On the way home from the Ba Ca market 100km from Sapa in Northern Vietnam, my rented motorbike's headlight cut out in the pitch darkness just after a hair-pin turn in the fog. Scare-ey! I breaked, rolled to the side of the road, and laid on the horn to wait for my buddy Matt to return and see what we could do about it. I discerned the problem was probably in the switch, as the low beams had cut out during the day, but the high beams had still worked. This same basic thing happened to my truck in Loa, Utah, and it was the switch failing. Matt got out his handy leatherman and disassembled the switch, filing down the connections and losing and finding and losing and finding a few tiny pieces in the process.
After realizing neither of us knows anything about switches and it was rather silly for us to have taken it apart, Matt put it back together and a local guy stopped, took a cursory look at the bike, and escorted us to the nearest shop. He lead and Matt followed with both girls on his bike, me sandwiched between their two functioning headlights.
About 7:30PM on a Sunday, we arrived at a little wooden shack with a drink and snack display, several motorbikes parked out front and a plastic-wrapped bike tire hung in the tree out front (this is apparently a universal SE Asian sign for "motorbike shop"). Three mechanics materialized out of thin air and set to disassembling the headlight case and exposing the bike's electrical guts. They determined the switch had failed and began the rewiring/sodering process necessary to bypass it so I could get home to Sapa (roughly another 20+ km up the road). Figuring these guys knew what they were doing and had it all handled, Matt, the 2 H'mong girls we had with us (Lan and Ker), and myself went inside for noodle soup and tea. While we were eating, the bike's alarm started going off. Odd, Why don't they use the clicker to turn it off? We went over to show them the off button to discover the remote was missing from the keychain. I immediately had a feeling of foul play, but could not remember for sure whether the remote was on the keys when I went inside or not.
Matt and Lan retraced our path and searched for the remote while Ker and I watched the guys disassemble some other parts of the bike, snip some wires, and bypass the alarm system. The remote was no where to be found. I did not insist on checking pockets because I did not know how to ask and did not feel it would be appropriate. Matt could not see why they would steal the remote since it would not work on another bike. Unfortunately, upon returning to the place where I rented the bike, we discovered there is a chip in the alarm linked to the remote our "savior-Sunday-night-mechanics" had stolen while we were inside enjoying simple bowls of 20 cent noodle soup.
The result of the ordeal was that we paid the mechanics 20,000 Dong ($1.50) to get me home, and the next day the bike's owner had to pay 93,000 Dong ($6.25) to replace the electrical system and I paid him 450,000 Dong ($28.50) for the alarm system chip they stole while I was not looking. It was not until after this was resolved that I remembered I had not set the alarm when I parked the bike, so the only reason it would have to go off would be if they had stolen the chip. I went to the tourist police half-heartedly, more for the adventure than actually expecting any results. This is a good thing, because what I found at the tourist police was 3 Vietnamese-speaking people that called an english-speaking person for me to talk to on the phone who did not really understand what I was trying to say, then told me he could not help me.
I am still not certain what the lesson here is (be more attentive around mechanics in this country? don't rent a motor-bike from a friend of a friend in a country where favors make business/relationships complicated? listen when you have an intuition that someone does not really want to rent you something in the first place?), but I am greatful for the process it sent me through. I learned something about seeing possibilities in the shades of grey between the black-and-white extremes I usually see as solutions at the outset of a traumatic event. I also made some connections in myself and my patterns of emotional self-victimization with concrete things I can do in this world to reclaim my power (thanks to Matt for the time and tea and energy holding space for this process). There truely is Zen in Motorcycle Maintenance...
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