Hills

Written by Amy Lyon

We each had our own relationship with the hills. Shari attacked them, relying on her strong leg muscles, tri-athlete training and will power. She lived for the hills. Andrew, our resident mountain goat, seemed not to tire, and kept his own pace in whatever order he decided to ride, first or last, it didn’t matter to him, the hills were just flat rides with a little twist.

Mike took them in stride, worked and conquered everyone, as did Rebecca, who was remarkable and constant. Jonathan and I had the most trouble and each of us at one point or another walked and caught a few bus rides up.

The last day of the trip, cycling the beautiful island of Cat Ba, Tanh gave me a breathing lesson that revolutionized my ability to do hills. I realized I’d been breathing wrong, and with that, not getting enough oxygen to my heart, which caused it to pump faster, forcing me to stop. I thought it was congenital. I had developed what I thought was a technique to regulate my heart, by breathing consistently, the same in breathes as out, and I’d count them by four. I thought the way to calm my heart was to control my breathing. Evidently this is the opposite of what I should have been doing.

Here’s the trick, and for this I will never forget Tanh. First off, he said, we should breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. When one breathes in through the nose, the breathe goes deeper into the abdomen. And follow what the heart is asking for. The faster it is pumping, the faster one should be breathing in, this then feeds the heart the oxygen it is asking for. Breathe out naturally. Follow your heart.

I practiced what Tanh said along the road that wound from sea to hill to sea again around the island. I was amazed at the first hill. My heart did not race; it remained constant as it was fed the oxygen it was asking for. Why now? I thought. Why was I given this on the last day of the ride? If I believe there are no coincidences, a belief I come in and out of, this is exactly when I was to receive it. Evidently I needed to struggle on hills for two weeks to learn to follow my heart. Perhaps this is a lesson to take with me off the saddle.

The end arrived at a cul de sac just below the Sunrise Hotel on the far side of the town of Cat Ba. We did it. We rode through challenges and delights and got stronger as the days passed. We learned when to stop and when to push, although most of us pushed more than we stopped. I was proud of us and amazed that if we had more to go, we were ready. I was teary, relieved and filled with a sense of accomplishment. Physically, we had done what we set out to do.

It was bittersweet to take off our panniers and watch Tanh disassemble our seats and pedals. It would feel odd to wake the next morning and not prepare to ride. Although Shari would get up and take a ride through town.)

Even before we finished the cycling on Sunday August 5 at 2:00 pm we started scheming: Where next for more on the job training?

I Sweat Therefore I Am

Written by Amy Lyon

The training miles we racked up during the spring and early summer helped our bodies get used to having our butts on a little narrow padded seat for hours at a stretch, and got our muscles familiar with the rhythm of cycling. I passed through several stages during our training. First my neck needed to adjust to being crooked forward, which it did; then my legs came to understand the endurance part of cycling. We also learned techniques that helped us employ our core body strength instead of relying solely on our leg muscles. And all the training gave me confidence, that I really could go to Vietnam in the middle of the summer, ride 500 miles, and survive.

Then there is the on the job training - which is 75%. One of the reasons to go bicycle in Vietnam RIGHT NOW is that it is not yet a country in which every citizen has a car. What we had to learn was how to bicycle with the motorbikes, how to blend into the moving traffic, how to circumvent rotaries, how to cross streams of oncoming motorbikes and how to pass slower moving cyclists, pedestrians, and animals while being passed ourselves. When we started in Ho Chi Minh City we were relieved to be transferred by bus out of town before we started riding. After 10 days of this on the job training, while riding through a congested town, Jonathan yells, “Bring on Ho Chi Minh City, I’m ready!”

The heat. We had it and had to constantly manage it. This became apparent after the first full day of cycling left us sunburned having sweat off all the suntan lotion. We were our own personal saunas, cleansing our pores non stop day in and day out.
On day four I had a bit of sunstroke. By kilometer 50 of an inland loop off Route 1, the only major north/south highway, I felt like I was riding with an extra 50 pounds strapped on my back. With only five kilometers to go I climbed into the bus. Stick a fork in me, as Jarrett, Jonathan’s trainer would say, I was done.

I was more than done. I poured water on my head, down my back, cooled off my feet, and drank more water. We, the driver and assistant and me, followed the rest of the group for the final bit and picked everyone up and headed to the coastal town of Qui Nhon, to a beautiful resort on the bay. Jonathan too was feeling unwell and after dragging ourselves to lunch, in order to make sure to eat, we spent the afternoon napping in the cool and dark hotel room. At dinner we were slightly better, and by morning, pretty much recovered.

