My Son by Motorbike

If you really want to feel the vibe of Vietnam, there is only one way to do it: on the back of a motorbike. (incidently extended periods of feeling this "vibe" may lead to posterior atrophy and numbing)

My friends, Alison Dave and I all met our biker brigade at 10:30am and began our day tour Easy Rider style through the back roads of the country. To die for! Quite possibly the coolest days of my life.

We made our first stop at a pottery village, where we were invited to squat down at a wheel, spun by a small woman who stood next to it on one foot, gripping a rail for balance, and kicking the wheel smoothly with her other bare-foot. It reminded me of the reverse of a kick powered merry-go-round in a park. Our lumps of wet clay with abysmal, but a humourous occasion for all the locals who gathered to watch the strangers try their (inept) hands at the craft.

Next we buzzed through small neighboorhoods and villages with houses and streets that were more like generous sidewalks, and kids who chased along side us shouting out "hello, hello!!" and a handful of other English phrases they were eager to try. We stopped to get a picture of some round rice-paper sheets drying in the sun on the porck of a small home. Before we knew it we found ourselves in the back room of the house watching as steaming fresh sheets were poured, covered, steamed and then quickly pulled one by one from the screen and laid with elegance and grace and incredible techincal precision onto a drying rack of woven banana leaves. All this was done by hand and a single chopstick. We were once again given an opportunity to try our skills, and once again the attempt was a cause for much riotous laughing. Oh how we Americans amuse these people. Our sticky, gooey sheets stretched, broke and plopped onto the rack in steaming heaps- but they still tasted delicious!

The rest of the day we made chronological tour of the silk making process. We went from a "worm farm"- thousands of soft white caterpillars, one three large stick racks on a man's front porch, spinning themselves into cocoons. Then to a muggy boiling factory where the cocoons were boiled and unspun into a single 10,000mt tread of unrefined silk. The fingers of the women in the small factory were permanently wrinkeld, shriveled and soft from the days of steam and boiling water. Finally in a looming village we watched as the cocophonous looms clattered and clacked breaking the otherwise stoic atmosphere and spinning the reams of silt into workable spools.

This was all before we reached our final destination: My Son. For my final paper at Bates I wrote about these ancient Hindu Champa towers, built around the 7th centuries, a fascinating implantaion from merchant and traveling kingdoms, on trade routes from India. As I wanderd around the deteriorating buildings I pictured my nights in the stacks of George & Helen Ladd Library, going through blueprints, diagrams and sterile layouts of the complex. And now I was walking amidst it all, feeling the crumbling stone, tracing my fingers in the carvings of Hindu gods and sentinels guarding the temples, feeling the grass and moss creeping up between the brick. It was incredible.

On our way back to Ha Noi that night, I looked forward to returning to my favorite little enchanted Vietnamese town. A chance to look back on all I had seen of the country and give the "vibe" in my backside a rest.