A Romantic Trail in Vietnam By Darren Baker

česky

I had only been in this country a month when I was invited on a wine-drinking excursion to South Moravia. The bus was being chartered by a group of mountain climbers who were planning to camp out for the weekend near the town of Mikulov. Most of them, anyway. One of the guys showed up at the bus carrying only two big jugs for bringing back wine. Apparently that was all he would need for the weekend.

The wine turned out to be the young wine of the season. It had a nice fruity flavor, but was definitely nothing to look at, especially in the morning. In fact, I thought one man I met there was either drunk or bullshitting me when he declared that this wine was the future of the nation. Later I realized I had misunderstood him. The future of the nation wasn't the young wine, rather the young people sitting around and drinking it. Including the guy with the big jugs.

I never did go climbing with the group that weekend. For one thing I'm no climber, for another I could go around to the back of the hill and easily walk up to the top. My first attempt here at any mountain sport would occur over a year later at a ski resort in North Moravia. It didn't go very well because I'm no skier, either. I had tried skiing only one other time in my life and the experience almost resulted in the death of a young girl.

Being an absolute beginner at the time, I was practicing on a shallow hill used mainly by children. Among them was this girl, who was skiing with no poles. After I took one particularly bad spill, with my face half-buried in the snow, she came skiing up next to me. She lowered her head and asked in a snotty little voice, "Need any help, Mister?" Had she been a foot closer, they may well have been her last words.

Water skiing was more my sport because I lived most of my life near water. But I had never been in a canoe until I was invited for an excursion on a river in South Bohemia. To look back at it now, everything should have been quite easy. One person paddles up front, another steers and paddles in the back. Well, as the person in the back, I forgot to paddle. I just sat there, steered left, then a little right, and enjoyed the cruise.

But the person who did all the work ended up getting the last laugh. The night before there had been a heated discussion about European politics. If I took an unpopular stand, my Czech friends would shake their heads and say, "You are an American. You cannot understand."

Okay, but then the subject changed to American politics, with one man declaring that John Kennedy was a hero. When I disagreed, saying Kennedy was responsible for Vietnam among other things, he again shook his head and said, "You are an American. You cannot understand."

This man wasn't the paddler up front, rather his wife was. Sometime after our canoe ride, she recommended that my wife and I take a walk along the river. There was, she said, a romantic trail that ran about five miles from one city to the next. This romantic trail turned out to be nothing less than a jungle. There were fallen trees to climb over, mud puddles to jump, thorns nipping at us from both sides. It was almost as if she had sent us to the jungles of Vietnam.

Naturally the going was slow without a machete. I couldn't wait to get back to the cottage and ask our friends what their idea of a romantic trail was. According to them, the trail had been a pleasant place to walk some years ago. More like twenty when they really stopped to think about it. But there's no denying the fact that I would have been better prepared for the jungle had I done a little exercise the day before. Like paddled the boat.