Hitchhiking Vietnam : A Woman's Solo Journey in an Elusive Land

Amazon.com
For seven months Karin Muller traversed Vietnam--sometimes by motorbike, often by foot--covering 6,400 miles from the Mekong Delta to the Chinese border. Along the way she survives 52 motorbike breakdowns, 14 arrests, and one awful bout with scurvy. She plants rice with farmers, saves a few leopard cubs from the black market, learns to drive a passenger train, and gets to know a lot of people on her Ho Chi Minh Trail trek. Told honestly and humorously, the culture, pace, land, scents, problems, and beauties of Vietnam are evoked as Muller and Vietnam interact. Snippets of letters home (like "I traded some of my antihistamines for Tampax yesterday. What a relief" and "Am I really blood type A? It's important") highlight the details, while the strong narrative holds them together. Her pictures are excellent, the story riveting, and the writing a pleasure--good reading for a flight to Asia or a day at the beach. --Stephanie Gold

Download Description
Imagine being a twenty-eight-year-old single woman, working your way up the management consultant ladder, with your own expense account, a fancy gym membership, and salary to spare. Now imagine throwing it all away to hitchhike a country under the iron fist of communism, with a dubious grip on the language, accompanied by a colorful and sometimes frightening menagerie of characters, human and otherwise, and carrying an illegal video camera in your backpack. That's exactly what Karin Muller did. This title comes from the PBS documentary of the same name. PBS will be televising this film several times over the next three years and has an extensive site devoted to it at www.pbs.org which has developed a built-in audience. Karin has received thousands of e-mails asking, "Where is the book?" Here it is at last! 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 311 pages, 8 page color well, 7 maps.

From the Back Cover
For seven months Karin Muller traversed Vietnam--sometimes by motorbike, often by foot--covering 6,400 miles from the Mekong Delta to the Chinese border. Along the way she survives 52 motorbike breakdowns, 14 arrests, and one awful bout with scurvy. She plants rice with farmers, saves a few leopard cubs from the black market, learns to drive a passenger train, and gets to know a lot of people on her Ho Chi Minh Trail trek. Told honestly and humorously, the culture, pace, land, scents, problems, and beauties of Vietnam are evoked as Muller and Vietnam interact.



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Imagine being a twenty-eight-year-old single woman, working your way up the management consultant ladder, with your own expense account, a fancy gym membership, and salary to spare. Now imagine throwing it all away to hitchhike a country under the iron fist of communism, with a dubious grip on the language, accompanied by a colorful and sometimes frightening menagerie of characters, human and otherwise, and carrying an illegal video camera in your backpack. That's exactly what Karin Muller did. This title comes from the PBS documentary of the same name. PBS will be televising this film several times over the next three years and has an extensive site devoted to it at www.pbs.org which has developed a built-in audience. Karin has received thousands of e-mails asking, 'Where is the book?' Here it is at last!



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