“When you get to the right place,with the right people...”
(Easy Rider)
That she'd neither seen nor heard of Easy Rider did not surprise me in the slightest. It was becomming clear we shared relativley little in the reference pool of popular culture, and scant else besides. However her underexposure to Hopper, Fonder and Nickleson's trans American homage to the hog did not put her off the idea of travelling the 1000km trip i'd suggested; through the Vietnameese central highlands on the back of a motorbike which was to be manned by a member of the self named clan of 'Easy Riders'. The Rough Guide references this disparate bunch of Honda highwaymen saying; "they'll probably track you down first, but if you need to find them, wait outside the church in the main square after sundown." This made me think of locating the A Team and already i wanted to travel with them. In the end a formal church wedding wasn’t necessary; as is often the way in Vietnam, the barman had overheard our discussion and made the call, and no doubt the commission, himself. Before we could say ‘heavy metal thunder’ two, slightly smaller than anticipated, though immediately likable motorbike merchants stood before us, laminated photos and tatty road maps in hand. After a brief route planning session and a stern price negotiation which ended with smiles and handshakes on both sides of the table, we saddled up and wound our way through the frantic streets towards the outskirts of Hoi An and the distant, misted, shadow like mountains on the horizon.
That first day, we gained about 1700m in altitude as we rode east towards the Laos boarder, where the Ho Chi Minh trail wound its way through the jungled hill sides. Only 40 years previously this area had been bombed relentlessly by Americans trying to stop the spread of supplies and guns slithering up north. And as we wound round the mountain switchbacks i tried hard to visualise the destruction; flames and smoke, the mud and the sound of choppers and the chaos. But really all i was doing was overlaying the images i'd been fed as a child by Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola onto the lush dense jungle surrrounding me. When we passed sections of forest which had been slashed and burned by the hill villagers to clear space for mountain rice, the scorched and mangled tree stumps and the bare red clay allowed the briefest of windows into the past and fed the somber mood i'd forced upon myself.She didn't understand why i kept going on about the war and i suppose my morbid interest came from nothing more than the fact that, growing up, Vietnam had been more a war than a country to me, an amalgam of horrific images and injustices. So through the whole time I was travelling in Vietnam, the war had to be the back drop to my understanding of the way things were, not so much in the sense that things and people were the way they were because of the war, but dispite it. And the more I read the more I realised that ‘War’ singular misrepresented the experiences of Vietnams inhabitants over the last two centuries. Shackled to imperial rule long before the GIs arrived and still fighting the Cambodians and then the Chinese well into the eighties. I don’t know whether Communism would have taken hold in the way that it did, if the population hadn’t been unified it its desire to oust the French colonialists. An irony lost entirely on the Americans I heard photographing them selves infront of bits of American tanks.
That she'd neither seen nor heard of Easy Rider did not surprise me in the slightest. It was becomming clear we shared relativley little in the reference pool of popular culture, and scant else besides. However her underexposure to Hopper, Fonder and Nickleson's trans American homage to the hog did not put her off the idea of travelling the 1000km trip i'd suggested; through the Vietnameese central highlands on the back of a motorbike which was to be manned by a member of the self named clan of 'Easy Riders'. The Rough Guide references this disparate bunch of Honda highwaymen saying; "they'll probably track you down first, but if you need to find them, wait outside the church in the main square after sundown." This made me think of locating the A Team and already i wanted to travel with them. In the end a formal church wedding wasn’t necessary; as is often the way in Vietnam, the barman had overheard our discussion and made the call, and no doubt the commission, himself. Before we could say ‘heavy metal thunder’ two, slightly smaller than anticipated, though immediately likable motorbike merchants stood before us, laminated photos and tatty road maps in hand. After a brief route planning session and a stern price negotiation which ended with smiles and handshakes on both sides of the table, we saddled up and wound our way through the frantic streets towards the outskirts of Hoi An and the distant, misted, shadow like mountains on the horizon.
That first day, we gained about 1700m in altitude as we rode east towards the Laos boarder, where the Ho Chi Minh trail wound its way through the jungled hill sides. Only 40 years previously this area had been bombed relentlessly by Americans trying to stop the spread of supplies and guns slithering up north. And as we wound round the mountain switchbacks i tried hard to visualise the destruction; flames and smoke, the mud and the sound of choppers and the chaos. But really all i was doing was overlaying the images i'd been fed as a child by Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola onto the lush dense jungle surrrounding me. When we passed sections of forest which had been slashed and burned by the hill villagers to clear space for mountain rice, the scorched and mangled tree stumps and the bare red clay allowed the briefest of windows into the past and fed the somber mood i'd forced upon myself.She didn't understand why i kept going on about the war and i suppose my morbid interest came from nothing more than the fact that, growing up, Vietnam had been more a war than a country to me, an amalgam of horrific images and injustices. So through the whole time I was travelling in Vietnam, the war had to be the back drop to my understanding of the way things were, not so much in the sense that things and people were the way they were because of the war, but dispite it. And the more I read the more I realised that ‘War’ singular misrepresented the experiences of Vietnams inhabitants over the last two centuries. Shackled to imperial rule long before the GIs arrived and still fighting the Cambodians and then the Chinese well into the eighties. I don’t know whether Communism would have taken hold in the way that it did, if the population hadn’t been unified it its desire to oust the French colonialists. An irony lost entirely on the Americans I heard photographing them selves infront of bits of American tanks.
As the days rolled under the wheels of our expertly manouvered motorbikes, i was able to blend the past with the present. Tourist stops all invoked a view to some aspect of the imperial past, but the day to day blah blah........tbc
No comments:
Post a Comment