Road Trip!

    

The big weekend is finally here. We have been training for four months for a triathlon in Mui Ne (on the coast south of Hoi An).  To clarify..."training" means that the kids have used their weekly "sports afternoon" on Wednesdays to run, bike and swim in an effort to get ready for this race. 

The idea of a triathlon was not met with enthusiasm by the entire group.  In fact, perhaps there was originally one enthusiastic individual.  That number quickly dwindled in the face of running in the hot sunshine, biking in the hot sunshine or swimming through sea lice and monsoon waves.  But, being the hearty group that we are (or a collection of parental masochists), we persevered and somehow managed to coerce, bribe, brow beat and force eight of our nine school kids and two of their French friends into competing in the race.

As it turns out, the physical training (and the motivation of our lukewarm group) was infinitely easier than arranging the travel logistics to get our group of fifteen from point A to Point B in Vietnam to compete in this race.  You don't appreciate the beauty of owning your own car with a bike rack until you want to hit the road for a race and are faced with the prospect of transporting eight bikes on public transport. The triathlon rents adult-sized bikes, so the adults (three of us) will be competing on bikes we have never seen before.  I am trusting that an unfamiliar bicycle with gears will be preferable to the Mary Poppins model I have been sporting in Hoi An this year (particularly since I attempted a "training ride" last week on said cycle and the chain entangled itself hopelessly in the gears thirty minutes in, and I had a hot walk in the broiling sun back to Hoi An pushing my bike).  So, the adult bike logistics were easy: sign up for a rental and hope for the best.  The kids, however, do not have the option of renting kid-sized bikes, so we were faced with the challenge of getting their bikes to the race on whatever form of transport we chose.



Pre-trip meal at Ha's

After much research, haggling and group decision making (which took close to two weeks), we finally settled on the public "open tour" sleeper bus.  Financially it seemed to make the most sense; we would be able to stretch out and sleep on the twenty hour journey; and they agreed to take the bikes from Hoi An to Mui Ne and drop them at our hotel.  Next we negotiated a good hotel deal for five rooms (three per room) at what appeared to be nice resort, and we set off on our adventure.  When the bus arrived at the Dingo Deli right on time on Thursday afternoon and packed all of the bikes underneath, I was encouraged that we had made the right decision.

Loading up at the Dingo Deli

As we loaded onto the bus, the kids were ecstatic.  Sleeper buses are essentially rolling bunk beds with a bathroom at the back.  This was an adventure.  The kids hemmed and hawed over the various seating options and finally made some choices when the conductor started barking at them to stop swinging like monkeys from the beds and settle down so he could get a head count (at least that's what I think he said).  We were off!  We promptly spent the first hour driving around Hoi An picking up other passengers, but there were no complaints from the peanut gallery as they were engrossed in the vastly inappropriate movie that was playing overhead.  The only whining came when Brianna took it upon herself to shut the entertainment system down when there was far too much close-up kissing going on on the screen.  This brought cries of protest from the back of the bus, and she was forced to restore power and go back to ignoring (and peeking at) the screen nestled four inches from her face.

Once we hit the road in earnest, it was smooth sailing. We discovered early-on that the bathroom was out of service, so all "relief activities" would need to take place at the one scheduled stop on the 12 hour first leg of our journey.  We settled in for the long haul fully aware of the dangers of drinking and dozing on this journey.  By the time we made our scheduled stop at 10:30 p.m. a few kids had actually fallen asleep.  Because of the bus bathroom situation, we encouraged everyone to take advantage of the beautiful roadside facilities where we stopped (complete with community comb for tidying up and scratchy sheets of sand paper for personal hygiene needs) before beginning the longer stretch of our journey that would take us to Nha Trang, a seaside city en route to Mui Ne.

I am happy to report that the night was uneventful.  Everyone slept off and on in various stages of discomfort.  I was grateful just to be mostly stretched out for the night.  We arrived bright and early in Nha Trang, and the logistical adventures began.  We had been told we would stop in Nha Trang but continue on the same bus to Mui Ne.  When we arrived in Nha Trang, they told us to get off the bus to switch to our bus to Mui Ne, and we watched them pull our bikes out from underneath...in pieces...wheels off, brakes disassembled, tires deflated.  Discussion ensued (thank goodness for Vietnamese speaking Catherine), and we determined that another bus would pick us up for Mui Ne and our bicycles would ride on a different bus and be dropped off at our hotel.  We waited a little over two hours at the bus stop/cafe and enjoyed various forms of breakfast food before boarding sleeper bus #2 for the final five hour leg of our journey.