Rebecca, having light freckled skin, donned herself as the Vietnamese women do, with long gloves, dubbed wedding gloves, that go entirely up ones arm. The Vietnamese women, despite the heat or because of it, cover themselves from head to foot. At the top is their conical hat. They wear long sleeves and long pants and masks over their faces. We tried the masks, but they interfered too much with our breathing.

It was impossible to avoid the hottest hours of the day (11:00 am to 4:00 pm) and still get in all the miles that Mike had conjured up, Tanh so well orchestrated, and Shari demanded. So we learned. Our bodies learned in their inexplicable way. By the end of the trip, we seemed better adjusted to the heat, although the third to last day when we left the state forest and rode for hours over levees in the fullness of the sun, we became fatigued. Tanh suggested the reason it affected us so much that day was that in late morning, after a tough eleven kilometer uphill climb, we all pressed to get back down in time to visit the primate center before lunch. The downhill, did include three good inclines, and we pushed ourselves over them. This, he said, took a toll, and if we had not pressed, if we had rode at a comfortable pace, we could have ridden forever. He certainly could.

We were fortunate to have Tanh as our guide. Due, in no small part, or perhaps totally, to Mike’s insistence that we have a good one. Tang came in second in an all Vietnam race between tourist cyclists. Small and wiry, he never seemed to change his gate, and although he did at times admit he was tired, it was not often. And, as he told us, he sleeps well every night.

Cambodia, Floating Village

Written by Jonathan Smylie

South of Siem Reap there runs a long, straight dirt road on top of a levee that leads to the edge of Lake Tonle Sap and the floating village. In the dry season this road is 15 kilometers long and the lake at its southern end is two or three meters deep. At the height of the rainy season, in January, the lake is ten meters higher and the road three kilometers shorter.

On either side of this elevated road stand shacks built on stilts and beyond them stretch flat, wide open fields that in the dry season are planted with rice and in the rainy season covered with lake water. Some of these shacks are as small as the tree houses I built as a child. Their walls and roofs are made of reed or wood or corrugated metal or bamboo. They stand on stilts 10 to 15 feet high, depending on the distance between the road (on top of the levee) and the fields below. Under these shacks the people string hammocks where they can doze in the shade.

The road ends in a giant parking lot of slick mud, crowded with tour buses, shacks, food stands and tourist boats. We board one and take a thirty minute ride down the river to the lake. On both sides of this cruse is the Floating Village and it is just that—a complete town on houseboats. These houseboats are either wood rafts built over actual boats with a structure on top or simply a shack on a tied together bushel of bamboo. The boat and raft combination leaves the house high above the water. The structures that stand only on bamboo rafts sit low and look like they could sink at any time. Many of these floating homes have TV antennas and use car batteries to power their sets. There is no other electrical source out here, but there is a place where the villagers take their batteries when they need recharging.

In addition to the house boats, there is a full length basketball court on a steel pontoon raft, three or four schools operated out of houseboats, a Catholic church and a number of restaurants. All along the river’s path are fish farms, giant underwater cages, some as large as a 40-foot long cargo containers.

On maps the place’s official name is Vietnamese Floating Village, why Vietnamese, I don’t know. The floating village moves locations depending on the season.

At the mouth of the river, the lake spreads out wide. With a storm approaching, the water was choppy and we decided to pull over to a large floating restaurant and fish camp. I walked over planks that surrounded the open top of a fish cage and caught a glimpse of the shark like catfish they harvest. In another cage, this one all metal, the top three feet of which was above water, I saw 20 or more alligators, ready to be shipped to Thailand or Vietnam for their skins.

Everywhere kids were begging and tourists were taking pictures. The contrast was surreal. Like with many of the street musicians I saw in front of the wats, people with missing limbs are here as well. One young boy, missing his left arm, kept paddling back and forth in front of the floating restaurant in a small round boat that looked like a dog’s wash bucket. Other children swam in the muddy water. Each tourist boat that docked at this turnaround point was immediately surrounded by small wooden boats from which young mothers crouched on their hams in the bow of their boats, their babies swaddled against them, held up a bushel of bananas hoping for a sale. Everywhere I turned people were trying to sell something, anything that might bring in some money.

When we return to the mainland a woman presented me with a round table plate with my picture on it. I was surprised but did not purchase.

Cambodia, Pyramid Pimp

Written by Jonathan Smylie

On my second day, I climb a beautiful brick wat. The older wats were built out of brick, the later ones sandstone and laterite, a rock that has the look and consistency of lava. Virak stops by the gate in the wall at ground level and tells me to take my time.

