Vietnam's Easy Rider

At the end of the day, we faced our first major decision. We had been on a mostly flat road for five hours. Naomi, who had learned to drive the motorcycle only a week before we left Hanoi, had frayed nerves from the traffic. Ahead of us, the road climbed steeply through a pass before descending into Mai Chau, our destination for the night. We had been cautioned about rock slides on this particular stretch of road, and half the sky had been smothered by a blanket of black, swirling clouds. The few motorbikes coming at us carried drivers with rain-soaked ponchos, and the only guy going our way abruptly executed a U-turn. We wondered if we should turn around, too.

We didn't. Up and over the incline we went, oil-soaked exhaust pouring out of our tailpipes, then down into the valley containing Mai Chau. We took the descent slowly, weaving our way between boulders the size of kitchen appliances and dents in the road left by their impact.

We arrived soaked but relieved in Mai Chau, a clump of Tai-minority stilt houses surrounded by a sprawling checkerboard of rice paddies. We stayed on the floor of a stilt house, where a Tai grandmother cooked us a dinner of sauteed pork and vegetables, followed by stiff rice wine called ruou to wash it all down. As we drifted off to sleep, we heard muffled applause and the sharp crack of sticks hitting a wooden floor -- the sound of small troupes performing ethnic dances for the handful of tourists in the area.

Roadside Chats

As we headed west toward the Lao border, the people became friendlier and the terrain more treacherous. Outside of Son La, our destination for the second night, a trucker called us over for tea at a shack on the side of the road. His name was Than and he'd been stranded for a week because of a broken axle. He asked us how much money we made, how much we paid in rent, whether we were married -- standard opening queries among strangers in Vietnam.

"How long until your truck is fixed?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week. Who knows?" he said with a smile. As we stood up to leave, he told us to be careful.

Nearing Son La, about 250 miles from Hanoi by our circuitous route, the narrow blacktop road widened into an eight-lane highway. We zipped by empty storefronts and deserted front lawns -- rare sights in a country where life usually unfolds out in the open, on the streets. Perhaps the residents were driven indoors by the superhuman scale of the highway, we thought. Later, a tour guide told us that the road had been widened to accommodate vehicles for the construction of a nearby power plant, but the only traffic we saw that day were some cattle grazing listlessly on the shoulder.

We had had a similar experience earlier in the day, at a war monument halfway between Mai Chau and Son La. After clearing a small peak, we saw poised on a bluff three granite soldiers looking heroically into the distance. Surrounding them were a vast, empty parking lot and some tattered wooden houses. We parked and rested, watching as some locals buzzed by on their motorbikes, not one of them looking up to acknowledge the white behemoth dominating the landscape. In the coming days, we would see many monuments like this one, plopped down in the midst of poverty.

The next day, during lunch at a com pho -- one of the dark roadside shacks where customers crouch over greasy wok food and pints of beer on tiny plastic tables -- we met a Vietnamese guy in his thirties who said he had worked for an oil company in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. "I stayed until the Americans came," he said. "Boom! Boom!" he shouted, frowning as he wiped his hands, the universal gesture for having had enough of something. It was poignant to hear a Vietnamese man talk about American bombs falling halfway around the world three decades after his own country had felt their impact.

1,500 Miles Traveled

Twenty-four hours later, on a dizzyingly high mountain pass, the sky began dumping sheets of rain on us, and we took shelter under a makeshift roof with a pair of Vietnamese teenagers headed home to Dien Bien Phu. We talked with them as a family of Nung people looked on suspiciously from across the road. Like most Vietnamese, the two 19-year-old boys didn't share our interest in the minorities on the other side of the highway. During the wars against the French and Americans, many people from the hill tribes fought against the Communists, opening up a vast and persistent gulf of mistrust between ethnic Vietnamese (called Kinh) and the minorities.

We spent a couple of days recuperating in Dien Bien Phu, a provincial capital that was the site of the French army's defeat in 1954 at the hands of Viet Minh guerrillas led by Vo Nguyen Giap. Considering its historical importance, present-day Dien Bien Phu is a bit sleepy, although we did see some French tourists wandering the town's streets and the halls of the shabby museum commemorating the battle. There, visitors can view old weapons, letters and maps, along with a plastic diorama of Ho Chi Minh discussing strategy with Giap. Tellingly, every French soldier depicted in the many photos lining the walls is frowning, while every Vietnamese guerrilla is beaming.

Rested, we set out north along the Laotian border. Dropping from the cool mountain air into the Da River valley's scorched fields felt like throwing open the doors of a flaming kiln. We stopped for gas on the outskirts of what, according to our atlas, should have been the town of Lai Chau. "No, Lai Chau is 100 kilometers up the road," said the gas station attendant. At lunch, we heard otherwise. "You're already in Lai Chau," said a plump woman manning the wok in a com pho. "No, no," interjected a young guy from the shadows. "Lai Chau is 80 kilometers from here."

They were all partially right. In 2010, a reservoir is scheduled to submerge Lai Chau. Depending on whom you talk to, the name of the town has either been reassigned to one of two other towns or it will be swept away under the coming floodwaters. Sometimes, change occurs so rapidly in Vietnam that the maps can't keep up.

At the uppermost tip of the map is Ha Giang province, one of the strangest places in the north. In one of the most densely populated countries on Earth, it is inhabited only sparsely; coats are worn year-round; and the money and optimism that permeate the rest of Vietnam are scarce here. In Ha Giang city, we secured the necessary guide and permit, which the government requires of foreigners because of the province's proximity to China and past unrest among ethnic minorities. After meeting our guide, we headed out into the fog-draped moonscape on narrow mountain roads that looked like ribbons tacked to a felt board.

Along the way, we bumped into a Dutch couple who were plying the same route in an old Russian military jeep. Their guide, an outgoing 28-year-old named Thanh, advised us to visit a weekly outdoor market near a town called Lung Phin. "Most people don't know about it because the ethnic minorities are trying to keep it secret from the tourists," he said.

The next day, we drove the short distance to Lung Phin, where we found ourselves in a sea of colors -- thousands of Hmong, Dao and Tai people hauling their goods up a hill. Here you could buy anything from a mound of tobacco to a water buffalo. As the crowd began to take notice of the two Tays wandering the grounds, some people spotted our camera and wondered what it was, while a group of girls insisted on posing for photos. One of the girls checked our work and, disapproving of the image on the camera's display, insisted that we take another.

Our hearts sped up; we felt like rock stars, or aliens. Living in Vietnam for a year and a half had conditioned us to accept -- sometimes even dismiss -- culture shock, but this time it felt different, more total. We strained, with no success, to find something familiar in the blur of colors and unfamiliar languages engulfing us. This was what we had been searching for when we'd set out on our motorcycles two weeks and 1,500 miles ago -- an experience we could never hope to duplicate. Nor would Vietnam be capable of duplicating it for much longer, we knew.

Picking our way through the stalls, we began to feel dizzy from it all. Collapsing in a heap, we found ourselves once again exhausted and helpless on the side of the road. Before long, Thanh appeared, rescuing us with a joke and a smile.

Dustin Roasa is a freelance writer in Chicago. Link to the Travel home page to enjoy all of the most recent destination profiles at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artsandliving/travel/index.html.