The Tet Offenses… or My Mountain Adventure

Note: This is a very long post but very worth reading… there will be pictures as soon as I can organize them, probably on a separate flickr account. will keep everyone updated.

In 1968, nearly to the date, the North Vietnamese army invaded the American occupied south in what was known as the Tet offensive, as it occurred during the holiday of Tet or new year, which is very similar to our Christmas. It was very surprising because no one thought there would be an attack on the holiday. 41 years later I “invaded” a small northern Vietnamese mountain village and was forced to leave because of an offense against a North Vietnamese man, then later had Tet lunch with a man who was involved in the actual Tet offensive… but we will get to that soon enough.
Tet, as I mentioned, is the Vietnamese new year, and is so because they use the Chinese lunar calendar. You know those placemats you see in Chinese restaurants? That is what I am talking and it is a really big deal.
As I believe I have mentioned before George is married to a Vietnamese woman and her family is from a very rural area in the mountains of north Vietnam. George, of course, was obligated to travel there for the holiday, which meant that I was pretty much obligated to travel there for the holiday. At first George said;
“We should go by train, it will be easier”
I replied “Screw that let’s go by bike”
“It will be hard and dangerous” he continued
“I eat danger for breakfast… plus I think you are just being a pansy” I responded
“Fine then, we will go by bike”
George also invited two others, a Dutchman who has traveled all over the world, got in more trouble and adventures than George, and even lived with some fundamentalist Muslims in the mountains Pakistan for a while, and an orphan street urchin kid who shines our shoes for a quarter. Both of these individuals and I were approved by the family to come visit.
I inquired if either of them were coming with us on the bikes (his wife was going by train and we were meeting her there) he responded that the boy would be but the Dutchman would not.
I was shocked “Wait a minute this dude may have camped out with Osama Bin Laden and you are telling me that he can’t handle a little bike trip?”
George then explained what the bike trip would entail… seven to eight hours of driving and 30 km of dirt road with pot holes three feet deep and three small rivers with no bridge. This only increased my sense of adventure. “This is going to be Awesome! But that guy is still a wuss.” George then went on to explain that the family had water buffalo and cobras in the back yard, which was a wooded mountain. They also had a pet cobra the Dad caught… George then warned that all these things, the animals and driving conditions had the real possibility of killing me.
I replied, “But if I live they will make for the greatest adventure story of my life so far”
And that my friends, is what you are about to read.
The days leading up to our trip were beautiful, like late spring or early fall, the kind where the temperature is just right and you think anything is possible. Even the air smelled of happiness. Alas this was not the weather we would be traveling in. We awoke to overcast skies and as we left at about noon, it began to mist rain. We quickly wrapped or bags in plastic and tied them to our bikes. Then we were off, the street urchin named “Phong” and George on his motorcycle, and me on my silver motorbike I affectionately refer to as “the silver steed” (for those who care it is a Honda wave alpha with a 110cc engine)
Not five minutes into the trip we were on what passes for a freeway here and some lady was trying cross and stopped like a deer in the headlights when she saw me. I swerved, missed her by half a foot, and amazingly didn’t crash. I pulled up along side George
“Moron!” I would repeat that about 50 times throughout the trip… people here are worse than in Ann Arbor… both drivers and pedestrians.
Anyway the first leg of journey was pretty uneventful. I got to go faster than I have yet on a motorbike, here that means 55mph and found a love for speed. We stopped for coffee in some small town where the people had rarely seen a westerner and we took pictures. At around nightfall it started to rain harder and the road got real bad real fast. My helmet is the kind that you see racers wear and has a tinted visor, which makes you look like a badass and is fine to drive in when you are in a city at night with plenty of street lights. But when you are in the countryside and it is totally dark and rainy, you need to have the visor up and there is only so long you can go with rain and mud hitting your face before you have to pull over and get a hotel. Getting a hotel here is not like America… we got two rooms for about $10. What is different is that you must give them your passport, George forgot to get his back in the morning and that caused him a heap of trouble later.
The next day we stopped at a small cafe for breakfast, and this is where I found one of my favorite things so far about Vietnam. The traditional Vietnamese bong. The bong is about two and a half feet long and all day northern Vietnamese men sit around and smoke tobacco out of it. Those who remember Austin Powers 3 will appreciate the fact that I had a breakfast of tea, a bong, and a bowl of Pho (noodle soup with beef).
The road did get better but it wasn’t going to last. When we got to the last town before the mountain dirt road started we stopped to buy Tet gifts. I bought the family 2 pounds of oranges, a large box of candies and nearly three pounds of tobacco for under $10. The locals loved that this westerner was buying all that tobacco. The family loved me for it too.