On top, a small framed boy, maybe 16 or 17 years old with black, long, uncombed hair, a black T-shirt and long pants approaches me. Like dozens of other encounters, I’m expecting him to show me a guide book or postcards he wants me to buy or to simply tell me a few interesting facts about the wat and then ask for money. But his approach is all together different.

“Are you alone? Would you like a girlfriend for the day?”
“No thank you.”
“A nice, pretty, young girl?”
“No thank you.”
“Pretty girl, do what you like.”
“I already have a wife and find one woman is enough.”

He stops asking (they never push to the point of being rude or obnoxious) and starts telling me about what I can see from this high vantage point. We are above the trees. He is helpful and I see towers and wats, I would have missed otherwise. He disappears for a while. I finish my picture taking and start down and he shows up again, asking for money. They want American dollars, I give him a 10,000 note worth about $2.50 USD. He thanks me and asks for a second. “For school, to pay for school.” Virak has told me each student must bring his teacher a quarter a day, because the government does not pay the teachers enough. I give him a second note.

Eighty percent of Cambodians are farmers and 60 percent are poor, which means they have a house, a one room shack on stilts and food to eat but no possessions at all, including furniture. He figures ten percent of the country are well off, and perhaps 20 percent in the middle. That’s why each time I step out of the car to look over another wat there are 4 or 5, sometimes ten children who swarm me, wanting to sell me something--books, postcards, T-shirts. Once I say no to a purchase, they resort to begging. They gently try to trap me by asking, “You buy when you come back from seeing the wat.” They are in great need, but never malicious. Shyness and a smile come over their faces when I hold their eye contact for as long as they will allow.

The aggressive ones are the young men in their 20s, who all seem to be pimps. Their questions are the raunchy kind and there is plenty of evidence that their services are in demand. In every wat I visit I see German and French men, middle aged, with young (early 20s) pretty Cambodian women. Virak confirms what I think I see.

We pass one couple while walking around a wat on the first day. He is French, middle age, athletic looking with bulky muscles, she is his height, maybe 22, Cambodian, slim, well curved and dressed for the cocktail hour. We see them again two days later at another tourist site. When I take their picture, she notices me and unlike the couple we saw on Cat Ba Island (a short overweight Chinese business man and a young Vietnamese woman who would not look at us) this woman looks me right in the eye.

The darkest side of prostitution is rampant here. On the back of the tourist map that the money exchange service hands you with your cash at the airport, and on bill boards lining the only road leading from the airport into town, the message is clear in any language, because it’s told in pictures. Sex with children will get you put in jail.

The uncontrollable joy and shouted hellos with which the Vietnamese showered upon us are missing from these people. There is a flat, blank look in their eyes. Incentive and curiosity is absent from their expressions as is the quick, easy joy of seeing someone new. Virek says his country’s people don’t have much religious faith because long ago they stopped trusting their leaders. Cambodia is run by a Vietnamese dictator and before him the Vietnamese themselves ruled for ten years and before that was the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. The companies that are building all the new hotels in Siem Reap are either owned by the dictator or his friends or are foreign owned so the wealth is not going into the local population.

For my three days here, I feel not only like a tourist, but an employer, having hired a guide and car and driver, having decided to say at the nicest hotel in town. I am uncomfortably comfortable.

Cambodia, Pich Sovirak, My Guide

Written by Jonathan Smylie

He is available just 45 minutes after I request a guide and driver and instantly I like him. He is tall with a slender build but stands comfortably in his body. He looks like a runner and by the end of the day; I’ve learned he ran the 100 meters and the 4 x 100 relay in high school. Now, at age 31, he was born during the second year of Pol Pot’s reign, he plays volley ball three or four times a week. To accompany his easy, confident gate and lean, straight body is direct eye contact and a quick smile.

He is one of 400 specially trained tour guides for the temples of Angkor, which are called wats. They have guides trained in every language except Korean, but are now training some who know that language as well.

Virak, the name he goes by, speaks English and Cambodian. Most of his guests are English and Australian, few are American. He’s been at it twelve years.

His father was a college professor, teaching geography and French, but when the Khmer Rouge took over, he was sent away to work in the fields as a farmer. Virak, along with his mother and siblings were moved as well, but separated from their father. A two-year-old sister died of starvation. Another sister was murdered at age four. It was the time of the killing fields. “Every family lost members during those years,” he said. Today, his three remaining siblings are all teachers in secondary schools. His father, still alive, has had a stroke and is paralyzed on one side. Virak’s wife gave birth to their second son four months ago. Their seven-year-old son will start second grade in October. And his wife will bring the baby to school when she returns to teaching second grade in the fall.

