My day of shame. I boarded a bus to Dien Bien Phu. The shame was made all the more acute by the fact that the lovely French couple I met the day before were toughing out the next leg of the trip. But I needed to accelerate my pace to Hanoi, and I didn’t relish another 100km ride over dirt roads.
I will say this for the bus journey: it provided a character-building lesson in why I prefer traveling by bicycle. As the driver lurched around hard corners, the oversweet coffee in my stomach threatened to make a reappearance. The passenger behind me asked to borrow my water, and then coughed a warm spray of it across the back of my neck. Thanks, you can keep that.
At Dien Bien Phu I had a bowl of noodles to calm my roiling gut, and then boarded another bus for Son La.
Because I had overpaid to get to Dien Bien Phu, I resolved, using tried-and-true tourist logic, to take out my grievance on the next bus driver. I settled on 50,000 dong as the absolute maximum amount I would allow myself to be bilked. The roadie asked for 100,000.
Conventional wisdom holds that if you accept a service without settling on a price beforehand, you are at the mercy of the vendor. This wisdom is largely true. But there is another way. For times such as these, there is the negotiating strategy I refer to as “How about nothing? How does nothing sound?”
Once the bus had started moving, the roadie undeniably had the upper hand. But I had a trump: my money was still in my pocket. And as long as I continued staring out the window, it wasn’t getting any closer to the roadie’s pocket.
Of course, other conditions have to be favorable for me to enter into this game. It has to be evident to everyone involved that a severe gouging is taking place. Credibility counts for a lot. And I have to be confident that the roadie won’t play his trump, beating the money out of me and then stealing my bike.
In this case, I guessed that negotiations would remain civilized. Furthermore, I was willing to play to the end. If ejected from the bus, I would just pedal back to town. I held out a 50,000-dong note and waited for the roadie to accept. He sucked on his cigarette. I admired the scenery. He took the money. Checkmate, Mr. Bus Man.
Naturally, I immediately felt guilty about depriving a hardworking Third Worlder of his tourist lucre.
Soon another passenger climbed back to have a go at me. He dropped nearly into my lap, and rested his hand heavily on my thigh. He appeared to be drunk, and his upper lip sported one of those poorly thought out Vietnamese mustaches. I worried briefly that he might be the Bus Muscle, coming to squeeze the extra 50,000 out of me, but he mainly seemed interested in my watch, a shoddy Casio that I’ve been trying to accidentally misplace ever since I bought it in South America. I deduced that he liked my watch from the way he grabbed my wrist with both hands and turned it this way and that, as though it weren’t attached to my body. After half an hour, I was able to establish that I don’t speak Vietnamese. The man keeled over asleep.
Another passenger lay a finger across his nose and blew snot into the aisle. Four more hours to go. In truth, it could have been a lot worse. Miraculously, the bus was half-empty, and, even more miraculously, no one was smoking.
Seven weeks earlier, in Cambodia, I had met a Canadian backpacker who was intent on having only “authentic” travel experiences. He bragged that he had completed the entire northwest loop by local bus because “that’s what the locals do.” I remember thinking at the time that the locals would probably prefer to be ferried around in air-conditioned helicopters and served cucumber sandwiches by attractive stewardesses in neatly pressed uniforms. But as a cyclist, I didn’t feel in a position to criticize another’s preferred mode of travel. Now I thought the Canadian was daft.
As a final indignity, the scenery outside the jouncing, dirt-smeared window was breathtaking. I longed to be biking again.
