Editor’s note: Daily Bruin photographer Eman Baha, a fourth-year international development studies student, spent three weeks during the summer of 2012 traveling through Vietnam with a small group of young people, including four other UCLA students. The following passage, photographs and captions chronicle Baha’s experience from a first-person perspective.
While on a UCLA Travel Study program in China during the summer of 2012, I met a fourth-year international development studies student named Vincent Ho, who told me about one of his biggest bucket-list goals – to motorcycle across Vietnam. After hearing about his goal, I jumped at the chance to join him on a journey from Vietnam’s northern capital, Hanoi, to the former capital of South Vietnam, Saigon. Three other brave fourth-year UCLA students joined our adventure: political science student Michelle Koepp (a Daily Bruin video staffer), psychology student Amanda Deering and global studies student Tara Rangchi. Escorted by Toi, a former Vietnamese mafia member we met at a hostel, we were ready to hit the road. The journey was roughly 1,700 kilometers long, or 1,000 miles. Riding many hours a day through Vietnam’s humidity and intense rainstorms, we finally completed the journey three weeks later.
Despite a frayed history between Vietnam and the United States, including a taxing war in the 1960s and 1970s that left hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead, we were treated with nothing but kindness and hospitality. This journey was a life-changing experience for me and the other Bruins who came along because it challenged the way we perceived the developing world. For me personally, witnessing the hard work that Vietnamese subsistence farmers put in just to survive renewed my appreciation for the opportunities I have been afforded in life. Nearly half a year later, the experience is still dear to my heart because it opened my mind to a new culture and taught me to be patient when dealing with challenging environments. While I wish I could share more of the thousands of photographs that I took on my trip, I hope these highlights will inspire others, especially fellow Bruins, to explore the world.