He takes me to Angkor Wat first, the largest and most well known of the temples. In clear careful diction, Virak tells the story of the wat, the king who built it, and how it is being preserved. Like me, he likes wide open space and points it out every time we come upon some, the first being Angkor Wat’s moat, 190 meters wide and 1.5 kilometers long (more than a mile) by 1.3 kilometers --a giant rectangle. It is the first open space in this country of jungle that we enjoy together. Three or four times during our next three days, we pass this moat on the way to a different wat and each time he gives the dimensions and restates the fact that it has never been empty of water. He likes that truth.

Inside the first wall of Angkor Wat is a massive field large enough for landing a fair size passenger jet. It’s the second stretch of open space he acknowledges. Nine hundred years ago, this area was the site of hundreds of wooden houses where the citizens of the city lived. Each place Virak stops, I take a picture, then he points to a different subject and I take another picture. We move to the wat’s center section, a series of walled off square, each higher than the last as we move closer to the center. Along a tall wall, Virak points out a mural and recites the mythical stories of good, depicted by monkeys, fighting evil, represented by man-beasts.

At the base of the steep steps that lead to the highest level, (each wat was built with a central tower or mountain where the gods lived) he explains that the climb is steep and dangerous, the steps tall and narrow, because it takes work to reach heaven.

Virak tells me to climb, look around, and to find a nice quiet place to set and let the calmness of the place come over me. For 45 minutes, I enjoy yet another open space above the jungle canopy. Unlike much of America where a high vantage point reveals a distant skyscraper, radio tower, water tower or power line, the horizon here is a clean straight line of green tree tops.

Our time together runs about six hours the first day. For Thursday he insists we drive 18 kilometers away and visit a small wat, built by a priest, with what is considered to be the most beautiful detailed carvings. The place is called Banteay Srei and he is right. Examining the carvings fill me with a deep joy and a sense of privilege to be in the middle of a jungle, in the middle of Cambodia, on the other side of the world from my world.

We discuss everything from how Bush has seriously damaged the international reputation of America (a subject he brings up) to local drug and alcohol abuse to the wide spread poverty and prostitution in Siem Reap, the tourist town just a few miles south of the wats. He is open with the facts, careful with his opinion and always friendly. Over our second lunch, I find out his birthday is January 5th, my is the 4th, and I describe the steady emotional state of Capricorns and he agrees he is that way and we share another laugh.

Bao Cap, When The People Starved

Written by Jonathan Smylie

We had only one day to explore Hanoi. At dinner the night before I asked Tanh what we should see. The Museum of Ethnology, he said, “Make sure to see the Bao Cap exhibit that documents when the whole country starved.” What I didn’t know until our museum visit was that Tanh was handing me the answer to one of my questions. What had happened in Vietnam since 1975?

For me, after the last helicopter left the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, the country dropped into the back of my thinking, my knowledge of it never deepening beyond the occasional release of another war movie. One of the things I was looking for and what Tanh in answering my question was giving me was a chance to understand the history of the country over the last 32 years or at least draw an outline of it. His emphasis on the Bao Cap exhibit showed again the candor we had experienced from him all along.

After the country was unified in 1975, the communist leaders moved quickly to socialize the southern economy turning food production into a forced collectivization. This time of “subsidy economy” was called “Bao Cap”.

The underlying goal was the maintenance of a tight control over the people and for the leaders the preservation of their power. The result was chaos. All rice distribution was controlled by the government, which set up a system of rice stores. Citizens were only allowed to buy rice at the store where they were registered. It was as if you were assigned to buy all your food at one particular grocery store. Each family was given rice coupons on which appeared their names, their jobs and the amount of rice they were allotted. The lines at these rice stores grew long and the stores were often closed before everyone received their ration. Not surprisingly, corruption was widespread with the most powerful and wealthiest people able to obtain more and better food then the vast majority. Often because the best rice never made it into the stores, the people were forced to trade their coupons for “moldy, smelly, worm-eaten rice.”

With no incentives in place for farmers to obtain more food by working harder or growing more crops, rice production dropped.

Stacked on top of this weak economic structure were a number of events in the late 1970s and early 80s that shattered the economy.

Because their incentive based work life in the south was taken away, hundreds of thousands of people, mainly ethnic Chinese, fled the country on foot or by boat causing a drain in vital human capital. It also didn’t help that thousands of the south’s intellectual and government leaders along with many skilled and educated people, who did not leave the country after the war, were interned in re-education camps.

During the late 1970s the country suffered major floods and drought that severely reduced food production.

Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 after the Phnom Penh government had claimed part of Vietnam’s southern region as its own and had instigated a series of border clashes. Vietnam quickly took control of Cambodia. To fight back, the Khmer Rouge retreated into isolated areas and began a guerrilla war which forced Vietnam to station 200,000 troops in Cambodia. United States and most of the other western countries instigated an embargo on Vietnam to protest this war, which isolated the country. To punish Vietnam for invading Cambodia, China launched a brief invasion. This month-long war destroyed many northern towns, but it also stung the Chinese. It is reported that China may have lost 50,000 troops during this revenge act. For Vietnam the cost of supporting troops in Cambodia and defending its border with China grew high.

Meat and rice became scarce. The lines at the rice stores grew longer.

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union cost Vietnam its only supportive nation, but in watching how glasnost and perestroika worked in Russia, Vietnam was given an idea for how to get out of its troubles.

Under a new leader, Nguyen Van Linh, the party’s motto became “to change or to die.” A contract-system was set up with the farmers to encourage cultivation. They were allowed, for the first time since the war, to sell their excess crop. In 1989, when Tanh was 13, rice production for the first time in years, increased significantly.

The new leadership understood it had to end its forced isolation with the world. Vietnam withdrew its troops from Cambodia and signed a peace agreement with the country in 1991. Hanoi began assisting the US in determining the fate of Americans missing-in-action, which in turn led to the US lifting its embargo in 1994 and establishing diplomatic relations with Hanoi in 1995. That same year the country became a member of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and foreign companies began to invest again.

Today Nike is the largest employee in Vietnam. The farmers are expanding their crops and everywhere one senses the Vietnamese see a more abundant future. Tanh, with his girlfriend, own a motorbike. Their country has a long way to go, still. But for some, like Tanh, it is happening now. For his two weeks of care and guidance, a group of six American cycling tourists gave him a $600 US dollar tip – a little less than Vietnam’s average annual per capita income.

A Village of Boat Builders

Written by Jonathan Smylie

On Saturday, July 28 we cycled 52 miles along the coast north of Nha Trang. Part of the ride took us onto the Hon Gom Peninula. The isthmus that connects the mainland to the high mountains that dominate the southern end of this land was nothing more then a thin, five mile stretch of sand dunes covered by beach grass, small shrubs and short trees. The asphalt road we followed was long and straight and empty of vehicles. There was a wonderful quietness about the place. On our right was Ben Goi Bay and the low tide had drawn down the water enough to strand in mud the anchored fishing boats. On our left was a most curious and beautiful discovery -- especially for the boy in me who loves working with wood – a village of boat builders.

Vietnams fishing boats, the sea worthy kind, have a number of similar characteristics; gracefully accentuated bows that lift high above the deck, hulls that are painted a bright, beautiful blue, and gunwales accentuated in a different color, often red. The boat’s center cabin will be covered in bright colors as well and geometric designed will accessorize the cabin’s walls, doors, and window shingles.

The most interesting personality trait of these boats can be found close to the bow, just below the gunwale. Each boat, and this is without exception, is adorned with whale eyes. The eyes are drawn in the shape elongated teardrops and painted white, their pupils a long, narrow dash of black. Fishman revere the whale as their protector from the dangers of the sea.

To our great fortune the village had boats in all stages of production. We saw the beginning framework of one boat that looked like the skeleton of a giant armadillo on its back. Wooden ribs had been pegged into the keel using long, wooden spikes. To keep these spikes from loosening a small piece of white wood, no bigger than your thumb, was wedged into its crown much like how the ends of pegs are treated in a post-and-beam house. Everywhere giant C-clamps were holding boards together.

To curve the end of a long board for use in building a bow, these craftsmen would wedge one end of the board against the bottom of a palm tree and then about five feet away rest the board over a stack of cinderblocks, about the height of your knees. Using this stack as their fulcrum, these self-sufficient people would hang weights; heavy stones cradled in nets or cinderblocks on the far end and let the weight over time bend the board into a curve.

These boat builders are proud of their craft and rightfully so. The whole time I was examining their work, I was fantasizing about how I could buy one of these boats and get it back to Lake Waccamaw, for no other reason than to have the most beautiful and unique boat on the lake.

We stopped in front of one boat, almost finished. Sealing varnish was being brushed onto the completed hull, blue paint was being applied, and an elongated section of unpainted wood just under the gunwale was being reserved for the whale’s eyes. When I asked, by gesturing with camera in hand, if I could take the builder’s picture, he proudly stepped in front of his boat and faced me. But before he stilled himself, he pointed to his right shoulder where a peculiar bulge protruded—bone covered by skin. Was it an old war injury? He took his cigarette out of his mouth, his eyes locked onto mine, and he posed in front of his beautiful new fishing boat with its whale eyes.