This is part 5 of a series of articles 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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The Rituals of the Habitual
In the morning I go through the motions of packing my bag, affixing it to the rack on the rear of the bike, tying it carefully with the orange bungee cord and stuffing the bright blue rain poncho in between the straps and the backpack. I’m not an expert sailor or bag-packer, though over the course of the previous few days I have figured out my preferred system of tying the cords in such a way that they and my belongings remain secured to the bike. I reverse the bike by hand out of the marble floored front room of the house, down the compact portable metal grate that’s used as a ramp in homes all over the country to bring vehicles in for safe storage at night, and gently let it roll back onto the narrow street outside.
Next comes the mounting of the bike, approaching always from the left as you would a horse, its pencil-shaped kickstand always letting it lean to that side, surprisingly sturdy. My helmet secured down over my ears after my face mask, which protects not from disease but from dust, air pollutants and exhaust emissions on the road. The final part of the routine, done hundreds if not thousands of times before, is to start the engine. Key turned in the ignition, thumb on the starter as the staccato wheeze of the engine skips a couple of beats before roaring into life in a cloudburst of noise that fills the alleyway. I hold down the clutch in my left hand, hook my toe under the lever that sits in front of the left-side foot rest, and gently shift into first. Releasing the clutch as I roll back my right hand back on the throttle, and I’m once again I’m gone. Although my nominal destination today is Ba Be Lake, about a four hour drive away, as I crawl out of the alleyways of Cao Bang and break free of my latest home, I’m already exactly where I want to be.
Welcome to Vietnam
I’d always been fond of walking, though I abandoned much of that habit when I moved to Vietnam. Hanoi is not a walking city, its infrequent footpaths dominated by vendors of food and various products and services, who provide scatterings of plastic stools for their customers to rest their feet under daily-erected tarps. The footpaths that are free tend to contain all manner of debris including the materials they were made from, and most of them don’t even exist in the first place. Instead of walking, the preferred method of transportation in Vietnam is of course the scooter, or to a lesser extent, the motorbike.
The ‘bike’, comes to replace the varying modes of transport that apply to different types of journey in one’s mind: train, car, bicycle, on foot. Whether backpacking along the coastal spine of this elongated dragon-shaped country, a day-trip to a nearby outdoor space, the commute to work, or simply nipping fifty metres down to the lady in the shop at the end of the alleyway for bottled water and cigarettes – every journey becomes a bike trip.
When everyone in a city of 8 to god-knows-how-many million people makes these bikes trips at the same time, it creates a thing called traffic. The traffic is a major talking point for anyone who’s visited Vietnam, and it rightly fascinates and captivates outsiders with its density, its intensity, and the apparent disregard for conventions, rules and safety displayed by its members.
I was naturally hesitant when I first started driving in Hanoi. The pattern of traffic in Vietnam is regularly likened to a shoal of fish, a collective intelligence that somehow (mostly) just works. Like every other aspect of living in Vietnam as a foreigner from a western culture, it does you better to discard your precious assumptions of rational order and to go with the flow of your new home; to accept your place in the proverbial shoal.
Like anything though, you can get used to it, and you soon start to see the chaotic rationale of the traffic rhythms, where the rules of the road do in fact exist as we know them – speed limits, traffic lights and general principles of over-taking and hazard avoidance – but they’re flaunted to an extent that they are efficiently condensed down to one single commandment:
“Just don’t hit anyone else.”
Assumption is the mother of all pile-ups, and trying to logically predict the movement of individual road-users is foolhardy at best. But with time, you instinctively learn how the system works and how to manoeuvre your way through it, how to react to small actions and interruptions so your passage through the city flows as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Rather than project your assumptions about the rules of the road and human behaviour, you must simply pay attention.
As Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme once said, “There’s a bit of a zen thing going on when you’re riding a motorbike, ‘cos if you don’t pay attention, you’ll die.”
The only way to truly pay attention is to let go. You must let go of your thoughts and expectations to understand how best to avoid the large oncoming cement truck; or to learn how to read the shifting weight and balance of a man transporting a ten-high stack of pallets of live geese as he slowly veers into your lane on the highway. You must pay attention to understand that although you can go anywhere, at any time, down any street, that to do so without understanding your surroundings will end in calamity. You must pay attention to understand that the king of the jungle rules the roads, and the larger and more robust the vehicle the more say you have; but in paying close attention you also understand that the smaller animals like yourself can find safe passage through the streets – if you pay attention.
