears, which feels odd to write. It is the same feeling I get when origin stories (i.e. Turtle Island), remind me that the earth is a living-breathing-feeling-thinking being. How different would the world be if we changed the language that we used, and we talked about the mountains, rivers, and trees as if they were alive and speaking with us? (These thoughts are not new, just remembering Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and understanding it, maybe in a new way?)
Words of Wisdom from our Guide, Ky:
Langan and lotus root improve your singing voice.
Durian mixed with Coke can kill you. (Fact check: untrue, but sensational)
If it is hot for several days, and then it rains, this is makes people sick. (This one keeps me up at night because I don’t understand it, but he vehemently insisted that this was a widely-held Vietnamese belief).
Apparently, if you just take a cocktail of antibiotics, steroids, and cold medication every time you’re sick, you will be cured (as he offers us Paracetamol, Levofloxacin, cefadroxil monohydrate, methylprednisone, and little green balls that are supposed to make your throat feel better). He claimed to have been told by a Vietnamese pharmacist to take all of these at once to help with his cold.
Quotes from Mom:
*Sees a white man on a paddleboard in Nha Trang bay* “Little does he know how high the coliform count must be in there” -grins with infectious disease expert glee, always kind of morbidly cheered by the thought of fun pathogens (We learned that only 17% of Vietnam’s sewage is treated before it is pumped into the ocean)
“This is where the weirdos must come to die” – upon seeing yet another weird tourist in Nha Trang
*Discovers I am reading a book on Buddhist teachings in Nepal* “That’s where your father went all crazy. He was thinking about being a monk at one point. Did he ever tell you that?” *shakes head*
Excitedly exclaims everyday: “It’s time to do the wordle!”
“The child in me wants to pick up all the little jelly things” —mom, at breakfast, looking at all of the jelly bowl full of ominously bouncing gelatinous blobs
“Holy Potatoes!!!” – upon seeing another beautiful view
“I’m a hot dragon” – looks longingly at the dragons on the palace walls (To be fair, we were both melting into the pavement like Wicked Witches of the West because it was 95F)
iPhone pictures, because I was on my bike and it wasn't as easy to be a real photographer:
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