Road bike Vietnam to Hochiminh trails – Its mean peace
It Means Peace
The bicycle, a Vietnamese war veteran explains to
the American cyclists pedaling the Ho Chi Minh Trail, “was our secret
weapon,” thanks to its simplicity, durability, and versatility—qualities
that just might bring the cyclists some measure of harmony
Ho Chi Minh Trail
It Means Peace
The bicycle, a Vietnamese war veteran explains to
the American cyclists pedaling the Ho Chi Minh Trail, “was our secret
weapon,” thanks to its simplicity, durability, and versatility—qualities
that just might bring the cyclists some measure of harmony.
ByMark Jenkins
Photo: The Truong Son Mountains loom over the Ho Chi Minh Trail (and
its riders), just outside of Ban Khok in northeastern Laos. (Mark
Jenkins)
He nods at our loaded bikes leaning in his doorway. “The route had to be passable for bicycles,” Ong says. “Bicycles were our secret weapon.”
The Vietnam bicycle path he spent four years surveying, mapping, and building would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the primary supply line for Communist forces. Built at the beginning of the Vietnam War, from 1959 to 1961, then continually expanded during the ’60s, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never a single thoroughfare but, rather, a vast, intricate web of interconnecting porter tracks, paths, streambeds, jeep roads, and tank and truck roads that ran down the spine of the Annamite Mountains (called the Truong Son by the Vietnamese), through the panhandle of Laos, eastern Cambodia, and western Vietnam—and which, it turned out, was best navigated by the versatile bicycle. One bike reportedly carried a record 924 pounds along the 1,000-mile length of the Trail.
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| Ong Phung Minh, 73, was one of the first scouts on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1957. “Everyone suffered,” he says when asked about his missing arm. (Mark Jenkins) |
Ong was one of six brothers, all of whom were soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army. Three died during the war, two in battle, one from a bomb dropped on his home. “For years and years, there was bombing every day,” says Ong, through our interpreter, Vu Chung. “I would say that about half of my friends died in the bombings.” When his left arm was blown off by American artillery, there were no nearby doctors in the jungle, so he bandaged it himself. He explains this not heroically, but as a matter of fact. “Everyone suffered,” he says.
After the war, he was given a house, a pension, and three military suits that have lasted him two generations. He slowly gets up from the table and shows us his faded military certificates on the wall, black-and-white photos of his dead brothers tucked into the glass frame. When I ask Ong whether all the sacrifice was worth it, his thin face tries to conceal a look of bewildered disdain. It will take weeks more of travel before I realize that my question is offensive. To the Vietnamese, the American War was the supreme struggle for independence. It required decades of death to beat the French colonists and the American imperialists. It is as if I had asked an American whether the Revolutionary War was worth it. Rather than giving me a lesson in history, Ong replies politely: “I have devoted my life to serving my people. And as for the U.S., our countries are friends now, as we could have been from the beginning. I want only peace.”
Photo: Mark Jenkins
MY WIFE, SUE Ibarra, and I have come to Southeast Asia to bicycle the northern half of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. With luck, we hope to trace a half circle, starting on the coast in the Gulf of Tonkin, dropping south into Laos, pedaling down through the panhandle, then hooking east through Vietnam’s former DMZ and back out to the coast. We have come to listen, to learn, to let the bicycle do one of the things it does best: bring outsiders into intimate contact with a foreign place, across a broad range of territory.
We’ve hired an enthusiastic, big-headed interpreter-cum-cyclist, Vu Chung, to accompany us as a translator. His English pronunciations are often hilariously incomprehensible, but he has a thorough grasp of vocabulary. He’s a young Hanoi freelancer who wears the vest of an intellectual and a red-and-white gingham scarf, a symbol of the Viet Cong. He lives with his parents, translates operations manuals, and thus is highly motivated for adventuresome work.
We arrive in Vinh, the putative beginning of the Ho Chi Minh Trail 200 miles south of Hanoi, by train on a gray, rainy evening. In the morning, we pull our three Giant bikes from boxes, assemble them on the wet sidewalk, attach our small panniers, mount up and, without fanfare, ride off. We have no idea if our plan will work. We have no official recognition, no government permissions. We’ve been told we will not be allowed to cross the border into Laos. And that, if we do manage to get into Laos, we will not be allowed back into Vietnam. Or we will be killed by unexploded ordnance.
Bicycling out of Vinh in a cold drizzle, we stop in the town square beneath an absurdly large Soviet-style statue of Ho Chi Minh. It is not possible to understand modern Vietnam without knowing something about Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s George Washington and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one. A hyperviolent leader (he had thousands of his opponents killed), the goateed, rib-thin little man became the central figure in Vietnam’s midcentury civil wars and revolutionary wars against France and the United States. Ho began his adult life as an intellectual. He went abroad in 1911 to travel, work, and study politics in the United States, England, Paris, Moscow, and China. In 1941, he returned to Vietnam to lead the independence movement. In World War II, his guerrillas were provided arms by the United States to fight the Japanese. After the war, he wrote Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence.