Early morning stopover in Nha Trang

Michal and Bri wait for the loo.

Fierce Bay Blades competition keeps the boys busy.

The bus was similar to the first one (although with less head room - making it impossible to sit upright).  I reclined and decided to enjoy the day-time ride since so much of Vietnam had sped by after dark.  Riding on the top bunk in a tall bus is similar to being on a boat.  You pitch and sway with every bump and curve in the road.  The road wound along the coast, and we were treated to some beautiful views.  The landscape changed from tropical to more desert-like.  We drove through barren, sandy stretches of nothingness - populated by the occasional tree and some extremely thin cattle munching on rocks. It was on one of these stretches that it became painfully evident that our driver did not have much experience climbing hills (and these were really just slight inclines in the pavement).  We bumped, and jerked and coughed and stalled most of the way up a small hill before the engine died completely.  We groaned.  The driver got us started again, and it took about twelve second for us to realize that we had lost the air conditioning.  It heated up to about 115 degrees in the bus in a matter of seconds.  Fortunately the driver was as uncomfortable as we were, and he pulled over to assess the situation and run out for a desert bathroom break while we all watched through the window.  The temperature climbed.  We speculated about our chances of survival in this barren land. We fantasized about killing one of those malnourished cows.  The bus restarted and the A/C kicked in.  We all cheered and waited for the next hill.

Beachside bathroom stop.

Beachside Bay Blades

Bus driver in the desert taking care of business

I tried to doze. The "connected iPod girls" sharing the seat next to me would have none of that.  With the two of them each sporting one ear bud, they sang along to God knows what.  It was unrecognizable.  They didn't even appear to be singing the same song, and they just kept singing and bopping.  I decided to read.  Not ten minutes after we had been stranded in that barren land, Nolan came rushing to the front of the bus clearly distraught.  He needed a bathroom and he needed it NOW.  I leaned over the edge of my bunk and told him to let the driver know it was an emergency (in his best Vietnamese).  He was doubled over and hopping, so I decided I had better get involved.  By the time I had gracefully catapulted myself to the floor and stumbled to the front of the bus, it was too late.  Nolan and I were standing in an expanding puddle on the bus floor as I tried to explain that we needed to stop.  The physical evidence trumped the poor Vietnamese communication skills, and we pulled over again.  Nolan rushed out into the desert to finish what he had started.  A few other kids rushed out to join him.  Three minutes later, as I was extracting desert thorns from the bottom of Nolan's feet and he was screaming, I asked why he had waited so long to let someone know he needed to use the bathroom.  "I was watching a movie," he responded.  As if that explained it all. 

After all the excitement, I was anxious to take my sticky feet back to my top bunk for the remainder of the journey.  We did finally arrive in Mui Ne.  We pulled into a bus stop/cafe where most people were getting off.  We stayed on to be transported to our hotel.  As we started to pull away, one sharp-eyed child in our group noticed another bus unloading our bikes at the cafe.  A conversation that turned into an argument ensued about the agreement to transport our bikes to the hotel.  It ended with us pulling away with no idea of the name or address of the establishment where our bikes were being left.  We watched the route in an attempt to memorize the way back to retrieve our bikes at a later date.

We were relieved to find that the hotel looked beautiful.  Sadly the sheen wore off five minutes later when we discovered that the rooms we had booked for three people only slept two.  More arguing.  Phone calls to Agoda in Thailand.  In the end, we've got free cots in our rooms and enemies for life at the reception desk. 

Casualty of the bus journey

The next challenge was to find our bikes.  John and I piled into a taxi with six kids for a slow ride around town looking for bikes in the front of any cafe.  We found them about 5km from the hotel after executing only two turnarounds for false-sightings.  We were relieved to have the bikes back.  The "in pieces" part was a bit daunting as neither John nor I are bike mechanics. We cobbled them together the best that we could and made sure everyone had one functioning brake for our journey back to the hotel.  It wasn't pretty but we survived.  These bicycles need some serious professional help before they compete in a triathlon.

It was finally time for some relaxing.  We enjoyed the hotel pool and a delicious roadside dinner before settling in for a good night's sleep on a hard-earned bed.  I feel like I've already competed in a triathlon, and it's not even race day yet.  This race, like this weekend, will be more of a test of survival skills and stamina than speed.  I toast the tortoises among us and trust that the hares don't have kids.

The Racing Team