This is part 3 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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Late start
When given the ultimate freedom of an open-ended trip of a lifetime, in the absence of set check-in and departure times, most people would still procrastinate and make excuses not to leave. I remain to this day one of those people, and so left far later in the day than I’d planned. After collecting my rental bike, a motocross-style dirt bike which offered a bit more power and robustness than my little day-to-day city run-around, my first destination was a nearby café to sit and enjoy an iced coffee and savour the moment of departure. Or perhaps, to dwell on the fact that I didn’t know where I was going. In such situations, part of you never wants to leave the known.
I’d only chosen this route the day before, having been in two minds about whether to spend my last hurrah visiting somewhere new and unknown, or to return to one of the many tried-and-tested and guaranteed beautiful places I’d visited throughout my time in this country. The difficulty in taking the road less-travelled is that it provides incredible resistance, as the mind often compares any potential failings of the trip with past victories, like a gameshow host taunting you with “Here’s what you could have won” – even though those victories are firmly in the past. It also plays the cruel trick of making home seem very appealing just as you’re about to leave.
My destination for the night was a small village of Bac Son, which lay roughly halfway to the city of Cao Bang on the map. Cao Bang was to be a stop on the way to Ba Be Lake, a popular tourist domestic tourist destination. Really I just wanted to go for a long drive. A friend had suggested Bac Son as somewhere to bisect the journey. It lay in a valley surrounded by pretty-looking molehills. My friend had found an abandoned military radio tower on top of one of them, which he’d – perhaps ill-advisedly – climbed to the top. An otherwise unremarkable and unheard of location, though a strong enough seed planted in my mind that now I clung to visiting it as if I’d been tasked with the responsibility of carrying some great treasure.
All excuses made and coffees drank, there was no more time to sit around, partly because having another potent Vietnamese coffee would have rendered me unfit to drive. It was almost three o’clock, and by then no matter how fast I went I knew I’d be doing some of the journey in the dark if I was to make it to where I was going.
Along with my own recurring tardiness and apprehension, the city itself delays the progress of the trip, both physical and psychological, and Hanoi’s sprawl is such that the first half of the day’s driving is steadily conducted along a long, straight, crowded, industrialised belt that reaches past Hanoi’s distant airport and far beyond towards the provincial city of Thai Nguyen, about 80km away. Somewhere along this belt I stop for bottled water, and to take pictures of my new bike to send to my friends back in Hanoi, to show them that I’ve actually left. Still tied to the city, still caring about city things. A comfortable bed, nice places to eat, bars and restaurants, friends and text messages.
A low cloud of smog hangs in the air for miles beyond the sprawl.
No turning back
At some point near the beginning of every trip, you’re convinced you’re going to die. My late start meant darkness descended shortly after I left Thai Nguyen, and with it, light rain which gathered in the air into a fine but heavy mist. LED lights from oncoming traffic offered dubious illumination, figures of vehicles apparating from the mist like the stalkers in horror movies. My head lowered to protect my face from the rain, my face grimacing as the rain dripped down my face.
My rental bike was still only a matter of hours in my possession, and not yet knowing its ways and ticks, I prayed its reliability wouldn’t be another variable that determined my living or dying. I honk my horn at regular intervals just to alert any potential fellow road users hidden in the shadows to my presence. I slowed down as I passed through a village where a collision had occurred on the other side of the road. Two bikes lay downed at incongruous angles, I couldn’t see where their drivers were. Half the town appeared to be in attendance at the scene. There’s arguing. Slaps are thrown. I keep my head down and keep driving. The mists keep descending from the sky. I think about death a lot.
I’d never even really cared about visiting Bac Son at all, hadn’t even heard of it until the previous day. It was all just an excuse to go for a drive, and I’d never wanted to drive like this. A seed planted in my mind gripped onto as if it were my own desire, clung onto when I could have just stopped at one of the country’s ample guesthouses that are to be found in every town and village. Questions and doubts arising about the point of it all, always delineating into two options: keep going or turn back. I can’t help but think about what I could have won, even though all dangers are equal on the lottery that is the roads of Vietnam.
The traffic dies down. The unlit highway winds into the mountains, the faintest of silhouettes of jagged limestone karsts, iconic symbol of Vietnam, visible against the sky so black it sucks the light from the earth. I’m glad I’m travelling alone, as I don’t want to be in some way responsible for anyone else’s death. There is still a way to go, and sporadic traffic continues to shimmer into being behind bright and sometimes blinding headlights, though I also get a strange reassurance that I’m not going to die, and even come to enjoy my progress along the darkened path. The rain dies off and I see something I haven’t seen in weeks – stars.
I arrive to my accommodation to a warm welcome, my hosts presumably happy I didn’t die between the time I made the booking and made it here. There are other guests, a group of bank workers from the city of Ha Long on a team-building weekend. “I think the worst thing about living in Ireland…” a young lad offers in perfect English as we stand around chatting, “…is going to be the hard border question.” I’d prematurely finished his perfectly articulated sentence in my head with “…the weather”.