Ho repeatedly asked for Truman’s support, equating the revolution against the French colonialists to the American revolution against the British. But the United States supported France’s efforts to reestablish its colonial overlordship. In hindsight, the decision was disastrous. What Ho and his general, Vo Nguyen Giap, understood, obviously better than the French and American militaries, was guerrilla warfare. Hundreds of years of defending their country against invasions by China had taught Vietnamese commanders how to win against a much larger force. Nimbleness, stealth, and speed were essential.
Those same attributes, of course, belong to the bicycle. Pedaling had been the primary form of transportation in Vietnam for generations; in the revolutionary wars, the bicycle would play a significant, if little-known, role. The preferred bike, ironically, was a French-made Peugeot, radically retrofitted to carry more than 400 pounds of food, ammo, or other materiel. These bicycles, called ngua sat (“steel horses”) by the Vietnamese, were not ridden when loaded, but pushed. The seat was replaced with a rack that could carry wooden crates and enormous bags. A metal beam was fastened across the handlebar, the frame strengthened by doubling the top tube, down tube, seat tube, and, sometimes, the fork. Fully loaded, the bike often required two pilots, one pushing from behind, the other steering via a bamboo pole extending perpendicular from the laden handlebar.
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| Photo: Mark Jenkins |
The 1954 Geneva Accords temporarily split the country into North Vietnam and South Vietnam with a demilitarized zone, the DMZ, roughly along the 17th parallel, as a buffer between the two. As part of the pact, a general election was to be held in 1956, but it was scuttled by the CIA because Ho, a Communist, was certain to win. This caused uprisings in South Vietnam, galvanized anti-American, Communist forces in the North, and ignited what the United States knows as the Vietnam War.
LEAVING VINH BENEATH low-slung black clouds, we pedal through miles of rice paddies dimpled with rain. In some, water buffalo, huge horns swept flatly backward, plod through the mud pulling scrawny men balanced barefoot on wooden harrows. In others, rows of bent-back women in bright blouses and conical hats, green rubber boots calf-deep in the mud, plant rice seedlings. Still other fields have already sprouted into blankets of brilliant green. Rice, rice, and more rice. Domesticated in China more than 9,000 years ago, rice is the staple for half of the world’s seven billion people. Throughout Vietnam, especially in villages, it’s part of every meal.
“I don’t know we going right way,” Chung says, stopping in the rain at a fork in the road surrounded by sopping rice paddies. Sue tells him to simply ask the rice farmers. They straighten up, grin at us, and point.
We pass through another village with a statue of Ho Chi Minh in the square. Ho died in 1969 and is officially worshipped by the Vietnamese. As we will discover, hagiographic statues of Ho stand in the center of countless towns, and Jesus-like portraits of him, or Lenin-like busts, can be purchased in almost every shop.
We arrive in Huong Khe at dark, covered in mud, soaking wet, hypothermic. Too cold to camp, we find a cheap hotel and take turns standing in the hot shower. The next morning we meet uniformed, one-armed Ong helping his granddaughter sell fried-egg baguettes to kids on their way to school. It is noon by the time he has finished telling his story and we are cycling again.The Hochiminh trails including of path in Laos, the make you have unforgettable Laos bike tours .
Sue, the strongest, is in the lead as always, her fierce little legs pumping like pistons, followed by me, followed by Chung, his feet splayed on the pedals like a little boy. Compared with the bikes that carried loads of 400-plus pounds along this jungle corridor, ours are featherlight—15 pounds of gear that includes a tent, sleeping bag, a change of clothes, and a rain jacket. Having bicycled all over the world, Sue and I are perplexed by modern tourers so burdened with heavy bags that all the élan, fleetness, and magic of two wheels is crushed. “Like pedaling a motorcycle,” Sue once said. “What’s the point?”
We are entering the Truong Son, or the Annamite Mountains. The higher we ride, the more jagged the slopes become. The Annamite Range is predominantly limestone, carved into steeples, towers, and barricades. Yet rainfall is so unceasingly heavy that even the vertical walls are thickly forested. All afternoon we push upward, through the bamboo, through barefoot villages of Khe Ve, Yen Lanh, Cha Lo. Switchbacking across a rainforest ensnared in vines, we reach the border town just below Mu Gia Pass at dusk. We spend the night in a shotgun hostel filled with sweaty stevedores. Trucks from Laos grind up the pass from the west, clear customs, then have their loads transferred by hand onto Vietnamese trucks. It’s a grim, grimy, vaguely dangerous place. During the war, Mu Gia Pass was identified as a choke point along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and was frequently bombed, yet the pass was so vital to the North Vietnamese supply chain that repairs always began within minutes of the destruction, and it was never closed for more than 24 hours.
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