I Still Don’t Believe In Karma
Have you ever found yourself in a situation that made you wonder “how the hell did I end up here”?
Well, I certainly did, as I found myself driving a motorbike between cargo trucks on the narrow mountain roads of the Hoa Binh province in Northern Vietnam while a drunk Vietnamese guy dozed on my back. I could barely ride the motorbike on my own, much less with the erratic movements of an intoxicated man I had no connection with.
To understand how I ended up in this situation I must take you three days back. It was a hot and humid Sunday afternoon, like any other during late summer in Hanoi. I was sitting on a bench in front of the Hoán Kiem Lake, a freshwater lake in the Old Quarter of the city. It didn’t take long before a group of Vietnamese students approached me. Apparently, it was a common practice for students to go around the Old Quarter on the weekends and hunt tourists to practice their conversational English. I was tired and could barely breathe with all the humidity stuck in the atmosphere. I was about to send them off when an idea popped into my head.
“Sure, why not…”, I told them. “Let’s chat for a bit… By the way, do any of you know how to drive a motorbike?”
It was a rhetorical question. Of course they knew how to do it, about two-thirds of the population drive scooters in Vietnam.
The thought had been swirling in my mind ever since I arrived in Southeast Asia a few months ago. Apparently, buying a motorbike and driving from Ho Chi Minh City in the south to Hanoi in the north was a must for backpackers visiting the far east country. There were just two problems in front of me: 1) I didn’t know how to drive a motorbike, and 2) I was terrified of driving a motorbike.
So I saw my chance and I took it. I chatted for while with the group of students and even went with them for ice cream. The next morning I met Luc, one of the students, in front of Hanoi University of Science and Technology where he taught me the principles of driving a semi-automatic scooter. I got the gist of it fast and we celebrated the small success with ice-cold sugar cane juice.
Now, I just needed to learn how to drive a manual transmission motorbike, the most common and affordable model available back then. Thus, I found a bike shop in the Old Quarter where the owner agreed to teach me the basics for a few bucks. He took me to an empty lane reserved for public buses which would rarely pass by, in the middle of a huge and busy avenue. He calmly explained the principles of manual transmission and the shifts of the gears. It was a 125cc Honda Win replica, the classic for backpackers. I was too optimistic thinking that one lesson would be enough for me to learn. Driving semi-automatic had been like riding a bicycle, manual transmission was a completely different thing. Not even in Mexico I had learned how to drive cars with manual transmissions, how the hell did I expect I could take a motorbike like that to the dangerous mountains?
Every time I stopped the motorbike, the engine would turn off and the guy had to come running behind me to start it again since I couldn’t do it by myself. About twenty failed attempts later, my dreams of touring the lost villages of the Vietnamese mountains vanished together with the shop owner’s patience. I felt disappointed and frustrated with my inability to learn. I was convinced that it would be too dangerous to venture out on my own into the steep mountain ranges of the north without even being able to keep the engine of the motorbike running.
At least until I received a message from a German backpacker who had seen an ad I made on a Facebook market group and was interested in selling me his 110cc Honda replica. I checked the engine and didn’t find any oil leak or sign that the parts had been replaced. We negotiated a price of 230 USD, around half the price of what the shop owner was offering me for one of the shitty bikes he had put together with some leftovers he had found.
It was a sweet deal, but I decided to call my parents before making an irrational decision. I expected their voice of reason would dissuade me from doing something stupid. After all, my dad had always expressed his strong opposition against “two-wheeled coffins” as he would call them.
“Sounds dangerous, but we trust your judgment,” was the last thing I expected to hear from them.
“Damn it,” I thought. Now I didn’t have any excuse not to buy the motorcycle.
The five kilometers from the Old Quarter to Hoan’s house felt longer than usual and my heart wanted to burst out of my chest every time a vehicle came within half a meter from me. The traffic lights were torture since my engine would die with every red light that crossed my way and I would manage to start the motorbike until my fourth or fifth attempt.
Back then, I was staying with Hoan, an IT guy in his forties I had met through Couchsurfing, and Kim, his fifteen-year-old son. Kim was a real hustler, he had a small business charging locals 90 USD per month for talking in English with the travelers staying at his father’s house.
Hoan was not very impressed with my abrupt acquisition, and together with one of his son’s pupils -an actual bank manager-, we planned a draft route for my journey into the northern mountains. If I was going to follow the backpacker tradition of driving a motorbike, at least I wanted to get away from the usual tourist routes.
Getting out of Hanoi was a feat in itself. I navigated the morning traffic to the QL6 national highway heading to the town of Mai Chau, the first stop of my journey. Cars, trucks, and hundreds of motorbikes circulated around me, keeping a fairly short distance from my bike and ignoring my evident lack of driving skills.
My mind, free of distractions, focused solely on repeating the steps I had half-learned the previous afternoon. “Turn on the engine by pressing down the clutch lever (left) and press the starter… Okay, good, now to shift into first gear press the shift pedal with the front tip of my foot without releasing the clutch lever… Good, I got this… Now to second with my heel… Okaaay, now same to shift to third and fourth. Alright, there is a stop light coming. Shift back to third, now second, now to first, and… F*CK F*CK F*CK -DO NOT STOP PRESSING THE CLUTCH WHEN BRAKING BECAUSE LA CHING@DERA ESTA TURNS OFF! And back to first base again…”
It went like that for about four hours until I reached a viewpoint on a hill not far from Mai Chau. The perfect stop to stretch my legs and empty the tank.
I noticed a group of men sitting on a small hut made of wood next to the viewpoint. They invited me to join them and we shared some shots of Ruo gao, the traditional Vietnamese rice alcohol. “Một — Hai — Ba — dzô!” we toasted and we drank. They serve me some rice, boiled eggs, and duck meat. I devoured the food that was kindly provided by the strangers.
After a few months in Asia, I mastered a technique to hold short conversations with people that didn’t share a common language:
“Me MEXICO. Me motorbike VIET NAM Mountains,” I waved my hands and pretended to drive an air motorbike. “FOOD, VERY VERY GOOD!” I rubbed my belly with a smile.
In unison, the men nodded their heads while keeping their arms folded.
“Me go to MAI CHAU”, I say.
At that moment, one of them took out his mobile phone and typed into his translator app: “Me go to Mai Chau too.”
“Very good”, I replied.
The man repeated the message while pointing out to my motorbike with his index finger.
“No, no. Very bad motorbike. Small engine, no going up the mountain with two people,” I wrote his translator.
“Very good, we go Mai Chau”, the man replied.
“No, no…”, I tried to reply when he interrupted me again. “We go to Mai Chau… Một — Hai — Ba — dzô”, we drank Ruou gao.
Thinking about all the favors I had received during my journey and the negative Karma balance I had accumulated, I decided to take the young man with me. In the end, we were already very close to the town so I didn't think more of it.
So that’s the story of how I ended up with a drunk Vietnamese clinging to my back, screaming and waving his arms until passing out on my shoulder.
Indeed, I had no idea what I was doing and I was terrified at the thought of falling on that road between heavy vehicles because of the jerky movements of the drunkard swaying on my back. When we reached the Mai Chau, I sighed in relief and felt the cold sweat dry on my forehead. I asked the drunk where he lived.
“Let’s go for some girls…” was his reply.
“No, where do you live? I have to go,” I wrote in his translator app.
“Let’s go for girls… Do you have money?”
“No, I don’t have money. Tell me where your house is,” I insisted.
He told me to go straight ahead. Eight kilometers outside the village I stopped. “W-h-e-r-e is your house?”, I asked him quite annoyed.
“Girls are in the next village,” he wrote in the translator.
I returned to the village and left him on the pavement in front of a local market. I was exhausted and didn’t feel like dealing with such a drunk person any longer. Bad Karma or good Karma, at that point I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t even believe in Karma in the first place.
