Religion in the communist state of Vietnam is legal – temples, mosques, churches, pagodas, shrines, are all allowed to exist, to function in accordance with state guidelines, once they have registered and received papers from government officials. The shape these religious spaces and communities of worship take in Ho Chi Minh is a complex thought – one I hesitate to comment on because, as we are learning in all our travels, and have been reminded here in Vietnam, one can get a lot of information in a short time, but it takes ages full of experience to begin to understand even fragments – fragments of Southeast Asia, of Vietnam, or even of this careening city of Ho Chi Minh, as it hurdles around us. But I’m going to comment anyway, knowing all my thoughts and observations are bare, preliminary, incomplete – but also hoping that they at least point me – us – towards more questions, which in turn point us towards more learning.

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Neil, Addie, Jesse, Nicole, Tim, and I along with two new team members rode out of Phnom Penh Saturday morning, May 5. Our two new riders were Vaa – Tim’s host brother from SST– and his friend Ratha, who both gave up their weekend to ride with us as far as Vietnam. The two are no strangers to the route and spent a summer biking around Cambodia talking with people in the rural areas about deforestation and the future of their environment. Their organization is called The Explore Cambodia.

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1. Many people on this trip have made me smile.

2. Going to the bathroom 14 times in one day should not become a regular occasion unless you are only going to fix your hair — even then, 12 times is enough.

3. I have determined that the participants in BikeMovement Asia are really cool, and if you don’t know them all yet, you should probably try to meet them sometime!

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Last night we listened to stories. We heard stories of three Christians, relatively young in their faith. We heard the stories from the people who lived them. We gathered with young people from Phnom Penh Mennonite Church and shared some of our experiences with Christianity and the Mennonite Church. We asked them about their experiences. And they told us stories…

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Phnom Penh, finally. After rolling into Detroit, my 747 to Tokyo was grounded by technical difficulties, forcing me to stay a lonely night in one of Michigan’s finer Best Westerns. On my way early the next morning, I was nervous – having missed both my connecting flights and worrying for the safety of my bicycle, which was somewhere in the South-Pacific. In the end I was re-routed through Bangkok, and arrived in Phnom Penh, to find my bicycle – some of it peeking through the packing box, but all in all, no worse for wear.

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Nick Loewen, Neil Richer and I, arrived in Phnom Penh exactly 24 hours late on Saturday, April 28th at 10:00 AM. Upon arrival we were thrust into Cambodian culture as we hitched one “tuk-tuk” back to the MCC guest house from the airport (a tuk-tuk being a small carriage attached to a motorcycle). This would have been an exciting first activity without three bike boxes, five people and excess luggage, but the extra challenge of fitting everything made it that much more thrilling. I had to laugh that just 48 hours earlier we found it necessary to have a fifteen passenger van drive us to the bus station because our bike boxes could not possibly fit in anything else. (more…)