Chalk it up to the magic of the Mekong

The first ten miles were terrible, honestly. As I rode out of Cần Thơ, a large Vietnamese city bundled between the bends of the Mekong River, I discovered that the bicycle I had rented for $1.57 per day was having an identity crisis. The 10-speed was really a 2-speed, the seat had no business being a seat, the brakes were on strike, the kickstand did impromptu trust falls. But the award for most dramatic, I would later learn, went to the left pedal; desperate for attention, it fell off no small number of times. The front wheel wobbled, but cosmetics did not concern me.

Still in denial of these soon-to-be problems, I pedaled optimistically down the highway alongside a mix of traffic; semi-trucks, beach-cruiser bicycles, scooter commuters, goat-loaded motorbikes. It was also on this over-stimulating, chaotic road liberated from the laws of traffic where I discovered the aerodynamics of the non la, the traditional Vietnamese conical hat that an old woman had gifted me for my five-day solo bicycle journey through the Mekong River Delta. As I crested a bridge on the highway, a small gust of wind tipped the non la downward, temporarily blinding me and igniting a howl of laughter from the onlookers as I fought, one-handed and wobbling, to free the cone hat from my face.

When I turned off the highway onto a quiet avenue of banana trees and rice paddies, I was immediately relieved. I also immediately realized that I was starving, given the great resistance my bicycle showed to being a bicycle and the emotional toll of surviving my first Vietnamese highway, but Google Maps informed me that I had exited the tourist zone. With no nearby restaurants on the map (or anything else, for that matter), I resorted to the old-fashioned strategy of searching for a place to eat with my own eyes.

In the Mekong River Delta, roads and footpaths are often shaded by banana trees and other tropical vegetation.

I pulled over at a roadside restaurant packed with locals, which I took to be a good sign. I fought with the kickstand for a minute, fidgeting with it as it teetered under the weight of my backpack strapped to the rear wheel rack. When I finally managed to balance the bicycle, I looked up and realized that the entire restaurant was staring at me, perplexed, curious, confused. For a second, I felt a surge of self-consciousness. Was it okay that I was here? Having just finished reading The Women, I was hyperaware of the atrocities that Americans had inflicted during the war, especially in this region, and considered, for a moment, that perhaps I was not welcome here.

The restaurant owner was quick to quash that concern. From underneath a shiny red helmet, he smiled warmly and gestured for me to take a seat on the child-sized plastic stool at a communal table. He waited for me to order but here, as would be the case with every restaurant on my bicycle adventure, there was no menu, no English translations or pictures as there had been in the touristy places. I lifted my shoulders in a theatrical, resigned shrug, pointed to the bowl of noodle soup in front of the woman across from me, and said, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Although the When Harry Met Sally reference was lost on him, the owner smiled big, nodded, then bobbed away in his helmet, reappearing with the most delicious $0.59 bowl of mystery meat and noodle soup that I have ever had.

After the meal, I checked the map to make sure I was heading toward Thốt Nốt, a relatively big town about 25 miles upriver from Cần Thơ. In the single hour of planning that I put into this bicycle trip, I marked Thốt Nốt as a good place to stop for the first night. I had refrained from making any hotel reservations, though; I was totally committed to being at the mercy of the Mekong River Delta and the adventures it had in store for me. Once I identified a sufficiently serpentine river that would take me toward Thốt Nốt, I hopped back on my bicycle and waved goodbye. The whole restaurant waved back and shouted, “Bye bye!”

As I pedaled deeper into the heart of the Mekong River Delta, it felt as though I was pedaling into a new world, one insulated from the commotion of city life by dense vegetation and an incredibly complex maze of river and road.

Life on the banks moved as unhurriedly as the rafts of water hyacinth drifting along the river. I passed a fat dog in a t-shirt sprawled out on the road; a woman submerging her laundry in the river, scrubbing the fabric against itself in a practiced rhythm; a group of old men leaning into a set of cards spread on the table, unbothered by the cloud of cigarette smoke surrounding them. Two children disappeared entirely under the coffee-colored water then reemerged moments later, giggling, splashing, ruffling the water hyacinth.

