Vietnamese Mafia

I was sitting around Mark’s apartment in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam smoking on a quarter ounce bag of marijuana stems that we had purchased for 2 dollars and some change earlier in the day from some cops sitting around playing poker. I then decided that I wanted to go down south and see the Mekong Delta. Mark told me some shit about these local guys he knew that could take me down on a motorbike. We went to this bar where they supposedly hung out at all time and looked at pictures of all the different trips they had taken. I really didn’t give a shit about the other places, I wanted to go to this Mekong Delta that I had heard about on these war channels. But these dudes weren’t just some dudes with a motorbike, they did this shit for a living. They probably saved every fucking penny they had and bought a fucking motorbike and said “I’m gonna use this fucking motorbike to take people to the Mekong Delta and shit”.

Everywhere you go in Vietnam there is some little Vietnamese fucker yelling at you about his motorbike and how he wants to take you somewhere. That’s how you get around out there. You just acknowledge someone who is sitting in front of a motorbike, screaming at you, hop on the back with him and tell him where you are going. Most of the time you don’t know where you are going, you just give him and address and he says some crazy shit in Vietnamese and takes off. You just hope the guy knows where the hell he is going. Then you give him a dong or two and he stays where he dropped you off, screaming about his motorbike to people walking by.

These guys in the bar were classy. They had a bar that you could find them in most of the time. They had a fucking book with pictures and shit. They didn’t scream at you about their stupid motorbike. This is how I wanted to see the Mekong Delta, not some crazy tourist bus down there.

So we set the details and all that good stuff. Of course Mark had to work and couldn’t get away for the weekend but he probably needed a break from my ass anyway. So I went with his Canadian roommate Gill. No, not like the fish gill. Gill. As in Gill, I’m Canadian and spell Jill, Gill. So we ventured out of Ho Chi Minh City heading to this Mekong Delta place.

Let me tell you, riding on the back of a fucking motorbike hugged up with some dude for a full day is not fun. Your legs above your knees get sunburned as shit and well, your hugged up with a dude all day so you don’t fall off. These crazy fucking busses and semi trucks get right on your ass and blow their god damn horns, scaring the fucking piss out of you. It is a god damn adventure and it is exactly what I needed.

On the way there, we stop at all these hole in the wall restaurants and get pressured into buying coconut drinks and weird fucking snacks. Not a problem. That’s just how shit works over there. They do these trips all the time and build relationships with these people on the way and probably get some kind of cut from them. But I don’t want to drink a fucking coconut, I want to drink a beer. I’m in Vietnam and I’m going to the jungle in the Mekong Delta. Fuck your stupid coconut.

We get to this snake farm place that was a part of the trip. I wasn’t really sure how a snake farm in Vietnam really would work. I was thinking from the way everything else was run over there that there would just be this field of spitting cobras that you ran around getting chased by cobras. Nope. I was pretty disappointed. I could taken one of those Leonardo DiCaprio shots of snake blood that he took in the movie The Beach but I was a fucking pussy and didn’t do it. I regret not doing that shit now but fuck it.

So we finally get in the jungle of the Mekong Delta. We are stopped at one of those restaurants and they ask us if we wanna stay in a hotel or with a family in the jungle. Fuck a god damn hotel. I wanna stay with a family in the jungle. We then get back onto the road and pull off on this little dirt single track path into the god damn jungle. Deeper and deeper we go for about a half an hour until we reach this little house in the middle of fucking nowhere. Dirt floors and all that shit. It had a little barn and looked to be surrounded by a swamp. I’m talking shit brown toilet water after a night of whiskey drinking. Little did I know that I would be getting my dinner out of that shit.

We are all greeted by the family and friends of the household. They were all nice and there were about 10 or so people there. One of the ladies of the house all offered us beers and the fun began. They had many questions for us and we hand many questions for them. We sat around a table drinking beers while the women cooked the dinner. They brought out some fertilized duck eggs as an appetizer and I decided that I wanted to eat the little baby duck in the egg. It was such a cute baby duck, with his cute little baby duck beak and shit. So I decided to eat that baby fucking duck. He was cuter than he was delicious. Kind of tasted like an oyster. But it wasn’t an oyster it was a baby fucking duck. I ended up puking all over the dinner table.

After everybody got a good laugh making fun of me, one of the older guys starts talking about how the Vietnamese Mafia is coming onto his land and stealing his oranges and he is losing money, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t think much of the story other than that sucks and shit. We continue drinking beer, Vietnamese whiskey and telling stories until dinner.

The ladies bring out this huge dinner for us and we eat the shit out of it. As we are wrapping up dinner and the ladies are clearing the table, this little Vietnamese bastard jumps out of the jungle screaming something in Vietnamese. Everybody at the table gets up from the table and start grabbing weapons from the house. Machetes, sticks, rocks and other shit they had collected over time. So, naturally, since everybody else is running into the jungle I decide that I better follow them cause something is going on and I have no clue what it is.

So we are trekking through thick Vietnamese jungle, through knee deep shit swamps and nasty brush. The little Vietnamese kid that had originally bolted out of the jungle starting this whole mess hands me a stick. Not a log but a pussy little fucking stick! I finally get my motorbike driver to tell me what the hell is going on and he tells me that the Vietnamese Mafia is in this guys field and we are going to fuck him up. In my drunken stupor I decide that this is an awesome idea and no Vietnamese Mafia steals oranges from this family. So I am fucking ready. I got my fucking stick and we are gonna fuck these bitches up.

The farther and farther we went into the jungle the more I was thinking to myself about how bad of an idea this was. Surely, the Vietnamese Mafia had more than a fucking stick but who knows. This is Vietnam after all. So I decided to use the little bit of common sense that I had left in my mind and decided to go back to the house. Oh yea. What the fuck happened to Gill?

I found Gill hiding in the pig barn by the house. I figured that would be a safe place for us to lay low until this Vietnamese Mafia business went away. Your mom wasn’t lying when she told you that you needed to clean your room because it looked like a pig sty. Pigs are god damn nasty and those things are not very nice.  The cops came and never found any Vietnamese Mafia with oranges. The night ended with Gill making out with my motorbike driver while I lay in bed next to them. I slept outside near the pig barn in a hammock. To this day I don’t know if this was part of the trip and it was all an act or not but that was the best god damn motorbike trip that I have ever been on. I ended up giving the family some money for their hospitality and a story that will always be with me.