Pay attention to the fella in the Range Rover who seems to have creeped up behind your shoulder just to set off his inappropriate vehicle’s bizarre Dukes-of-Hazzard-like klaxon as if playing a school prank, before gunning to mow you down anyway. Or the young buffalo popping wheelies down the motorway doing 50 on a Honda Wave while his mate sips a bubble tea through a plastic straw with his arms folded on the back. But don’t look too closely, as you need to pay attention to the million and one other things on the road, not to mention your own driving.
The experience of driving through Hanoi is an exercise in attention management. There’s a lot to take in, and each journey seems to bring with it opportunities for stress and misfortune. When placed in a constant fight-or-flight state of hyper-awareness, the only way to maintain sanity is not to repress the feelings, but to face them head on, to align the tempo of your bike and attention with that of your surroundings.
Physical activity warms up the senses and opens the pores of experience so that everything is remembered better. The excessive hyper-stimulation of being on a bike has the same effect, doubly so the excessive stimulation in a city as bristling with human energy as the capital of Vietnam. Driving through its streets day or night tests your awareness with an overload of stimulation of the senses which never dulls, all clothes shops and noodle stalls and jewellers and money exchanges wedged together; newer and more glamorous cafes and burger shacks trying to entice the growing market of foreign workers (this includes you), residents scurrying across streets and down into the labyrinthine network of alleyways to live, to work, to sleep. The foliage of thick trees hangs into the middle of streets through ridiculous knotted clusters of electricity wires; at night it lights up in gaudy neon and thrifty signage and humming humidity. To drive through Hanoi is to lose oneself in a heady phosphene-inducing blur of fluorescent forecourts and warmly-lit restaurants and so many details of life and existence: Mobile clothing racks full of sequined jeans and garish dresses; children’s flip-flops naughtily discarded with a flick of the toe as they ride pillion on their parents’ bike, arms resting by their side, head resting on shoulder; inexplicable Vina-house music blaring from speakers hidden under an elder’s tea stall; all to the backdrop of a burning orange sun, glimpsed from under a blanket of fumes.
Like the city, you come to an understanding of the rhythms of your bike also, though putting some small faith in its previous owner that important parts of it won’t disintegrate on you at a crucial juncture or junction. You quickly learn the weight of it, how much to lean into turns, when to change gears, how long it takes to brake at different speeds. You become aware of how loud your engine is and what you can and can’t hear when you’re driving; become even more aware of the noise of the city and how everything just drowns out everything else until it’s all just one great big hum. When every step around the city is taken on a bike, it begins to become part of you.
They say that riding a motorbike makes you understand why a dog sticks his head out the window of the car. The speed of a car but the intimacy of a bicycle, every journey remembered, not in your mind but in your body, on a much deeper level. Millions of points of information bombarding your pores every second of every journey. So much you forget it all after a while. But it’s all there. To take it all in through the medium of the motorbike is to absorb every detail of the place itself so that it can be recalled as in a woozy but potent dream, whose characters and objects might not exist as we know them in this world but exist in a deeper sense in our souls, for they represent life itself.
A constant battle for attention between the self on the bike and the external environment. Although one must move to the whims of the crowd, the bike gives you control, gives you freedom. You manoeuvre it with a quick flick or a swerve. My little city runaround, although its engine would struggle to power a lawnmower, what it lacked in high-end power it made up for in acceleration and agility (and perhaps most importantly: reliability). Any situation could be escaped with a quick shifting of weight, a swerve of the hips, a flick of the wrist to get a burst of acceleration to flee some momentary danger, an unforeseen teenager dashing across the road or the emergence from a side street of a scooter with an unstoppable cargo of beer crates piled high on the back.
There were pockets of respite from the stimulation. Days off were often spent zipping around its streets, ostensibly for the purpose of meeting friends, writing in cafes, or exploring the city – but looking back it seems that so many of these pastimes were just excuses to get on the bike. Sunny autumn days spent cruising around the perimeter of the enormous West Lake, banking into the contours of its Formula One style ring road, complete with red and white chevrons marking the turns, past vendors selling corn from carts; the new middle-class of Vietnamese with their Western-style challenges of recreational running and cycling; linen-clad elderly groups practicing early-morning Tai Chi, lovers canoodling and taking each other’s pictures on concrete steps overlooking the turgid body of water.
