Another extraordinary day

    Woke up real early and shoved off from Vung Tau at 5:24 with barely enough light to see.
 People were up and about riding bikes and exercising. The first 20 miles was a breeze,  straight and flat roads with no traffic. After that with the first town came the never ending city along with the traffic.  Saigon has spread its tentacles out for miles.  Usually the towns and cities come and go, not this time.  No exaggeration, there must be fifty million motorbikes in Vietnam with a population of one hundred million people. There was no time for me to shift into automatic pilot.  I had to be vigilant for the next three hours. With forty miles covered, I took refuge at set back farmers market where I had a huge mango,  an ice tea drink, Vietnamese pancakes and the best milk I have ever tasted.  Back on the road again, the heat ratchet up and I pushed on to Bien Hoa.  Sixty miles on the odometer,  I found a cafe just inside the city where I cooled off for twenty minutes. Next, trying to find Binh’s church, our rendezvous point, turned into another Google GPS cluster F—-.  It had me weaving all over the city.  At the fifth church, I stopped on the verge of losing my mind and called Binh.   (Google needs to get this god damn app off the market.  Apple’s navigation system is equally as bad.  For my next trip, I need to find a navigational system that knows what the hell it is doing.  Thank Jesus that I have a compass and paper map.) With help from the church’s priest, Binh was able find me and lead me back to his house where his family was waiting.  Through very narrow neighborhood streets we weaved. I never would have found his place on my own.  A modest front to his house, sandwiched in amongst many others, opened into fairly sizable store, house, storage area, garden and a completely separate new house in the back.  His parents, five years my junior,  and three of Binh’s siblings where there to greet me. Everyone lives on the premises in one area or another. After feeding me lunch and his sister introducing me to two new fruits, I was shown around the enclosed property.  The father has an operation for turning tamarack root in to powdered spice.  Also, he processes other natural ingredients into a variety of other spices. His youngest daughter uses the front portion of the house as a store to sell the spices along with other exotic items to the surrounding neighborhoods.  If you were not a local, you would have never found this place.  Binh set me up in the new house in the rear, all to myself.  After cleanup and a nap, he took me to his church on his motorbike. With me in the back, he maneuvered around tight alley turns with amazing adeptness. His church is huge and has multiple services to accommodate the thousands of members. Everything was in Vietnamese except for Amen. As the only western in the church, taller than everyone else, I felt I was on display.  Once out of church, we hopped on the bike, picked up some baguettes hot out of the local bakery oven and head for home.  Dinner was ready and I was the special guest. They waited on me as  though I were royalty. Every topic was touch upon: the war, the government system, my bicycle trips, their efforts to speak english, eating dog, abortion, America... and on it went. They want me here for two nights and tomorrow I will visit the university that Binh is the dean of and even sit in on an English class.  What an experience I am in the middle of here in Buen Hoa.