The group forms a circle holding hands around a bonfire they’ve made in the yard, cook corn on the cob, and have some kind of a sing off, all of which they invite me to join in. The evening has all the makings of heading towards a rice wine climax but thankfully they remain a wholesome bunch. I am exhausted. I watch a Leicester City game on the TV with our hosts, things from close to home seeming to follow me unconsciously across the world and find me in the mountains, though football is called the beautiful game for a reason.
The radio tower
I sleep well, eat well and leave late – as usual – though this time it’s with an excuse: that I’m waiting for the last of the mist falls, the sky being no longer able to hold the weight of it or the darkness. It is timed well with my morning coffee. I sit about writing and eating breakfast, content to wait around with no excuses needed, as if there were an imaginary figure writing up a report on my adventurous performance on the trip.
Having arrived to Bac Son in pitch black, I see for the first time the valley and its surrounding mountains, my friend’s advice confirmed as sound as ever. I have barely yet seen on my trip anything beyond the city and its urban attachments, and so it feels as if I’ve been abducted in the dead of night and planted in the middle of the countryside. And despite it all looking peaceful and wonderful, the unknown still plays tricks on the mind by dangling the known. Should I have gone somewhere else?
Before leaving I manage to find the infamous tower, with the assistance of a helpful stranger, who charged me a 20,000 Vietnamese Dong (less than a euro) ‘finder’s fee’ for leading me off the main road and to a hidden approach to the hill marked only by a rope to help with the steep, slippery, initial ascent. An admirable bit of commerce, well-earned and happily paid.
The abandoned military radio tower was every bit as dodgy as it sounded, it’s white paint fading into rust. It looked sturdy enough to hold my weight, and putting trust in my friend’s assurance that it was climbable, I clambered up the ladder safely ensconced within its frae. Below I spied the valley in which I’d stayed the night before, being able to ‘see my house from here’ as it were. I could see too, the approach road which had led me to the town on the last leg of my journey, and laughed at how afraid I’d been of the dark at the time, like the day revealing the monsters under the bed to be children.
From above, I gained a new understanding of my surroundings, just as seeing them for the first time in daylight had expanded my perception from the night before. I looked down below as if poring over a detailed map, using my very basic knowledge of the terrain to fill it in: the house I stayed in last night, the road I arrived on, the rough location of the restaurant in the town I’d taken a well-earned break at the night before, my safety confirmed at having reached civilisation.
Such perspectives almost create a feeling of being a time travelling voyeur, the motions and activities of the previous night or day playing out in the mind in present-time over the static and peaceful image below. The drama of the previous night is uncovered then as a spectacle, a movie and stage show, complete with computer generated weather conditions, the vehicles mere stage props.
The god-like perspective was worth the climb, the delays, the late start, the fool-hardy slog in the rain and the dark. In doing so it also broke some of the psychological trail of the road ahead, as I looked beyond the town of Bac Son and across the endless fields of conical green hills, a blurry formless picture taken as a whole, though each individual component sharp and distinct, and having climbed one of their kind I felt like I knew each one of them intimately. It shed some small light on the unknown road ahead.
I get back to my bike sweaty, and perhaps for the first time, eager to progress. Despite being a full day and night into my trip, the temptations of the tried-and-tested were still lingering somewhere in my head, creating an irrational disappointment with what was in front of me. That despite standing in the middle of everything I’d hoped to find, it wasn’t as good as the other thing, the day drawing me with the promise that things would somehow get better further down the line. So it is with the unknown.
Tied to the city
The drive continues through the stunning landscape that northern Vietnam casually drops from behind every mountain. After a while it all falls away, and a quiet country road takes me past understated but pretty tea plantations on low-lying hills. It feels strangely lonely to be the only one on it. It almost makes me miss the dark rainy highway. Doubts start to resurface, doubts that I’d thought the view atop the tower had dispelled, doubts that the omniscient perspective I’d gained couldn’t dispel.
Maybe I should just go back to Bac Son? Maybe I could stay there for the week. Sure it was practically home now, having seen it from above I knew it like the back of my hand. I had a welcoming place to stay, guaranteed wonderful views. The fog of war had already been uncovered in my mind, and now it represented safety. It had become over the course of a night and morning, the tried-and-tested, and now stood in my mind as the point of resistance against the unknown road ahead.
The sprawl of the city stretches far further in every direction than its observable limits, marked by buildings and traffic. Its reach is far greater than what we can see, covering many more miles through space, and many more hours through time than a car or bike can carry you in a day. Even though I was far, far away from Hanoi by now, and the tether pulling me onwards had at this point been spun into a strong rope by the growing promise of what lay in the unknown, there was still the last nagging thread tugging at me in the opposite direction, pulling my mind back to what it knew.
Continue reading:
Part 1 – Meditation
Part 2 – Float
Part 4 – Dreams
Part 5 – Motorbike
Part 6 – Return
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