This is part 6 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.
Sign up for regular essays and stories about travel, the outdoors and the effect they have on us.
The Drive Home
The drive back to Hanoi takes a full day.
One of those long day’s drive that covers such distances and changes of environment that it takes up the mental space of four separate days of your ordinary life. The road out of Ba Be carves through stunning vertical cliffs, and once I’ve cleared beyond them I begin to wake from the dream I’ve been in for the last few days, reality slowly emerging back into sight as mountain ranges peel back and unravel until I’m back on a highway, the odd passing truck carrying building supplies reminding me that the so-called real world is calling; there are things to be built and there is work to be done. The stretch of road appears newly built, with few homes or signs of permanent life along it. Thankfully this means there are neither children nor chickens loitering along the side of it waiting to make a unpredictable dash across the road.
I stop for lunches and iced coffees and cigarettes in rural Vietnamese towns and villages and jot down notes, an attempt to capture whatever what happened out on the lake, and in the days leading up to it. Details, place names, times, routes, feelings. People, distances, distinctive and generic descriptors of scenery, the precise angle of the sun where it hit the lake as I gave up trying to describe what I was experiencing, the details and possible meaning and nature of dreams, the funny synchronicities of life and the similarities of this bike trip to all the others I’ve been on, big and small.
From the city of Thai Nguyen it’s a long, straight urbanised belt all the way back to Hanoi for over 80 kilometres, technically the countryside but in reality just one big built-up town and all the traffic that goes with it.
The road is busy, and not for the first time I’m grateful to be travelling alone.
It’s all trucks and buses and dust, with people only using bikes to shuttle from one side of the road to the other to get a bag of sunflower seeds or to drop their toddler off at the crèche – safer to momentarily join the masses of automobiles than crossing on foot. None of them look to see if anything is coming. When you know, you know.
“Just don’t hit anyone else.”
There is traffic and there is noise. There are near-misses and there are far-reaching consequences for not paying attention. There is the honking and harping of klaxons and the beeping and tooting of little horns, all of them coagulating into a wall of noise that feels thick in the air. There are clouds of dust and there is no room to breathe. There is no room for error, at times no room for even one more vehicle on this road, at least not at the steady highway pace we’re all locked into, like we’re all just jumping on a conveyor belt, or a dizzying merry-go-round.
Drive in this over-flowing river of chaos for a few hours and the hairs will stand up on your arms and neck for a week.
It’s absolute mayhem.
Luck feels like much more than half the equation.
The sun still hangs in the sky forever.
Splits in the timeline
I’ve often reflected on the long, humming, heaving, petrol-fuelled linear merry-go-round back from Thai Nguyen, and wondered about the statistical probability of death that we all face each and every day as we go about our lives.
Every day we stand within feet of passing cars, assuming they won’t hit us. We step over obstacles on stairs assuming that this time we won’t trip and fall down them and break our necks. Not that we should worry about these things, but how different things could be, every day hundreds of moments where a few seconds or a few feet difference – a fraction of nothing in the scale of the earth and the universe and our own lifetimes – could remove us from history.
The drive back to Hanoi made me question the nature of reality and if I hadn’t really died a thousand times in a thousand different universes on that road, only making it back alive in this one where I’m writing this, and maybe a couple others, but no more. Too many trucks and variables. In an alternate timeline my parents must be grieving over their reckless son, his physical form burst apart by a feckless truck driver, just a few short kilometres after making it home from an otherwise uneventful trip.
And at night my dreams were so physically overwhelming in the morning it felt like they’d rewired my brain, or had such a powerful neurological effect that my body is held together differently the following day, it feels like someone else’s. It felt as if I had been in some sort of crash, when I woke, like I was waking up for the first time in my life. Other worlds so vivid as to seem more real than this one, and the result every morning is waking to see the world a little differently to how you saw it the day before.
Maybe we all die all the time, but the timelines of history split, and your spirit goes back to the last time you dreamed, and you re-enter the world that morning when you wake up, to give it another go, with the memories and lessons stored inside that will safely guide you throughout the day, not in your brain but buried deep beneath your skin.