I felt my lungs expand with air that was thick with moisture and the scent of tropical flora, of plumeria, of passionfruit, of over-ripe mangos that had finally let gravity carry them to the fertile soil below. Occasionally, I breathed in the sour scent of stagnation, a canal offshoot sitting idly under the stilts of a wooden shack. All part of the Mekong package.

As I bicycled through the delta, I was astonished by the kindness of the people who called it home. Each time someone glanced under the brim of my non la, only to realize that it was not another local, but me, a foreign girl, there was an instinctual exclamation: “Hello!”, smile, full-arm wave. I never tired of this greeting, no matter how routine it became. So for miles and miles, over footbridges and ferries and cracking pavement, I trumpeted a verbal trail of “Xin chàos” and “Hellos” with an earnest appreciation for everyone who greeted me.

A young girl plays on the bank while her father organizes his cast net.

A man on a scooter, loaded with goods to be sold in the market, rides down a road lined by banana trees.

A wooden skiff floats in the still waters of a canal offshoot.

A wooden shed hangs over a small waterway during low tide. Most structures are built on stilts to accommodate the large fluctuations in water level, depending on the tide.

A typical scene in the Mekong River Delta: banana trees, flat bottom boats, rafts of water hyacinth, and laundry hanging outside of riverfront homes.

I wrapped around the river until it intersected with a channelized waterway, one that I needed to cross by ferry. The map was wrong. Where there should have been a ferry dock, I instead found a woman cracking her way through a massive pile of coconuts. As I scanned the river in confusion, the coconut woman pointed toward a boat upriver. I thanked her and cycled toward the ferry, watching as it struggled against the current. The ferry rammed its loading ramp onto the concrete slab on the bank but never actually reached a full stop during the process; it simply twisted sideways and roared its engine in protest, pivoting slowly while the scooters zipped away and I, quickly but cautiously, rolled my bicycle onto its rusty grid of rebar wire. And just like that, for the price of 1,000 Vietnamese dong (about 4¢), I had embarked on the first ferry of my journey.

The ferry captain steers his vessel across the river. The Mekong River Delta has an extensive network of bridges and ferries to transport locals.

The ferry deposited me in the small but action-packed town of Thới Long. I parked my bike at the market, which flurried with excited whispers as locals gathered to see what this foreigner was doing here, so far from the tourist track.

I wandered around the stalls and became increasingly shocked as I identified one oddity after another: a mesh bag filled with snakes, a bucket of warty toads, a pan of skinned rats, two eels slithering inside a plastic bag. At this point, a crowd had gathered around me and we sprung into an impromptu, market-wide Vietnamese language lesson: I pointed at a meat for sale and they shouted its Vietnamese name in unison, amused at my amusement. I repeated the word back to them, intonation totally wrong, but they nodded and smiled and gave me a thumbs up anyway.

The leader of this effort, a smiley woman sitting cross-legged on her butcher table just behind a matching set of pig feet, asked me the market's most pressing questions with the help of Google Translate: Are you alone? Do you have a lover? You want a frog? It was an interesting series of questions, I thought.

Pans of fish, crabs, and squid on display at a local market in Thới Long.

The butcher, sitting in front of her set of pig feet, laughs about my reaction to the snakes and rats.

The town of Thới Long is one of many Mekong River Delta towns that are bisected by a waterway.

As I settled onto my bicycle, I waved goodbye to the crowd that had amassed at the market and relaxed in knowing that I was just 5 miles from my destination. Surprisingly, I had survived the day with relatively few hiccups and was on track to reaching Thốt Nốt before sunset. I weaved my tires around the cracks in the pavement with this relief, skirting around potholes and the limited sunlight that managed to penetrate the canopy.

