This is part 4 of a series about a solo motorbike trip I took around north-east Vietnam in December 2018. Each story can be enjoyed alone, and together they form one big over-arching story.
It’s about road trips, motorbikes, solo travel and finding yourself on the open road. And of course, it’s about Vietnam.
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Oh, and I got a million dreams. It’s all I do is dream, all the time… No, this is not piano; this is dreaming.”
– Duke Ellington
But when we wake, it’s all been erased, and so it seems, only in dreams
– Rivers Cuomo
Crossing the border
Some time after lunch and a couple of hours of pleasant but uneventful driving I round a bend and pass an enormous billboard – one of those hoardings one finds throughout Vietnam with cheerful-looking artwork depicting the various happy workers of the Socialist Republic – signalling I’d made it across the provincial border to Cao Bang (pronounced something like ‘Cow Bong’).
The road widens and the surface gets smoother, and after pulling upwards for a short while, I crest the hill and relax into a long, cruisy downhill jam, the traffic thinning out to give me free rein of the road towards the city. The highway carves through canyons which opened periodically to reveal the vast mountainous horizons on their far sides, the pages of a picture book opening to display new wonders, closing again to let me focus on the road and digest what I’d seen. The slow sunset lasts for hours in these parts, cradled amongst the green mountains splashed in curious oranges, reds and blues.
Cao Bang
My arrival to Cao Bang is timed perfectly with the disappearance of the setting sun, my path through the suburbs partially illuminated, night-time being present by the time I make it to its central drag, a city’s true form being revealed only after dark. I found it rather charming for a northern Vietnamese city, whose centres are generally indistinguishable in the repetition of their centralised urban planning, usually flat topography, a homogenous offence of flashy bank facades and noisy electronics shops, and the region’s bleak grey winters. Cao Bang is protected by large hills on one side, while the Bang river hugs it closely around the waist of its eastern side. Guangxi Province in China lies just over 20km to the north.
Vietnam’s national football team are playing the Philippines in a minor football tournament, and I join the earnest crowd watching it in a large café on the main strip. Rather than being tired from the day’s driving (I’ve been travelling for about five hours since I got down off the radio tower) I feel alert, refreshed, energised. I could have driven forever today. Further into the mountains, past Cao Bang, but even further again: I imagine driving south once more, past Hanoi and to the sea, over flat lands, into the sun.
I get dinner in a late-night rice shop, and enjoy the last movements of life scurrying on the rural city streets. Finding my home for the night on a narrow central alleyway-cum-street, I’m delighted that my private room has all the luxury one would find in a boutique counterpart closer to home in Ireland, including a ridiculously soft mattress. Soft mattresses are one of those things we take for granted as being ‘good’ at home, something worthy of pursuit and attainment, and even orthotic or scientifically tested ones designed for maximal health and physiotherapeutic correction tend to have some sort of comfort in mind.
In Vietnam, however, mattresses are a shallow and incredibly dense and firm object. To suggest having a soft mattress would be like suggesting that someone wear a wooden shirt – it is one of those cultural differences where one simply wouldn’t understand the question. My host must have many westerners through to invest in such a luxury good, who must be watched with a kind of kind bemusement, in the same way we view their devoted consumption of the durian fruit. I have grown used to the hard mattress in my time here, by now appreciating and even preferring it, though in this instance it feels like the bed has been put here just for my relaxation and health. I am exhausted.
And yet, I could have driven forever.
Dreams
I dream so hard that night that the physical sensation of chemicals flooding through a dam in my brain wakes me with a jolt, a psychedelic shock to my brain and my entire system, my dreams so vivid I can still see them playing out around me in the pitch-blackness of my room. I do not know where I am, that moment of sitting up in a void as my brain regains its rooting in space lasting far greater than a moment, over a minute, or maybe several. It is difficult to discern as being cut off from my senses of space I remain cut off from the passing of time as well.
I haven’t dreamt in months. Not that I can remember, at least. Although not a physically painful experience, it has the feel of a high-charged electric shock, that leaves an intensely uncomfortable and lingering feeling, almost of shame rather than hurt. It’s not a nightmare – something I haven’t experienced since I was in single digit ages – but something different.
