December 23, 2016

I’m on a 15 hour plane ride from LAX to Hong Kong, connecting to Hanoi.  It’s the Eve of Christmas Eve.  For the next 7 days, I’m traveling through Vietnam by myself, and then I’ll meet Angel in Luang Prabang, Laos.

I write a lot about love and the ending of love, loneliness and travel.  I guess I think a lot about love and loneliness, and when I’m traveling those thoughts come to the surface more easily.  I take the time to dig towards the center of them, on these travel days when my normal day to day life doesn’t crowd out these thoughts.

I’m excited to travel by myself for the first week, though I am going into this trip feeling a little lonely from the outset.  Angel started traveling a month ago.  We haven’t had any kind of “boyfriend talk”, and even though we haven’t, I stopped hooking up.  It felt weird, so I stopped.  So, I haven’t even cuddled with anyone in weeks.  I guess that will focus your mind on loneliness and love as well, huh?

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The average times per hour that I am almost creamed by a car or motorbike is four.  Hanoi has a million motorbikes (literally, a million, that wasn’t just a turn of a phrase.)

My guide Tung and I did not communicate easily.  He was a sweetheart, but I could barely understand anything he said.  G’s and C’s and most other consonants came out of his mouth as Z’s.  He understood about 20% of what I said, though he acted like he understood 100%.  Halfway through our tour of the Old Quarter of Hanoi on bicycles, I asked “Have you ever guided anyone on a bike tour?”  “Oh yes,” he said emphatically.  I shrugged.  At the end of the day, he announced with a big smile, “I really like the bike tour, it was my first time!”

The Presidential Palace in Hanoi…very yellow.

Back to the million motorbikes.  Imagine thousands of them on every narrow street and blind alley, flying from all directions, mixing and careening between cars, inches from disaster at every moment.  Traffic lights are a suggestion, a fact reinforced when my guide asked me at the first stop light “Do you like to pay attention to the legal?”  “Nah,” I shrugged.  When in Rome.

A view of the maze of Hanoi out of my hotel window.

So, we ignored the stoplights.  Intersections were rarely at right angles, and often not going in four directions.  They would veer in three directions or five directions as often as four.  As far as I could tell, ancient ladies on mopeds and anyone balancing something to sell on the back of their moped can also go in the opposite direction of traffic.

Needless to say, because it was nearly my last afternoon on earth, this was my favorite afternoon in Hanoi.  It was extreme urban sports in the middle of a bustling Asian city.  It gave me a fresh understanding of my grandmother’s fear of merging into freeway traffic.  This is probably how Illinois interstate traffic looked to a farmer’s wife who rarely went to a big city.  In Hanoi, every intersection is a calculation of how fast each car and motorbike was going, their direction of travel and angle of turn, whether I would plan to go to the right or left of them, whether I would make it into the tiny space of road not blanketed by motorized two-wheeling death machines.  And not all of these mopeds were driven by young guys or girls.  There were babies on the back, gray women in their eighties, teenagers smoking cigarettes and talking on cell phones with their girlfriends clinging to them with one hand.

Everyone was aware of exactly how large their bikes or cars were, as they merged within inches every few minutes.  Making a left turn was especially fun.  Cars do, generally speaking, drive on the right side of the road in Vietnam.  Had Vietnam been an Anglo-driving country, I probably would have given up – that would have taken me over the edge.  Left turns involved inserting my bicycle into a space about 1/10^th the size that I would consider safe in the US, and trusting that every vehicle was paying attention and would flow around me.

30 of the 30 million motorbikes

And they did.   The Vietnamese were simultaneously the best and the worst drivers in the world.  The worst because they didn’t really care about rules – if it works, do it.  The best because they paid perfect attention and didn’t kill me (or each other) every five minutes.  I guarantee you that there would have been a 10 car American pile-up on every corner in the states.

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I spent Christmas Night 2016 by myself, in the most adorable tiny train car traveling from Hanoi to Sapa.  The bed was just big enough for me to sleep on, I don’t know how someone who was an inch over 6 feet would fit in it, but it was cute beyond belief.  I wanted to eat it.

The night-train car to Sapa.

I forgot how much I loved the night trains I took during my days of backpacking through Europe.  You are lulled to sleep by the rocking of the train, and you wake in the morning to a new adventure.

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Angel takes up a lot of space in a room.  Wide shoulders and a tiny waist, considering his frame.  When you first see him, he’s one of those guys who is impossibly masculine, without trying to be.

There’s not an overabundance of intimacy when he first meets you.  He’s friendly, but a polite kind of friendly. He doesn’t kiss you like he wants to be your best friend, his eyes don’t light up in a fake LA way the first time he shakes your hand.  He smiles, and that’s all you get.

Our first date was the polar opposite of the movie scene where a long-unhappy married couple don’t speak to each other over a dinner table, or a bad rom-com scene where two people awkwardly try to figure out topics of interest.  We couldn’t stop talking, to the point where each of us interrupted the other many times, because we were trying to get extra words out.  Each thread of conversation, whether travel in South America or early careers or our first languages, diverged four or five times instead of halting or withering.

In a front corner of the crowded dining room at Sawyer, the low din of the full room force us to lean in to hear each other.  And I’m still learning how to hear his accent, especially when it’s loud.  I still wonder if this is a date, or if he just wants to have dinner with a friend.

We are sitting at right angles to each other, so I rest my hand on his leg for one second.  I want to figure out if this is actually a date, and I figure if it’s not…I’ll know by his response.  He puts his hand firmly on my leg.  It’s a date.  He probably wonders why a giant grin slides across my face.

Our first kiss, (or rather our first kiss on a date), was back at the house after dinner, just after we walked in.  In the kitchen.  His arms wrapped around my waist quickly, and mine reached around his neck.  He pulled me in, and I could smell him, the good smell when you’re close to a man.

That first kiss was only 6 weeks ago.

I’m thinking about him as the train pulls into Lau Cai, dark and foggy.  It is a 45 minute drive to Sapa and the Hau Long Sapa Hotel.  It’s only been a few days, but I’m settling into the rhythm of a solo vacation.  But I’m still thinking about when I will meet up with Angel in Laos.  When everything will change.

The Hau Long Sapa Hotel.