A Veteran Returns

You’re going where? That was the reaction many of us got when we told friends of our plans to go to Vietnam--for a bicycle ride from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon).

Our trip last January was not that well-publicized bike ride, known as the Vietnam Challenge, that included veterans from both sides of the Vietnam War, many of them disabled. They cycled the same route, but a week ahead of us. Our journey was outfitted by Cycle Vietnam (now renamed Cycle the World) of Portland, Ore., which has been offering the trip once a year for five winters now. The package cost just over $4,000, including air fare.

I’ve had a latent curiosity about Vietnam since I spent a year there, very unwillingly, at the direction of our president. I’d seen enough of the country then to know it was a beautiful, exotic land. This time I’d tour it nearly from one end to the other--and it would be a voluntary act.

I’d been drafted in October 1968, made an infantryman and sent into the shadow of “Hamburger Hill” just two months after the big battle there. Through considerable good fortune, I never shot anyone, and the one trail-watcher who shot at me missed.

After poking around the jungle for six months, I became an army photographer with the 101st Airborne Division. I could go almost anywhere I wanted, as long as I turned in exposed film. I’d take two cameras--the Army’s and mine--and used mine the most, so I have lots of photographs from those days.

This year, our Singapore Airlines flight left Jan. 5 from San Francisco to Singapore. From there, we flew Vietnam Air to Ho Chi Minh City, went through Vietnamese customs and then flew on to Hanoi.

We had a couple of days in the capital, during which we toured the “Hanoi Hilton,” where some U.S. airmen were imprisoned during the war, now open as a historical site. We filed by for a quick look at the deceased Ho Chi Minh, displayed, very much against his wishes, in a large, gray-columned mausoleum. (Ho had asked to be cremated and his ashes buried on three unmarked hilltops in the north, middle and south of Vietnam.)

On the third morning, off we rode toward Ho Chi Minh City. We had 93 miles to go that first day, down the valley of the Red River to lunch at a restaurant in Ninh Binh, then across an estuary and over some minor hills to the city of Thanh Hoa for the night.

On each full day we’d have two water stops at pre-announced locations. It’s easy to know where you are along QL1, Vietnam’s Highway 1. There are red and white kilometer stones marking the distance from the northern border all the way south.

Our group consisted of 20 paying customers, two Cycle Vietnam guides and one bike mechanic. Twelve men and eight women ranging in age from their mid-20s to mid-60s, we represented 13 states from California to New England. There were six couples. Only four tour participants were veterans of the Vietnam War. The group included present and former teachers, a policeman, business people and retirees. One lady celebrated her 60th birthday in Vietnam. I was 53.

Group members had various reasons for making the trip. Some wanted to tour Vietnam before it was spoiled by development. For several veterans, it meant returning in peacetime. This was the case for Joe, who had been an Army lieutenant during the war. Now a teacher of photography in Massachusetts, he went to make photographs of his own.

Another vet, Wilson, had been a helicopter crew chief based in Qui Nhon, a coastal city. He had tried this trip three years earlier, but had to fly home from Hanoi because he began to have nightmares about the war. The following year he successfully completed the trip and, having made Vietnamese friends, joined the tour again this year.

Bob and Holly decided, essentially, on Vietnam over mountain biking in Nepal. We were a congenial group, though people very soon separated into smaller groups according to their cycling ability. Some would be far ahead each day, but only a few of us actually bicycled all 1,200 miles of the tour in our 14 days of cycling. I bicycled just under half that distance, but I did keep my eyes open the whole way.

Our Cycle Vietnam guide was Hung Luong, a native of Phan Thiet, a coastal town east of Ho Chi Minh City. Hung was a small child during the war. Hard times came, and in 1980, at age 13, he became a “boat person,” made it to a Hong Kong refugee camp and finally settled near Portland, Ore. Since then he’s gone on all the Cycle Vietnam trips, first as a customer, now as an employee.

Cycle Vietnam owner Rick Bauman was with us in Hanoi and for our first day on the road, then left to make arrangements for a new trip in Myanmar. He rejoined us in Nha Trang for what he said was the nicest day of the trip, soon to be followed by the hardest day: the climb up to the beautiful French-style town of Da Lat.

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We were supported by two buses and a small van. Vehicles, drivers and three more guides were supplied by a Vietnamese travel company. Travelers in Vietnam must be under the auspices, however loosely, of a Vietnamese travel company, which acts to keep participants (and hence itself) out of trouble.

We stayed at a series of “tourist hotels,” which otherwise didn’t seem to do much business. Vietnam works hard to attract tourism, but I wonder how successful they’ve been. The hotels were all air-conditioned, not unimportant in this hot, humid climate. They were quite livable, with private bathrooms, but not luxurious. Most had mosquito nets around the beds, though insects weren’t a problem. We all had roommates, but you can pay for a private room if you wish.

Showers were primitive in the extreme. Bathrooms were tiled, with floors that sloped to a drain. On the wall would be a set of valves, and a hose with a shower head at the end. Forget shower stalls, and on the whole trip there were only a couple of bathtubs. Primitive or not, showers felt good after a day of cycling, which was long, hard and often hot.

Vietnam is mountainous, even along the coast. I bicycled 88 miles the first day out of Hanoi, but I paid for it. I didn’t feel good for the next three days, and mostly rode the bus down to the 17th parallel, once the border between North and South Vietnam.

We bicycled right past the former Camp Evans, the base camp north of Hue where I was stationed. The A Shau Valley is west of Hue, near where we’d done much of our wartime patrolling. It’s one of those powerful, exotic places--a hidden valley near the Laotian border, with birds that almost sing scales and a river that flows out to the Mekong. I’d love to go there again, but it wasn’t going to happen on this trip. I had to keep up with the group.