The dirt road was not as bad as advertised. There were indeed rocks all over and the hills were very steep, all but one of the rivers were now non existent (during George’s earlier trip there had been flooding) and it was more like a very wide stream. I spent my early driving years doing a lot of two tracking and this was nothing. Although I do have to admit I laid the bike down once in a mud puddle and hit my leg on a rock, which sucked. When we got closer to her house though things changed big time. The train station is about 3 km from her house and it is the most treacherous road I have ever driven.
When I was a freshman in college I drove a stretch of countryside road with no streetlights in the middle of the night with fog so thick you could only see three feet in front of you (Cadillac to Mesick) that WAS the scariest driving experience I have ever had… until this. The 3 km mountain pass was 10 times worse. Picture this; a path about 10 feet wide covered with very slick mud and rock with an aqueduct (yes really) and/or cliff face on one side, and a cliff leading down to a raging river on the other. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. There was even one spot where they had built a little canal across the road and the “bridge” over this canal was about a foot across. If you missed it your ass was in the water and probably over a cliff. The Dutchman, who had joined us at this point, said “my god that was really very dangerous.” That is coming from a guy that once pretended to be an Iranian secret police officer and nearly got killed for it.
Although I was tired and covered in mud I made it, and when I did, WOW! This place was beautiful. Last fall I drove through Shenandoah National park… This was prettier. The place actually reminds me a lot of Appalachia, though I am pretty sure U of M can beat these guys at American football. But seriously the house was built on the side of the mountain, was very small, (most cabins up north are bigger) made of clay with a tin roof and had a cement floor. There was a cistern where water was pumped from the ground by hand. There was also a “kitchen”which was basically another little “house” with a campfire in it, it also holds some really old flintlock guns that are over 100 years old. The bathroom was basically a tarp, held up by sticks with a little shoot on the floor that then ran down the mountain, yes you had to squat… I took a bunch of imodium so I didn’t have to deal with that shit…literally. The house did have electricity and even a satellite dish, but no heat, which is something we will get to in a second.
There were also about 50 kids running around, I guess there isn’t much to do in the mountains but raise buffalo and screw around… at any rate Phong immediately made new friends and soon we didn’t even know he was there. There were also animals, there was a pig pen with a bunch of pigs (side note; they play a game where you jump in the pig pen and try and run across to the other side before the pigs attack you) and there was a water buffalo “barn” in the valley with water buffalo and a bunch of dogs and puppies running around. Dogs and cats in Vietnam are different because you don’t pet them, you keep them so they chase away the rodents, they had also caught a squirrel, and as I have mentioned a cobra for pets.
The rest of the day was spent hanging out eating traditional food, like smoked pork and pig stomach, and smoking the pipe. I ended up having to share a bed with the Dutchman, we slept head to foot with different blankets, this happened solely because the father would have been offended if it didn’t for some reason.
Anyway, for all the traveling that the Dutchman had done, sleeping one night in the wilderness proved to much for him… granted this guy went to bed with only a tee shirt and boxers on and it was probably only about 40 Fahrenheit out (I slept in like five layers of clothes and gloves). He woke up in the dead middle of the night and started freaking out, went outside and may or may not have thrown up (he did drink a lot of this really bad cherry wine that George bought and that probably had something to do with it).
When I finally got back to sleep I was out like a light, George tried to wake me up when they slaughtered a pig in the morning but I guess I just grumbled and went back to sleep. I am told the pig made quite the racket while it was being killed but I only heard the silence of the hams (bad joke I know).
What did get me up was the police who had arrived to deal with our passport situation. This pissed me off because it meant going back down the horrible road, and deal with a bunch of bureaucratic BS at the police station (Any family who hosts foreigners must register them with the local police and take responsibility if something goes wrong). George, of course, had forgot his passport and got levied a $10 fine… I will talk more about this incident on the political blog in the very near future.
After that we went to the market where there were butchered pigs all over the place with the heads being sold along with the rest. The Dutchman, who was indeed being a pussy, went to the train station and back to Hanoi.
Back at the house we did some mountain climbing and found a very old couple living in a straw hut with no electricity or running water. We also found a rat hole and cobra hole. The cobra hole was probably three feet wide. I asked Phong what it was and he made a hissing noise and a snake motion with his hand.
“Yeah, we should probably get the hell out of here” was my response.
The rat hole got me excited because I was told that in two days we would return to it with the dogs and go rat hunting, which is similar to English fox hunting but without horses in that the dog digs in the hole the rat gets loose than the dog chases and kills it while you run after them. I love that kind of stuff.
Soon it was time for a traditional lunch with the men eating at the table and the women and children on the floor. Not saying it is right but it is what it is. We had fresh pig and this alcohol that was pretty much everclear mixed with some kind of vegetable and served out of an old oil bottle. There was also pig blood soup, I wanted to try it but George said that was a great way to get tuberculous so that didn’t happen.
