| Muller | Hitchhiking Vietnam
Page 163 |
Highway 14 was an unusual name for a road that quickly petered out into a one-lane dirt trail. The cement houses gradually turned to bamboo, then to palm leaf shacks and finally disappeared altogether in a sea of thin brown trees and graying, sharp-edged grass. The vinyl seat that had once felt so soft developed sudden lumps and protrusions. I had long since stopped holding my breath at the variety of rattles that accompanied every impact with a pothole and begun cursing the twenty-two-year-old shocks.
Just as I was preparing to throw pride to the winds and beg for a break, the engine obliged by coughing twice and quitting. We coasted to a stop. Jay stared balefully at the dusty chrome. "What's wrong?" I asked.
"How should I know?" he snapped, fiddling with the accelerator.
He had regaled me with stories of his motorbike treks through Thailand, month after month of rugged roads and unexplored trails. I had assumed some measure of troubleshooting skills from all that reckless adventure.
"I never broke down," he mumbled.
Eventually, he jiggled the gas tank and was greeted with a hollow echo. Suddenly he was the Marlboro Man again, reaching over to switch on the reserve and ordering me to get on as he revved the engine and lowered his visor.
A hundred meters later the reserve ran out and we again coasted to a stop. We resolved our differences with a flip of a coin and Jay hiked off down the road in search of a liter of gasoline while I sat in the baking heat and watched over the Beast.
He returned almost immediately, having hitched a ride on the back of a cheap Russian Minsk that purred with annoying reliability. Apparently every hut along the road kept a few liters of gasoline stored in the outhouse or under the roof of the pig pen, ready for quick sale to foolish strangers.
An hour later we hit a particularly deceptive pothole and the muffler dropped off. I walked back in silence to wrap it in a towel and rode the rest of the way into the next small town with the sleek, crowning glory of our Classic Machine cradled in my lap.
