Lance Armstrong I am not

Today is the last day of biking in Vietnam. The three of us board a bus today-- Turek and Jemale bound for the southern coast and I for Saigon.

Vietnam turned out to be an overwhelming experience--both good and bad. Our bikes took us to rural Vietnam, where many of those born after the Vietnam War had almost certainly never met a foreigner. We were treated as celebrities. People dropped their farm tools to stare at us, brought their kids over when we stopped to eat (rice), touched us, invited us to spend nights in their home, freely fed us (rice), chased after us on bicycles, and shouted a million hellos to us. In eight days, we neither met a single English-speaker nor saw another foreigner. In that sense, the three of us felt like we saw the real Vietnam.

On the other hand, we had quite a few negative encounters. People tried rip us off in literally every single transaction, Turek and Jemale had things stolen from them, one Vietnamese held my backpack hostage on an isolated beach and threatened to kill us if we didn't pay him ransom (we gave him a tarp in the end), I got bitten by a masseuse, we ate the same meal all day every day, the weather was blazing hot (105), and I have lost all feeling in my ring and pinky fingers on both hands.

Finally, I found it emotionally difficult at times to be an American in Vietnam. We killed more than a million North Vietnamese (we met one person whose older brother was killed by an American bomb in the war), deforested large parts of the country, left behind thousands of tons of unexploded ordinance, and set the country back decades. Evidence of the war is still fresh: we spent three days riding on the now-paved Ho Chi Minh Trail; we explored the Vin Moc tunnels used by North Vietnamese soldiers; we biked through the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and crossed the Ben Hai River; and we saw dozens of war memorials/cemeteries that lined our route in central Vietnam. It is hard to be here and not think about our involvement in Iraq.

So I am hanging up the riding shorts and getting on a bus with my bike. I hope to resell the two-wheeler before Tuesday, when I fly onto Cambodia. Ciao for now.