I heard the bass first. It thumped nearly in tempo with the squeak in my left pedal’s rotation. Given the Vietnamese’s proclivity for karaoke, I figured that the bass was booming from some household with an unreasonably large sound system, where a family was making the most of their Sunday afternoon. But as I rounded a bend, I saw the arch of flowers and balloons, the people in cocktail dresses and suits taking photos in my path.

Had the context clues not indicated wedding, the next string of events could have easily been the first paragraph under the headline, "Solo female tourist abducted on harebrained bicycle trip." The partygoers glanced under the brim of my non la, expecting nothing out of the ordinary. But to them, a foreigner in the middle of the Mekong River Delta was certainly no ordinary thing. Their realization of that fact, elevated as much as their blood alcohol content, exploded out of them in excited shouts and arm waving and chasing. I slammed on my brakes to see what they wanted, noting that it would have been more effective to use my non la as a parachute. Two men grabbed my arms while another man snatched my bicycle out from underneath me.

The man with my bicycle rolled it into the matrimonial tent and up onto the stage, struggled with the kickstand for a moment, then wedged it between two standing bouquets of wedding flowers and a banner that read “Congratulations to Quoc Anh and Vanh Anh.”

As the two other men towed me into the tent, I watched all fifty-odd guests, seated at round tables covered in empty beer cans and hot-pot dishes, turn to face me. They paraded me to the stage like a show pony and everyone began to cheer. A large part of me was mortified to attend a wedding looking like an absolute dork; I was one Hawaiian shirt away from winning "Tourist of the Year" with my fanny pack, sun-protection sleeves, and camera dangling from my neck.

A Saigon beer appeared in my hand and a crowd of sweaty guests formed around me, each of them yelling into my ear, too drunk to register that I had no idea what they were saying. Even if I could speak Vietnamese, it was impossible to hear anything over the karaoke singer screaming into the microphone.

Someone threw a stool into the center of the crowd, and I was being pushed upon it. I stood, wobbled, reached out for a steadying hand but was met with another beer. A woman stuck a half-peeled shrimp in my mouth. One of my captors shook an unopened Saigon, cracked the seal, then showered me and the crowd with lager. The shrimp woman returned with a chicken leg and held it to my mouth like a microphone. Matching their bacchanalian energy, I raised my beer and began to chug. As if on cue, the kickstand failed and my bicycle crashed down on the stage. We paused, considered fixing it for a moment, then collectively cheered and lifted our glasses instead.

I spent the next hour in rotation of the stool, the stage, and the hotpot table, where the guests filled my bowl over and over with various Vietnamese meats and treats. After many, many attempts, I found success in convincing them that I needed to continue on my bicycle journey to Thốt Nốt before dark. I typed out a message on Google Translate to thank them for their hospitality, and of course, to wish a long and happy marriage for the bride and groom.

As I wheeled my bicycle out of the tent, I ran the most pleasant gauntlet of hugs, handshakes, and hand-over-heart gratitude for being involved in each other’s very special day. Alone, I shook my head, astounded at what had happened, and thought about all the weddings that I had been to back home – how horribly uncomfortable would those brides be if I wrangled some stranger off the street into their reception? Different situations, sure. But on second thought, were they really so different? The most obvious difference, it seemed to me, was that this society greeted outsiders with warmth and curiosity rather than skepticism and alienation, as ours so often does. In that moment, in my inebriated state, all I could do was chalk it up to the magic of the Mekong.

The final 5 miles were far wobblier than the first 25, but I managed to roll into Thốt Nốt in one piece. I knocked on the door of a guesthouse, hoping that they had an empty bed and hoping that they would not report me for tipsy cycling. I was in luck: they had one room available and seemed oblivious to the smell of the beer shower I had taken just an hour ago.

With that, I called day one a success.

The rowdy guests at Quoc Anh and Vanh Anh's wedding.

The proof that I did not make any of this up.