I’d long been fascinated by Hai Van Pass, where QL1 climbs over a headland between Hue and Da Nang. I’d seen it from both sides before but had never traveled the road up. The next day we went over it. The top of the pass was swept by rain, wind and clouds. Hai Van is steep--a cultural, geographic and climatic separator in this long, narrow country--with several rocky streams coming down from higher ground. If I were going to have jungle flashbacks, it would be here. Ten feet off the road, it looked just like the terrain and vegetation I’d seen 28 years earlier. It was for places like this that I returned to Vietnam.

On down the coast we went, past the former U.S. base at Chu Lai, 50 miles south of Da Nang, which is now used by the Vietnamese military. Along the way, we passed several coastal towns and cities with wonderful large airports, which the U.S. paid for--landmark places such as Phu Bai, Da Nang, Phu Cat, Tuy Hoa, Cam Ranh Bay and Phan Rang.

Rick predicted a strong tail wind to speed us down the coast, and it came between Quang Ngai and Tuy Hoa. As we pedaled, steep headlands alternated with quiet inlets where fleets of fishing boats were moored. Rice paddies were everywhere. We crossed more river estuaries on bridges or by ferry, and had lunch at one particularly beautiful fishing village south of Tuy Hoa, very near where Vietnam curves farthest east. I’d seen this part of the coast from the air in 1970. White beaches occupy indentations in the steep cliffs along the sea.

The My Lai memorial near Quang Ngai marks the spot where U.S. soldiers, who never came under fire, murdered more than 400 villagers and committed other atrocities against unarmed civilians in March of 1968. Now history also attests that when the North Vietnamese Army overran Hue in 1968, at least 2,000 civilians were massacred from a list prepared months ahead of time.

So what’s different about the My Lai massacre? The perpetrators weren’t the Nazis, Saddam Hussein or Ghengis Khan. “This was [done by] my country,” trip-mate Lanny said simply.

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Farther south, about 30 miles beyond our layover near the beach in the resort city of Nha Trang, we lunched at an attractive little restaurant near Cam Ranh Bay. This had been the point of entry for most U.S. military personnel during the war. My first-ever night in Vietnam was spent there on July 20, 1969, which was memorable for another reason. I’d flopped onto some sand, turned on my portable radio and listened as Apollo 11 descended for the first manned landing on the surface of the moon. I wondered whether the astronauts or I had the greater chance of getting home alive, and my bet was on them.

At Phan Rang, another 30 miles south, our hotel was built near a former South Vietnamese presidential retreat. A pleasant place it was, with trees along the beach and gentle waves on the sand. But the next day we’d leave the coast for the hardest climb of the trip. Then there would be some downhill, and another steep climb to the resort city of Da Lat, 5,000 feet in the Central Highlands.

I didn’t think I was enough of a cyclist to do that. Neither did some of the others--so we got on the bus, intending to start bicycling from our lunch stop at the first summit. I had come to see Vietnam, not to suffer.

From the bus, I saw bikers who seemed to be suffering. They labored up the big hill, one straining pedal stroke after another, as if tormented for sins unpardonable. Told that at least one biker had been angry at those who boarded the bus, I said I was trying to think of a word that expressed how little I cared.

Then the bus broke down.

Off came the bikes. I had never been good at uphill climbs, and at first it didn’t look like it was going to work this time either. Then, about 40 years too late, a revelation came. I’d been trying to climb too fast. I tried riding only fast enough to remain upright on the bike, and was able to keep going with just the ordinary number of rest- and photo-op stops.

We had a good lunch at the small open-air restaurant atop that first summit. The Vietnamese serve lots of seafood, and there were some good breads and butter.

For a communist country, there’s sure a lot of small-time capitalism in Vietnam. There are literally thousands of open-air shops facing QL1. Many are small, simple eating establishments. At many other shops you can buy merchandise ranging from food to bottled water, canned Coke or Pepsi, film, drill presses, bicycles, motorbikes and caskets.

Then it was mostly downhill to a junction with the road from Ho Chi Minh City that goes steeply uphill through forest to Da Lat, a former mountain retreat of emperors. After a couple of miles, the repaired bus arrived. Again, I was glad.

We rode down from Da Lat to an overnight stay in Bao Loc. The last day was to be the longest. But after a wonderful downhill rush, I knew what was coming--increasing congestion, trucks with air horns and things I hadn’t come to see. I called it a trip, and bused on to Ho Chi Minh City.

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GUIDEBOOK

Vietnam on Wheels

Getting there: Three carriers fly L.A.-Hanoi, with one change of planes: Thai Airways, China Airlines and Cathay Pacific. Round-trip fares begin at about $1,250.

Outfitters: Cycle the World, 1631 N.E. Klickitat St., Portland, OR 97212; tel. (800) 661-1458. Next year, riders leave Hanoi Jan. 25, return to U.S. Feb. 14. Cost of land package, per person, in a shared room is $2,895 (single supplement, $500) including moderate to deluxe hotels, food (all but four lunches), in-country transport, support vehicles, guides, visas. Not included are bikes and air fare to Vietnam, although the company will make arrangements.

Among other outfitters of Vietnam bike trips:

Asian Pacific Adventures, 826 S. Sierra Bonita Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036; tel. (323) 935-3156. Land package is $2,950, not including bikes or transportation to Vietnam. Butterfield & Robinson, 70 Bond St., Toronto, Canada M5B 1X3; tel. (800) 678-1147. For upcoming tours, the land package is $5,950 (single supplement, $650), not including air fare to Vietnam.

For more information: Embassy of Vietnam, 1233 20th St. N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036; tel. (202) 861-0737, fax (202) 861-0917, Internet https://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org.