Day 22 - At Least We Only Tipped Him Half of What He Wanted

The next morning we arranged a really early us to a town called Dong Ha right below the old DMZ. Dong Ha was right in the middle of the country until it woke up one morning to find itself right in the middle of a war zone. We wanted to get their early so that we could see the DMZ and still get to Laos that day. Our bus was the usual 45 minutes late and when we came down that morning we found the guy who had taken us to the fireworks the other day asleep on a little mattress in the lobby. It seems in these little hotels someone still has to be on duty all the time so they try to grab some sleep when they can. Outside before we got on the bus there was someone selling early morning baguettes, which were good though not exactly Europe good. The bus ride to Dong Ha was quite short and we got there early in the morning. We went to a place the book recommended to get motos since Dave and Ken thought that we should get our own motos and explore the area ourselves. We turned down one guy who was on us right as we got off the bus about all the services he could provide. He spoke the best English I had heard out of one of these hotel people.

The hotel the book recommended was out of motos even this early on the morning and the guy at the counter, or I should say sitting watching a TV near the counter, mumbled something about it being Tet, which apparently lasts about three days. "It's Tet" was the excuse we heard all day for everything. Where is everyone? "It's Tet." Why is this so expensive? "It's Tet." Why are there potholes in the road? "It's Tet." We eventually had to go back to the first guy who had come up to us at the bus station since he did actually have motos to rent. I had never driven a moto before and didn't really want to start in Vietnam, so Ken and Dave just rented one and Dave, who used to own a scooter, did most of the driving. I had a bunch of time to kill so I asked around about a place where I could get my pants, which were badly ripped during the bycycling, fixed. One guy there offered to take me to a place where I could get them fixed and back for about 50,000 dong or a little more than $3. Since it was Tet we could exactly go to a shop so he took me some distance off the main road into a residential neighborhood to someone's house. My moto driver had about 10 words of English and the people at the house had even less so I ended up just sitting in the living room with the moto driver, the father of the house, and his two kids while the wife went and got out a foot sowing machine, which are common in Vietnam and antiques in America, to fix my pants.

The children were playing with some small toys and watching some dubbed American movie I had never seen. The moto driver and the father sat down to have a nice Tet beer and even after three or four refusals I ended up with one. Again in Vietnamese style we all only drank when toasts which thankfully was a lot less frequent than with the young people. It was just a very odd feeling to be sitting with this family, who I could not really communicate with, on a holiday while they worked, or at least the wife did. I had no idea how to react so I just sat there half watching the movie and toasting. Eventually the beer was finished and the pants were repaired. When the pants had originally ripped I thought that they were damaged enough that even with some repair I wouldn't be able to wear them much anymore, but they were actually fixed well enough that they may last for a while. We left but instead of going back to the hotel the driver mumbled something about Tet and drove me back to his house. He sat me down near a TV in his main room by maybe his six children, or at least there were six children sitting there, gave me another beer and, for reasons that never quite became clear, left to change into a suit.

He reappeared when his wife brought both of us a bowl of Pho for lunch. W little bit later two other guys wearing suits showed up and we all drank and they talked for a while. Again I mostly watched the TV with the kids, which this time was Power Rangers. As strange as going to the first house was trying to figure out why he took me to his house was even harder. There are times like that when I just feel lost trying to figure out a set of cultural contexts that are very alien to me. I can make a few guesses but it really could have been anything. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out what people are thinking, but I had no idea what was up. After the beer he did finally drop me off back at the hotel. I paid him 60,000 instead of 50 but it did include some surprise meals and beers. I wandered around a little and just mostly sat and read for another hour or two before Ken and Dave returned. They said the tunnels they went to see were interesting but almost no one was around. I thought the best way to go into Laos was just to start by getting a bus to the border, but the guy who had rented the moto to us popped up again and called someone who said he could get us a pretty good price on a ticket to Savankhet, the city we were going to in Laos.

We paid about $15 a person, which was about what the book said, and we were off toward the border. The person who had rented us the motos wanted a 40,000 dong tip for making the call, and we ended up giving him 20,000 which was too much anyways. Oddly he never wanted any collateral for the bike so Ken and Dave could just have disappeared with it. The bus to the border took us up into the mountains through poorer and poorer looking towns. The houses were soon all made out of wood and built up on stilts to either avoid mudslides or provide a shaded area underneath. The scenery was still beautiful as we went up full of cute little towns and towering jungle. We passed the famous town of Khe San where some of the heaviest fighting of the war was. The only marker there was another statue of a heroic looking guerrilla soldier. We stopped and picked up two women dressed in the more traditional cloths of some of the poorer areas, only to drop them off again about 15 seconds later for reasons that were never explained. Maybe they lacked the money or as Dave speculated they might have smelled bad based on some hand motions the driver made. We reached the border town and the woman on the bus offered to do some black market money exchanging for us but we refused.

It was about then that we learned that the bus driver had no idea about going to Savanakhet and this was as far as he drove. The guy back in town had ripped us off. His phone number was on the back of the receipt he had given us so they called him and talked for a while, probably about how they were going to split the money, then Ken talked to him for a while, eliciting a string of ridiculous promises. He said at one point we should go across the border and try to use his hand written receipt there. If we had more time I would have been in favor of going back to town just to yell at him, not that it would have done much good, but we needed to go across the border before it closed. At least we only tipped him half of what he wanted. The border wasn't exactly closely guarded, as the Vietnamese people, who I guess didn't need a Visa, just rode though on their motos with only a nod to the guard. We were sent over for a Visa inspection and stamp from the guards but spared any fake fees. The Laos side was so lax that it would have been possible to miss where you were supposed to get a stamp, which might have been a problem later. On the Laos side there were a couple of goats just sitting around chewing on some grass.

There was though no one anywhere near the border offering a ride so we just started walking with our thumbs out. Most of the cars just passed us with maybe a wave until one fancy looking truck, which Ken had seen going up to the border only a minute earlier gave us a ride for a pretty good price. He was some Thai guy who said he had just dropped his brother off at the Vietnamese border and was going back to Thailand though the town we were headed for. He drove a nice new truck and said he worked at some sort of duty free shop, which very well might have been code for smuggling. He liked to drive quite fast on what was probably the best paved road in Laos until he would come to one of the numerous strips where the road was torn completely up, which would slow us to a crawl for a second. Laos is a country almost the size of Vietnam with about 6 million people to Vietnam's 90, and no railroads in the whole country. The few highways are two lanes wide and look completely demolished at points. The towns we passed were very poor looking like the ones closer to the border at the other side. The country was also much more dry with a very red ground that Ken compared to Oklahoma. We were still pretty high up but it seemed fairly flat and I missed the green rise of mountains that seemed ever present in Vietnam. It certainly had its charm, but I couldn't shake the feeling that Vietnam was prettier. Our driver was friendly and had some English, though he never talked much. He let us off right in Savanakht and we were able to find an OK hotel and some quick dinner.

P.S.
Sorry for the long time between posts lately I got a little burned out with transcribing all this from my journal.