Bored in one place, moving on, zipping across town to hang out in another café or eat in some new restaurant. But really, just to be on the bike. Each small journey a little condensed travel experience, every trip and every day was an adventure until the last, no matter how many times I traversed the same streets, or sat at the same monstrous junction with a thousand others, waiting for the lights to turn green – or close enough to green, if you’re paying attention – slowly sweating and cooking in exhaust emissions and engine rumbles and traffic. In every moment, alive.
It was blissful though. In each journey there are these beautiful small microscopic moments of freedom, each moment a moment of complete and utter control, however brief. And a deep desire begins to ignite within you that will not rest until it is satisfied, even if you don’t know what it is and find yourself compelled to do strange things that defy explanation. In these times, you need to get out of the city that smothers your senses, and rise into the fresher air, to go up and up and up and reach out and touch the sun itself.
The days warm up. The traffic worsens on a monthly basis. The stifling combination of traffic, heat and air moisture, and the sweltering choke of air pollution that came from the woozy mixture of all three, leaves you gasping for air. You search for an escape in each flick of the hips, trying to force your head above the low-hanging clouds of the city that threaten to suffocate you every day as the city burns and you sit idling behind the exhaust of a second-hand school bus in 40 degree heat and humidity levels that’d drown a dog. Near misses begin to pile up, each one registered under your skin even though you’ve long forgotten a week’s worth of commutes through the chaos. You’re gasping for fresh air.
Each journey – across town, into the city, to work, to the shop at the head of the road – satisfies a restless energy to explore, to travel, to live, to be free. But in doing so it creates half a dozen more. There is still work to return to, people to see, and the sun plunges down behind a scaffold of skyscrapers at the end of every day. There is nowhere left to turn, no micro-escapes to make through the gaps of light between old men and women on knackered Honda Dreams on the morning ride to work, no more expressions of freedom the city has left to give you, as you slowly cook in the sun.
That’s when you have to go to the mountains.
Sun-splashed rice paddies on the road between Cao Bang and Bac Kan provinces
Cresting the Hill
On day three I drove west towards Ba Be. Despite having had a taster of driving through the sun-lit hills the previous evening as I approached Cao Bang, I was in no rush with my morning. Breakfast was a slow steaming bowl of soup, savoured as I waited for the shadows to evaporate from the narrow side streets of the town. Afterwards, I crossed to a café and finished the borrowed book on mindfulness that had steadied my senses in my hotel room deep in the night, as the main drag rumbled with morning life.
The bike pulls me uphill out of the city for a few minutes until I emerge on one side of a large valley. Wide surfaces protected from sheer drops down shimmering leafy mountainsides. The first half of the journey is a comfortable playground, the road thankfully relatively empty, though I’m not entirely in the wilderness yet. I’m in no rush, letting the pull of the bike do its work as I lean into empty turns. Mentally I’m tied to the mechanism of a roller coaster, the bike dragging me ever so slightly further up and into the mountains. The valley opens up in ever greater expanses as one burrows ahead further and further from the departing point. A long, controlled inhale of breath to the apex point of the ‘mountain’ – though many mountains are traversed and passed by, the metaphorical one feels to pull and pull upward, the bike guides me to lean into turns ready for a release that doesn’t quite come… before I descend to the valley floor, meander through some roads carved under rocky outcrops, past slow-flowing rivers and into the village of Nguyen Binh for a friendly lunch stop, with iced coffee dessert of course.
Shortly after leaving Nguyen Binh the road pulls up the side of the mountain. There is a fork in the road. To the right, the road to Ha Giang, to the left, what I presume to be a road that will take me – eventually – to Ba Be. I cross through a pass in the mountain and it looks like rain in the distance. Hazes hanging over mountains stacked four, five and six layers behind. Each layer green, but the ones beyond growing more and more silvery, not even looking like mountains just 2-D polygon shapes against a backdrop, a strange hologram of colours and other ephemera. Are they sheets of rain or some other trick of the light or the mind? Through what strange filter in the air was I about to pass through? I feel the fleck of a single drop of rain on my cheek, one splatters on the lens of my sunglasses. I am driving straight into the mirage.
If you pay close attention to yourself, at the start of every trip there’s a subtle nagging feeling that at some point – on some stretch of road, through some fault of your own, or your bike’s, or your fellow road user’s or some other physical artefact strewn along the highway – you’re going to die. But further along the road, perhaps several hundred miles in distance and several days in time, you reach the top of a hill. It looks like rain, but it doesn’t rain. It looks like the road ahead might take you to veer straight off a cliff, but it curves around and shoots you further and further careening through banked edges as though through the barrel of a wave, the sun dappling your shoulders like foaming wash, just enough momentum to caress you through and out the other side. And you don’t die. Your bike doesn’t fail. It doesn’t rain. You are pushed through, past the threshold and through the light at the end of the tunnel and into the sun itself.
