Touching down in Saigon, it strikes me that I am the farthest away from home I have ever been. Dragging my aching muscles through the automatic doors, a wave of wet, muggy heat arrests me. Rising out of the broad avenues of swarming mankind, the potent aroma of grease, street food, and diesel fuel fills my lungs while red sunlight filters lazily through the smog-covered streets. These streets cross one another at weird angles like the brown lines that lacerate the old map of Vietnam on the wall of our apartment. That map—cracked and warped from years in the Saigon heat—was made in 1954. The same year the French were humiliated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, marking the end of the French occupation of Vietnam, and the beginning of my country’s troubles here.
Motorbikes scream by us at breakneck speeds and I feel my heart jump out of my chest every time we cross the street. Collecting ourselves enough to hail a cab, we slip into the chrome stream of Saigon traffic and are lost in the anonymity of noise and heat. My feelings of both loving and hating the street alternate rapidly, spinning together into a strobe wheel of maniacal, pulsing energy. It seems to seep up through the cracked concrete and form a circuit cable, plugged straight into the heart of this place I have newly discovered. Good morning Vietnam.
A woman wields a pushcart down the busy avenues and alleyways of Sai Gon
Diary of S/Sgt. Nicholas W. Halden
5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), United States Army.
Da Nang Air Base, January, 1968.
It was one of those smiles that was simple, genuine, slightly bashful, but capable of tearing a rift in spacetime that could force the world to stop moving for a single moment. It made you feel like you would do something, anything just to see it again. I sat down on the hot metal bench outside the canteen. She sat down next to me. I was still grinning stupidly at her. The Vietnamese have a saying that Vietnam has two seasons: hot and hotter. As her dark hair clung lazily to her bare shoulders in the scorching afternoon heat, I was beginning to believe it. She had a way of speaking that was alternatively cross and inviting. Amid my fumbling attempts to make conversation, her face seemed to alternate between curiosity and incredulity. It spoke to an enviable self-confidence that anyone would find extraordinarily attractive. At the same time, there was a kind of inexplicable sorrow in her eyes that came through even when her face lit up in a spontaneous laugh. If only I had understood the source of that sorrow then, I would have perceived the hidden strength that it must have taken to keep her slight frame together.
The rain lets up for a brief moment to reveal a stunning view of a Buddhist shrine in the Ninh Binh region of Vietnam
It’s three weeks later and my ash-white knuckles are wrapped tightly around the disintegrating rubber handles of my motorbike. With my heart in my throat, I navigate treacherous, washed out mountain roads, noisy, rain-slicked highways. My knee aches from where I fell off a smaller bike less than a month before. My only goal is to survive the next mile, then the mile after that. I don’t like motorcycles or scooters. I don’t like things on two wheels or things that require balance. I definitely don’t like this combination of the two.
A week before that I am diving into the ice blue waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, wary of the prying eyes of police patrol boats. I race my friends to the shore. I win. It's the only sport I was ever any good at. That night we learn how to cook a traditional Vietnamese meal of Gỏi cuốn together. We almost crash my drone in Ha Long Bay. It’s two weeks earlier and I’m watching the sun rise over the eighth wonder of the world. I’m describing the faded reliefs on the walls of Angkor Wat to my companions. I tell them the meaning of the Dharmachakra–the Wheel of the Law–and the story of how the devas and asuras of Hindu cosmology joined forces to uncoil the body of Shiva’s world-serpent Vāsuki to churn the Sea of Milk. They remind me that it’s six in the morning, and we’ve barely slept in three days. I stare at the relief and my tired eyes watch the great nāga uncoiling. I dismiss it as a trick of the light. Three weeks later and we are on a beach in Hoi An, saying goodbye to a motley collection of travelers we have come to view as our friends.