How can you ever truly know what happens when you dream? If you wake each morning the same person, just lightly refreshed, a pillow shaken-up and popped back down right where it sat? Each night we close our eyes is a test of faith, that you’ll wake up again in the morning the same person, un-interfered with in this world or another. Have I just fallen into sleep in that world and dreamed up this world, only to be woken up at the moment of my death each time, all of this a hazy memory, perhaps not even remembered in a rush to work, as so often happens to the worlds of my dreams?
People from my life so real it was as if I could feel their touch. Are they aware of my presence, did they dream about me that night as well? We remember so little. I wonder to what extent do these moving images represent reality, or if they are merely contrivances of the mind. Are they a deeper reality than we understand when we’re awake? If these are stories based in this world, are they documentaries of the past or warnings of the future, or existing in some distant present?
And if they are not, then surely what you see in these supposedly restful times affects how you go about the following day, month, year, the rest of your life. How can your conscious mind not correct and adjust according to what it’s seen, these worlds that for the time they exist are every bit as real as the ones that we construct in waking moments in the same space in our heads. How fanciful our boldest assumptions are shown to be when the reality of the present catches up to them, that these projections of our waking mind bridge a gap of realism to our softest sleeping dreams, such that either vision must have an equal chance of occurring in this so-called real world.
It doesn’t only happen at night, a day-time nap will do, it’s often better, more satisfying. You get two days in one if you play it right, not just a groggy continuation of the start of the day. Decide you’re napping, accept it, let your mind melt away as you sink in. You don’t even have to really sleep, just nod off a bit, doze. I’ve learned to snore long before I sleep, just when my head’s cocked back, my mouth open, my inhibitions lowered, my guard down. Slip into the dream world, for what feels like an eternity but might only be seconds, or fractions of them in this world. Keep one foot in this world for safety and don’t let yourself truly drift off forever, or you might not come back again – you might be dead to the world for the rest of the day, a dozing giant who consumes and subsists only on sleep.
Every night you close your eyes you do in fact die. And then you wake up, feeling refreshed after only a few minutes, returned a new person, born again. The important thing is not that you sleep – but that you dream.
Epilogue
The traffic thickens the closer I get to Hanoi; by the time I reach the centre it is jammed. From its outer limits it takes me two hours to get back to the central Old Quarter to drop the rental bike back to the shop. Just as I’m nearing the turn-off for the bridge that will take me straight there over the Red River, I inadvertently miss the turn and keep driving straight, my eyes sore, and take the long way around which involves sitting for an extra hour in the heaviest traffic of the city. This was not what I had in mind when I said I could drive forever, or like I didn’t want the day to end. But all days must end. I’ve been on the road for over eight hours at this stage, including various stops.
I tease my way down narrow tourist-laden streets, blinking as I readjust to a neon darkness I haven’t seen since I left. Hanoi always seems different when I get back to it, even after a single night away. The city gets developed so quickly these days that at least one shop probably has been renovated or even demolished and built back up in the short five-or-so days I’ve been gone. There is always work to do, always jobs to return to.
Light-headed and red-eyed, I make my way down the still-manic highway that runs tangential to the city’s centre. I can barely see, my eyes stinging with dust picked up miles and hours ago, my hands numb from the vibrations of the bike’s handlebars, my stomach rumbling so it blends in with the engines around me.
I pull my phone out while idling at a junction, red icons popping up from the alternate reality of the whatsapp group chat confirming that at least one of them still exists – “Having a few beers at the lake if you’re about?”
“Sound.”
I have just returned from a faraway land: a golden land of motorbikes and freedom and open roads where days mean nothing and time stands still, and now I need to reintegrate myself with this world again. The world of traffic and jobs and friends and text messages and things to do. I am starving. There is somewhere I need to go.
I hang a right at the Opera House, then a left.
I park my bike at the side of the street in a pile with fifty others and go straight to McDonald’s.
Click here to catch up on the story so far:
Part 1 – Meditation
Part 2 – Float
Part 3 – Sprawl
Part 4 – Dreams
Part 5 – Motorbike
If you enjoyed this, then why not sign up for my free regular newsletter. Essays and stories about travel, the outdoors, and stuff that’s good for your general well-being.
Or follow along on: