Raid Gauloises - Viet Nam 2002

For those that come to race the RG, it is a 600 mile nonstop race with biking, hiking, caving, bamboo rafting, rope work, and kayaking. For everyone else, it is the most exhilarating, emotion, spiritual, and rewarding cultural experience of land, people, and society that anyone could have ever imaged in this advanced age of jets and computers.

It’s 4:30AM and I’m by myself, without the team, biking in the unlit streets of Hanoi. There are no street lights, no porch lights, and no neon signs advertising the Big Mac to shed light on my future path. The road is narrow, with brick stucco one and two story buildings on each side of the road. The road is not straight, but seems to be built after the buildings were built, or after the present buildings replaced what was there a century ago. There is a low cloud cover. You cannot see the streets it is so dark, it is hard to make out anything on the road. I have no light on my bike. Is there a rock in the way, a ditch, a hungry rat roaming, anything that will become an obstacle for my bike? I chance it, as I chance the small intersections where someone else could be biking in the dark also hoping to not run into anyone. I have the GPS so it’s laying bread crumbs down so I can find my way back through the maze of narrow roads, back to our hotel. It’s exhilarating. I’m free, no work, no bills, no computers, no endless moving deadlines, in complete darkness moving with an exaggerated speed through the streets.

Soon I’m at the destinations that I’m looking for, Lake Kiem. The narrow streets open up into a mass exodus of people walking, stretch, running and doing the Vietnamese version of yoga around the lake of the giant turtle. It’s 5AM, and there are tens of thousands of people here enjoying life. Old people and young people are here performing their daily rituals. I sit along the lake. Sometimes people wave, sometimes they just smile, other times they just look, and then some come and sit and talk in a language none of us know.

On older gentlemen sits and talks, he knows about 20 English words, I know no Vietnamese. He constantly smiles as if his language and smile are one gesture; he is about 60 years old. I am sure he was here in 1975. He doesn’t seem to care about past history but only cares about our brief time together. He says he is sorry he doesn’t know more English more than once. He thinks my bike is ‘high technology’. I try to explain to him about our race, where we are starting, where we are finishing, and what events there might be. He talks about his family, I tell him about mine. He smiles and says good bye for now. This is a good place to be.

I ride around the lake with the early morning traffic. The rush of life, the motor bike traffic, the early warm humid air propels me around the lake faster than the motor cycles travel. I am racing past them, and watching all the people enjoy life. After the race, I will bring Carolyn here in the morning. Tomorrow I will bring the rest of the team here to enjoy. And I will also hear once again my friend shout from the road as we bike past, “high technology!”

This is our journey to Viet Nam!