The Golden Hour
At midday, the sun is hot as ever and scorches the whole land with a chrome blur. Things are a little cloudy, distant places blurred. But around 3 o’clock the sun settles in the corner for the evening, its day’s labour pretty much done, and instead of forging ahead it turns to offer guidance to those that follow it.
The lunch break, although consumed in a lively village at the lowest point of the day’s driving, is the apex of a day’s mountain driving. All things before it a build-up, a prelude, a last supper reaching the destination; not the night’s destination but the entire purpose of the journey. The whole day – the whole trip – a build-up to this point. A short physical uphill with a constant threat of rain, the odd splash of a single drop on your cheek. But it never comes, and so it always goes. Physically – and in every other dimension – it is all downhill from here. The rollercoaster releases.
The Golden Hour creates a realm of magic in which everything comes alive to show its true glory, freed from the oppressive overhead summertime blaze, every individual rock formation and tree and stage show underlit to give it its own moment in the spotlight.
The mountains breathe and inhabit the space around you. The Golden Hour exists outside of the normal limits of time. Like a happy hour in a pub, it seems to last for far longer than sixty minutes. It also exists outside the normal limits of space, for it is found in many locations, both in the objective world and in our minds. It is a place one can return to at will, as if it were a town, a village, or a coastal region itself. It hangs in between the woods of the forest, grasping space where it is allowed. It exists on one side of a country ditch but not another. It is a living thing, bounded by the limits of nature as all living things are, it flows through the atmosphere like a river. It is a pure filter of light, much more visible than when the sun reaches its highest dominance in the middle of summer.
There are few straight stretches in these mountains, and around every turn there are more turns, and such is their extent and range that even though you have a simple plan – ‘straight that way’, for example – your bike ends up facing every direction on the plane at some point. Surrounded by mountains on all sides at varying distances and with no idea of where the ‘bottom’ is, the sky instead starts to rotate around you like a gyroscope. The sun hangs on the edge of your periphery like a persistent mosquito or a guiding fairy. Despite perhaps momentarily blinding you at times, it also fulfils the sun’s main purpose – it energises.
Up and up and away into the mountains until there is nowhere higher to go and so you go through them and touch the sun. Freed from the city, freed from the sprawl, freed from the traffic and all the immediate grasp of humanity it brings, but with the body’s attention wrestled back and released into the earth. That fight-or-flight feeling of constant stimulation drawing attention that you’re going to die, your senses exposed to everything around you. But here, around you there is nothing but mountains and trees and the sun. The physical and metaphorical noise has been removed, so that everything you pass is free to wash over you. Although there is a destination in mind, you never want to reach it, and it even feels as if something is stopping you from reaching it, despite your steady and methodical progress. Every flick of the wrist propels you to glory, every corner you turn an expression of freedom, every swerve of the hips an escape from life itself, to be returned again to greater life.
Driving forever, like the mountains have no valleys, like the sun will never set, like the day has no end. This is the destination all along. Floating, not in a formless black void, but in a colourful sun-bathed space that dances with life. I have returned to the dream world of my own free will, and it has accepted me entirely. Time loses all meaning. When there are infinite choices of roads to take, of people to meet, it’s questionable if it even still exists. To stop would be to spoil the magic, to make decisions would be to question living, to take photos would be to snap you out of the spell created by the energy recklessly generated over hours and days of just being on the bike, of pushing a little harder than is wise, but by now, you know what complete control is. You have faith in the bike, faith in the road, faith in the world and faith in yourself.
I arrive to the edge of Ba Be Lake just as the last light is disappearing behind its mountains, just as I had planned, if not consciously then by virtue of driving into the long-setting sun and letting it guide me by an instinctual understanding of its path through the sky. Within minutes, it is night and the once golden scene is now a mysterious silvery-grey. I make the last few yards of the journey through a pitch-black forest, only my bike’s headlight casting a visible circle of light.
It has not rained, I have not died.
I feel like I’ve been driving forever.
Continue reading:
Part 1 – Meditation
Part 2 – Float
Part 3 – Sprawl
Part 4 – Dreams
Part 6 – Return
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