Even when I fumble through to find the bedside light, illuminating the guesthouse room with its luxury blankets, its pretty curtains, its crafted bookshelves, I still have no absolutely no idea where I am, where this room exists, in what vast and dark solar system does it flow, or if it even exists at all. My mind grasps back through a non-existent reality, tracing its steps, pulling at the safety rope of memory to try and pull itself back out of the cave. It finally hauls itself out into the light, and I remember the city protected by a mountain and a river; the drive through the glorious sunset-drenched canyons, crossing the border to Cao Bang.
All that exists of it now in the infinite space are feelings, though those are as vivid as any picture, in their own way. I can kind of picture it but the memories are emotional, not details, though as inarticulable as the emotions are, in my mind each split-second of them plays an entire movie of storyline, plot, beginning middle and end. The stories made up of familiar faces in hyper-realistic movies; the plotlines too abstract and far-fetched for them to be truly based in this reality. And yet…
As I sit up in this mercifully soft bed the dreams feel more real than the place I find myself in. I’m relieved to check my phone and see fresh new red icons, the notifications more meaningful than the mere communication of information, for now they confirm that the worlds outside this room, outside this time zone and country, continue to exist, or at least appear to for now. How real even are these messages on the phone?
I can’t go back to sleep. I need more time in this world, to touch things with my external senses, to secure the rope that ties me to reality, before I plunge back into the cave, lest I be trapped in there forever. We would never know if we never woke up again, and myths have been told for as long as history itself about people who have vanished into the ether, never explained in terms we can understand. In a nightmare at least there’s a clearly defined enemy and source of fear. This was more unsettlingly vivid, so profound in its incomprehensible resonance – a movie so realistic as to cast doubt on my waking life, with plot twists that unsettle your view of reality, though it’s impossible to explain why.
There are two books on the shelf by the window: Mindfulness, and Life’s Greatest Lessons. I flick through the book on mindfulness, an easy read, finishing half its short pages before attempting sleep again. It is 5:30am. I have had recurring dreams in the past, and sometimes even a midnight bathroom break or wakeful tossing and turning has only momentarily removed from hyper-vivid worlds before plunging me back into the same ones again, to continue the same storyline, as if it were too important to escape from in the relative safety of this physical world. I wonder if I’m going back to the same world whenever I dare to lay my head down again, as if preparing in some way for a surgical operation. I lie back into the safety of the soft white pillow, which now is swallowed in the pitch-black void, and accept my fate. Another late start, my most recent procrastination, as I journey once again into the unknown.
Early start
In the morning I make my way down the street to get breakfast in a overflowing, steaming phở shop. Great big steaming vats of soup are dished out into bowls and I huddle on a red plastic stool at one of the communal tables in the narrow room. As I allow the steam to rise off my bowl and the added garlic-and-chili brine to work its magic in the liquid, an exchange of one form of heat for one more to my liking, I savour my surroundings both human and constructed. Strange-looking substances and products are stuffed into recycled plastic jars stacked high on shelves up to the roof, though their contents don’t appear to be on the menu at the front.
My middle-aged neighbours giggle and chatter amongst themselves about my height. They ask why I don’t have a woman with me, giggle at my age, and tell me there are plenty of women around here just waiting to be taken off into the mountains on the back of my motorbike, and would I take any of them? The chị shows me the small dish of rice pudding she’s eating, something I’ve never come across before, and orders some for me. There’s a distinct and difficult to place not-quite-sweet flavour from it. I’m later informed by a friend that this particular shop serves the north-Vietnamese dish of rượu nếp, which is pudding made from the rice leftover at the bottom of the bottles of ruou – Vietnamese rice wine – or to give it a more familiar title: moonshine. It’s never too early for rice wine in this part of the world, though the correct rule to adopt is never to refuse it, even when it’s 8:30 in the morning. And when it’s wrapped up in a breakfast dessert then it really would be rude to say no.
I return to the same café I watched the football in the previous evening. It’s quieter now, the city’s strip taking on a more relaxed country vibe in the splash of low daylight. There’s a chill in the shade but the sun is steadily rising to do its job. It is early December, winter usually taking hold in this part of the country, though the weather is that of a delayed autumn. I finish the book on mindfulness I began in the middle of the night. I’m in no rush. Today I drive towards Ba Be. Though having crossed the border to Cao Bang yesterday afternoon, I’m eager to get back on my bike, just to drive. I’m not sure if it’s yesterday’s drive, the fresh air, being a couple of days away from Hanoi, or the luxury white sheets of my super soft bed, but I’ve just had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in months.
Continue reading:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 5:
Part 6:
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