Our Mekong delta tour ended the next day, in a flurry of tours and quick stops at local artisan workshops. Some of it was actually interesting, such as seeing how they made the cloth, but much of it was tedious, such as the small house where the young women made incense sticks. I refrained from buying anything, except for a small bottle of whiskey with a snake artfully placed inside it, which at the time seemed like something really unique that I simply had to have, and which later caused me some problems in customs in Los Angeles.

By the time we had bused, ferried, and boated our way back to HCMC, I had made fast friends with an Irish couple in our group, so we made arrangements to meet for dinner. As it happened, it turned out to be drinks and dinner, and the drinking phase lasted so long that we didn’t eat until almost ten o’clock. I don’t live like this at home, but it was vacation. You’re supposed to break all your rules on vacation, right?

I walked them over from the Pham Ngu Lao area to where the restaurant was, showing them the Rex Hotel and the Opera house along the way, and that magnificent looking block or two with the wide streets and impressive looking hotels. By this time, I had gotten my bearings around the city somewhat; it was like the 1995 knowledge in my brain was starting to make contact with the present, and I was feeling very happy about being here.

They had picked out an Irish pub from the guidebook, and we tried to go there, but due to our warm up activities on the other side of town, by the time we arrived the kitchen was closed, so we had to eat at the restaurant next door. Over the next couple of hours, we talked about what was around us, and about our lives at home. I told them about my former life in Thailand, and about how I had once also studied Japanese. They told me they had been traveling together and living in Australia; they hadn’t been home in a couple of years. It all seemed so romantic, meeting someone from another country and exchanging accounts of each other’s hopes and dreams and hardships. I have had this happen many times on the road, but for some reason, it never seems to happen to me at home.

They told me about their visit to the War Remnants Museum, which has a lot of historical realia (photographs, quotations, rifles, fetuses) from the American and French wars. I told them about growing up in the US during the war years, watching it on TV every night, and how lots of American soldiers joined up because they thought they were being patriotic and fighting communism. That’s what a lot of people thought. But gradually, they changed their minds.

“The Americans even made war on the environment. They used Agent Orange and napalm and they also bulldozed the trees right out from the roots so they wouldn’t grow back.”

I know.

There is such a legacy of things my country has done.

And people seem to want to confess to me, when they find out I am an American, all the bad things they know about the United States and its actions.

It can be hard being an American on the road, especially in a place like Vietnam where there is a clear history of our involvement. Situations come up, and it is easy to feel pressured to either explain or even apologize for American policies. I try to be even-handed about it; after all, I am not the government, and yet at the same time, if people haven’t met an American they can really talk to, I’ll be glad to talk to them. I don’t defend my government, but on the other hand, many people from other countries don’t understand America from the inside.

We said goodbye, eventually, after sitting for a couple of hours and discussing our respective countries, the rigors of travel, the people and places we had seen, and the nature of Vietnamese culture. I felt much more alive and connected to my new world when I left them, thinking that now, maybe, I would start meeting people and really enjoy my trip. One of the drawbacks, I might have mentioned, of traveling alone, was that it had an upside and a downside: the upside was that you were exposed to your environment a lot more, and gained more intense experience, but the downside was that you could get really lonely and start thinking too much. I still went for the riskier option, the one with the higher payoff, but it was always nice to spend an evening with people who were traveling as a couple or a group.

We returned to our respective hotels, and I went right to bed. And although I felt very warmly toward this Irish couple, I never saw them again.

The next day, I made another quick decision: I had but one month in the country, and daily I was receiving reports of storms and impassible conditions on the highways between the middle coast cities, such as Nha Trang and Hue, and where I was in Saigon. I wanted to visit those cities, to explore the memories and to see if I could re-capture the feelings I had once known in them. But how was this going to happen with floods and roads turned into mud fields?

This was a much different Vietnam than the one I had visited twelve years before. Then, I had arrived in April, and the days were consistently hot and dry. I only saw perhaps two afternoons with showers, and even those had been mere respites from the heat, brief downpours that changed nothing about the land other than cooling the air slightly and making things more humid. Now, although the weather in Saigon was warm and sunny, I felt pressure to plan my days just right, because I wanted to see everything on my list – Hanoi, along with some areas nearby, Hue, where I had ridden a bicycle to one of the emperor’s tombs, Da Nang, where I had gotten sick in a hotel room for three days, Hoi An, where I had only spent an hour, Nha Trang, where I had loved the beach and the harbor, Dalat, and perhaps even some new places I hadn’t been before. The question was, how could I proceed north, my original plan, when the roads were washed out?

After an intense interval of thinking about my options, the only logical one appeared to me. I would get on a plane and fly to Hanoi, where the weather was also reputed to be sunny, spend a few days there, hoping that in that time the weather might clear up in the middle of the country. Then I could make my way south, going in the opposite direction from what I had planned, but eventually hitting all the same places. It seemed like the only real choice I had if I wanted to get out and see the country, so I bought a ticket for the same day, check out of my hotel, went to the local bus station (I had inquired at the travel agent), and taken a city bus out to the airport. I was so proud of myself for not taking a taxi.

Being in an airplane in a country like Vietnam brings about a clash of extreme opposites. On the outside, peasants and city folk are counting bags of rice, selling little Chicklet-size packs of chewing gum, bargaining for sandals, wearing their pajama-suit and a conical hat, most of which I imagine has been a way of life for a hundred years or more. Once inside the passenger ramp, though, I am greeted with the smell of cleaned airline carpet mixed with the slight odor of jet fuel; the crew, as Vietnamese as I am an American, is attired in smooth and spotless blue jackets, speaking fluent English, and making me feel like I have punched through a barrier and fallen into a separate Vietnam that never existed anywhere else. For a moment, I wonder which is real, the street, or the airplane cabin; at the same time, I am thinking, are these people, the same ones who sold me the bootleg Lonely Planet guidebook, now going to make this plane fly – safely?

But they do, and a scant hour later I am touching down in Vietnam’s capital city. I spent only a couple of days here on my other trip, and I had been tired and near the end of my travels then, so I hadn’t cared about anything, and had hardly gone out and done anything at all. Now, this time, would it be different? I intended to make it so, if I could.

For those who have never been to Hanoi, it is a very long commute from the airport into the city proper, almost an hour. I managed to get a free ride into a big hotel on their bus, then caught a xe om – a motorbike taxi – over to the guesthouse I had picked out of the guidebook. We sped along some roads as night was falling, and hundreds of two-wheeled vehicles like ours came at us, crossed our path, or swept up alongside us. It was exciting and dangerous at the same time. Night was falling, and for a fleeting moment, I felt the stimulation I used to get when summer turns into autumn: a quickening of the pace as the heat lessens and the night increases its extent over the days.

I heard a “hello” next to me; it was a boy of about ten years old, riding on the back with his father. He smiled, and I waved back to them. When we entered an area known as the old quarter, a place I had not quite explored on my other trip, the streets became narrow and the sides filled with red and pink paper lanterns, as well as people lingering about on foot, on bikes, or with shoulder-poles balanced as they walked. It was like being in a movie, and it sure felt like December, perhaps because of the colors and the nighttime festivity. We sped through the narrow streets, and the shops and pedestrians and carts and lanterns whizzed by in one gaily-lit blur. In one of my moments of good fortune, the guesthouse I had selected had a room (I wouldn’t bother to phone them, it was too much hassle), and I was able to throw down my backpack once again – always a moment of relief when I travel. I showered and put on a clean t-shirt. The next part of my journey was about to begin.

What will happen to John next? To be continued...