Then I got to do the one thing that I was most excited about… Water Buffalo riding! It is the year of the water buffalo and they are the biggest animal they raise. If you have never seen a Vietnamese water buffalo, it is basically a cow with horns that curve back, but they are very mobile and can go up mountains and swim across rivers. Fortunately they are also very docile and very hard to piss off, so it wasn’t like riding a bull, though I did have to jump off when the buffalo went too close to a tree. (pictures are coming)
After Buffalo riding we went inside and started watching Transformers (They have a DVD player). Pretty soon George started freaking out about something with his wife in Vietnamese. I know enough to know he was saying something about going or taking something home. I asked what was up and he said;
“Shut up for a second we have a big problem”
For the record a “big problem” for George usually turns out to be nothing… this time, however, it was indeed something.
All of a sudden he got up grabbed his helmet jumped on his motorcycle and said
“Phong took off and said he is going home”
I figured he just had some stupid fight with one of the other kids and was being a brat… I was wrong.
Soon George started calling the house and talking to the wife and finally I was handed the phone.
What happened was this. At some point the Dad had cornered Phong and told him he was costing George too much money and that he was being rude, had offended him (hence the Tet offense) and had to leave.
George was livid. George’s wife and I ended up going down the road to where they were, a small cafe… with a pet monkey, and tried by phone to convince the Dad to let him stay… He wouldn’t.
This, of course, meant we couldn’t stay either as we were not just going to let him sleep in the woods or something.
Now really what kind of a jerk throws out a homeless kid, who he had been warned, would not know all of the culture rules as he does not have a family, the day before what is basically Christmas? And more importantly what kind of a jerk throws out his daughter because she was nice enough to invite a homeless kid to New Year? Not to mention the fact that we very well may have had to drive all night on motorbikes in near freezing temps because very few places, hotels, or otherwise are open during Tet.
We went back to the house, packed up quickly, George cursed out the father and we took off down the path of doom. By this point it was nightfall, I could barely see anything, and was trying like hell not to fall off a cliff. I was also forced to carry Phong on the back of my bike through all of this and was really scared that he would break something or die if I did indeed crash. However we made it through the dirt roads without a major problem.
I had my adrenalin pumping and was willing to go all the way back… In fact when George got off the phone with the Dad at the cafe and turned to me and said “We are going to Hanoi” It brought back memories of the good summer at the theater when, after the Harold and Kumar preview, several of my coworkers said “let’s go to White Castle” and we drove all night to Grand Rapids only to find there is no White Castle in Grand Rapids. I was totally ready for an all night eight hour journey like that.
But I also had on 7 top layers 4 bottom layers and two pairs of socks… they didn’t. We, most fortunately, did find a hotel because they were losing it.
We woke the next morning to rain and George didn’t want to go the final four hours, I convinced him otherwise but they were miserable, it rained the entire time, my shoes and therefore feet got soaked I had 8 layers on this time and I still got cold towards the end. I had to deal with a terrible cross wind that was making it very difficult to keep my very lightweight bike straight, I almost ran out of gas and less than 2 miles from home, George’s bike broke down.
We did have a great new year meal with a couple whose roadside store was open. They served us tea, Tet cake, and mountain chicken with spice/salty orange sauce, which was delicious. They also gave us gas at a reasonable price. The man oddly enough, had actually been in the Tet offensive and we talked about the war, or the American invasion as they call it, a little. He mentioned that during the war, he did not get to have Tet lunch. He was just as proud of his service as any American veteran I have met, and a very nice guy especially since we used to be his enemy.
When we arrived at the hotel I honestly could not believe it… we had specifically told them not to touch any of our things and they basically gave our rooms to their family members, without our permission and with us still paying for them and moved all of our stuff out… I am still missing several DVDs and my Vietnam flag… we are moving out at the end of the month.
Everyone at the Wife’s house was seriously angry at the father. Today he went to stay with his family for a few days and will soon be moving to another mountain town. He basically got kicked out of his own house… though for the record, though he was offended by the breaking of a culture rule, he too broke one. Phong was George’s responsibility and he should have brought the matter to George. He had also agreed not to give the boy any trouble due to his situation (the kids by the way, loved him and they were all having a blast until dad stepped in).
We did end up having a great Tet holiday today, we went to the proprietor of beer corner’s house and he gave me my very own bong, it even has a dragon carved into it. I am buying him some damn fine scotch for that. We spent today and last night at a gaming center with a ton of computers which was one of the only things open… we have the movies, they have games online, everyone wants to get away from the family during the holidays.
Like I said though, one of the best adventures of my life.