Against the Wind

You can either take a bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, or you can take a boat up the Mekong River from a town called Chau Doc, near the border. I had elected to go with the boat option, paying an additional 10 bucks to upgrade to an express hydrofoil. What cooler way to go to Cambodia, eh? As it turned out, I didn't make that connection either.

After walking around town all day, I was making my way back to my hostel when a guy on a motorbike asked me, "where you from?" I had been getting accustomed to politely avoiding people on the street who approached me because there were so many. But for some reason I turned around and answered "America." His name was Day. He told me he was a private tour guide and showed me a book of recommendations from numerous travelers who he had guided on custom trips around southern Vietnam. The first recommendation read: "So, you've stumbled across Day, tour guide extraordinaire, and you are thinking it is pretty shady to accept a tour offer from a random Vietnamese guy on the street. Believe me- GO WITH DAY! You won't regret it!"

So I cancelled my hydrofoil ticket.

Day agreed to take me on a 2-day tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels, which were used by the Viet Cong to harass American soldiers during the "American War". He said he would take me there and to his hometown of Tay Ninh for dinner with his family. The next morning, as I waited for him to pick me up on his motorbike in a torrential downpour just short of a full blown monsoon, I started having doubts. I only managed 3 hours sleep in an oven-like guest house room the night before, I was already soaked, and the idea of a comfortably dry tour bus ride into Cambodia was beaconing. Easy, dry, bus ride with a tour company and fellow travellers... or a rain-soaked 70 km ride on the back of a motorbike to the tunnels with a local Vietnamese man who's father had been killed in the tunnels by an American bomb dropped from a B52? What sort of trip was this anyway? Comfortable and easy or adventurous and limit-pushing?

I sighed. Then laughed. "Alright Day, I need to buy a raincoat first. Let's go." Jumping on the back of the bike, I felt that comfort zone explode one more time.

The ride was wet, to say the least. I swore I couldn't have felt wetter if I'd been in a swimming pool. Manuevering through the traffic of downtown Saigon, holding the seat in a white-knuckled terror as your hired tour guide passes slower moving traffic by swerving into oncoming traffic lanes is probably the last way you would want to understand what driving in Vietnam is like. I found closing my eyes helped until a bus flew through a puddle, spraying us in mud and water and nearly knocking us into a trishaw driver carrying a chain basket of live pigs. I thought of the bus to Cambodia and of my stubborn quest for adventure.

But the rain slowed and we got to the tunnels. I followed Day and another guide through the narrow passageways, trying to keep up with them and smacking my head several times on the dirt roofs in doing so. I almost felt like I was in Discovery Zone, trying to chase a friend's little brother through the plastic tunnels long after I had already grown too big to manage more than a slow, cursing crawl.

Mixed emotions, disturbing, confusing... They played a video honoring the achievements of the Viet Cong against the "evil American invaders", showing how they set traps with steel spikes and popped out of the pits to fire machine guns into a field of advancing soldiers before disappearing into the earth again. By the end of the video I was thoroughly pissed off. I had to take a few deep breaths. I was really in no position to be angry at anybody. Here I am as an American tourist being led by people who had grown up in the area with families who had been permanently affected by the war. Feel bad for them? Feel guilty? Feel angry? I didn't know.

I can't describe what it is like to stand in front of a war memorial statue of a woman holding her dying son in her lap in the middle of a cemetary where thousands of Vietnamese were killed by my countrymen. Nor the feeling of standing in a museum, staring at war photographs of mangled corpses and deformed limbs from American chemical weapons next to families of Vietnamese tourists. Then there was the video of how American soldiers were tortured, how the tunnels became a hell trap for boys who had been drafted to fight a war they didn't know anything about.

All of those images were mixing around as I sat down on the tiled floor of Day's tiny home with him and his three brothers-in-law, sitting under a mantle where a portrait of Day's father in military uniform stood watch. The whole experience was so surreal. But the most amazing thing about the entire crazy, convoluted scene? How unbelievably genuine my hosts were to me. They held absolutely zero negative feelings against Americans, much less me. We passed shots of a heavy rice wine and ate chicken and rice, with Day acting as a translator. I expressed my gratitude for how welcoming they were to me. Then one of Day's brothers-in-law shook his head and then shook my hand, looking me straight in the eye. He said something in Vietnamese and held my hand firm. Day translated. "Our governments may not agree, may not ever agree, but we are the same. We have the same heart."

I nearly cried.

The rice wine shots kept on coming and we sat and sang to a kareoke machine into the night. I sang "Against the Wind" and "A Hard Day's Night" which were the only songs I knew in the list of songs that started with A. Quang and Trang got into singing some Vietnamese songs and I got Day to sing one too.

The hydrofoil ride will have to wait for the next time I cross into Cambodia.