Three Weeks On A Motorbike On Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh Road
By: Calvin Godfrey
Tags: Vietnam, Travel

STOMACH PROBLEMS, AN INTERVENTION FROM ST. JOSEPH,

AND A SECULAR ABSOLUTION

Between Hanoi and Danang, the Ho Chi Minh Road sees almost no commercial traffic and instead feels like a 1,000-mile parade route, where every man, woman, and child has been instructed to wave and cheer you toward your goal.

Every hour or so, I’d see a fellow rider zip by. Some wore nothing but bathing suits and flip-flops. Others had covered themselves from head to toe in Lycra and Gore-Tex. All were driving Wins loaded with backpacks.

The first travelers I actually spoke to were a Dutchman and a German who’d pulled over to consult their iPhones. The 20-somethings had met five weeks before in Saigon while taking motorbike riding lessons.

Their bikes had treated them well — as had everything else, with only one exception. “It’s my stomach,” moaned the German girl. “It’s an ongoing problem. I’ve tried everything.”

The stomach is, indeed, the worst thing to have break down on this highway, where most bathrooms consist of holes in the ground.

I was soon having my own problems, having abandoned my initial safety diet (white rice and water) in favor of beer and whatever looked interesting.

My guts began to twist and turn in a valley full of pastures and paddies, forcing me to make way toward the Cathedral spire jutting out of a village called Nghia Thanh. Upon arrival, a young man welcomed me from a rectory balcony and showed me to an immaculate facility where I had what can only be described as a religious experience.

Father Hoa, the pastor, invited me to stay as long as I liked.

“A guest is a grace,” he said, before handing me the key to a tidy room where I showered, changed and ran out to catch the tail end of his homily.

Later, over a bottle of California merlot, some fried pork belly, mixed greens and fetal duck eggs, I decided to confess my agnosticism.

He didn’t seem to care.

“We’re all brothers of humankind,” he said.

After we’d made inroads into a fruit plate, Father Hoa went to find his black robe and invited me to accompany him to the neighboring cathedral for “a ceremony.” Soon, we were racing up the road in his tiny car.

Some 300 faithful had amassed in the darkness, waiting for him. The women wore flowing silk tunics, the men freshly ironed shirts. The whole village would carry a collection of electrified icons of their patron, Saint Joseph, while chanting hymns, beating drums and burning candles through the night.

As the procession wound through the darkened rice fields like an iridescent centipede, a warm, fuzzy feeling gave way to a… panicky, my-insides-are-turning-to-liquid feeling. I dropped back among a small group of boys pushing a gas-powered generator on wheels.

An excited teenager began interrogating me in broken English.

“Where are you from?” he cried, clapping me on the shoulder. “What’s your name?”

I plastered a painful grin on my face for a time. And then finally grabbed him by the collar. “Get me to a toilet,” I hissed. “Now!”

A man shot forward out of the dark, seizing me by the elbow and yanking me away from the growing crowd of good Samaritans.

“This man has diarrhea!” he announced as we barged through the gate of a nearby farm. A woman washing dishes pointed to a concrete outhouse with two bricks arranged over a hole.

“I can’t,” I said, ready to cry.

Saint Joseph himself must have relayed the urgency of my predicament, because I was wordlessly whisked to yet another farmhouse — this one with a bright, white, Western-style commode. In a matter of 30 seconds, I had broken a towel rack, but solved all my other problems. I stepped out onto the porch holding the twisted tin bar.

“No shame,” the farmer said, waving a hand from side to side. “Vietnam. No shame.”