A brief respite to take in the beauty of the Hai Van Pass before we continue on our journey from Hue to Da Nang
Another city, another week. Another taxi screeches to a halt next to the party hostel. We are greeted by the dull thudding of loud western music coming from the backyard. Inside is a dizzying soundscape of chthonic beats and rhythms accompanied by an epileptic assault of light and color. Stumbling through the doorway in a pleasant state of inebriation, our party of seven or eight disbands to the four winds in search of whiskey, vodka, old friends, and new flirtations. The scene that hails us as we wander out of the indoor lounge area out into the pool deck seems straight out of a film montage of a wild fraternity party. Drunken Australian boys perform backflips into a pool full of half-naked Scandinavian girls playing volleyball. Bleached-blonde Californians play beer pong with a pod of aggressive Kiwis. A pair of predictably boisterous Polish guys shouts for more beer over some girl sporting a grating New York accent and not much else. An army of swift, competent bartenders and hostel staff cater to their every need. In one corner a Dutch student explains to an inattentive new friend everything that is wrong with the cheap Vietnamese grass he’d pawned off of a street vendor. He is stoned out of his gourd. My friend and traveling companion Jon turns to me with an expression of shock, exasperation, and something akin to horror as he illustratively sweeps his arm over the debauched scene.
“This is the side of Southeast Asia I always knew existed and never really wanted to see.”
I nod in agreement. Saigon. Siem Reap. Hanoi. Da Nang. Hoi An. For three weeks, Jon and I have been crisscrossing Vietnam and Cambodia along with Jon’s little brother Josh. The three of us are closer in appearance than we were in demeanor. At school we were often mistaken for each other by our own friends. Josh ran over me on his skateboard freshman year and we instantly realized each boy was the other one’s doppleganger. It was the start of a long, obnoxious friendship. A fateful pairing of opposites. Five years on, here we are together, on the far side of the world.
An hour later we were sitting, hand-in-hand at a grimy restaurant table. Two ARVN MP’s lounged at the entrance drunkenly field-stripping their 1911’s and punching tiny holes in the table with the firing pins. Los Angeles was there too. He sat across from us smoking bad cigarettes and drinking what passed for the local beer. He liked me, but I could tell he still clearly viewed me with suspicion. I was an intruder, either on a friendship or a potential romance. It was inside that shoddy little restaurant tucked into an alley away from the bustling main street that I discovered the story behind that inescapable sadness in the girl’s eyes. Her mother had been taken from her. Cancer. Not long before, either.
The suns gently sets over the beach in Hoi An.
The city of Hoi An–once a thriving conduit of trade between China, Japan, Europe, and India–now serves primarily as a landing zone for millions of Western (and increasingly, Chinese) tourists who descend in droves upon the city’s charming old town, pleasant beaches, and ubiquitous watering holes. The city boasts hundreds of backpacking hostels that cater to all the carnal needs of thousands of drunk, promiscuous Australians, Kiwis, Dutch, South Africans, Germans, and the occasional Canadian or American.
Beautiful young women and handsome young men flit in and out of this Vanity Fair of loud music, dirty bathrooms, alcohol, and illicit substances night by night, seeking a fix, a thrill, or some way to bury whatever it is that brings them halfway around the world to a place like Vietnam. Every year following the rainy season, these nomads descend upon Southeast Asia for a variety of reasons, savory and otherwise. You can easily distinguish the veterans from the new arrivals to this scene. There is a hollowness, a kind of numbness that steals the light from their eyes and the life from their laughter. It's a kind of sickness that comes from long exposure to the Pacific sun and too much time wandering aimlessly through the nightclubs and drug dens of Southeast Asia. A narcotic haze that cripples ambition and manifests in sun worn skin, cheap cigarettes, and fifty cent Saigon beer.
She toyed with a crumpled hospital note stuffed inside a well-worn East German passport. The wound was still deep, and the memory was still fresh. The opiate healing of time and distance had not yet blunted the jagged edge of grief. Halfway around the world, her eyes brimmed with hot, wet tears of love and loss. Her beautiful face was now crossed with rivulets of long-withheld grief. Now I understood the deep, black wells behind her dark eyes. The quivering at the corners of her perfect mouth that betrayed each smile. Now I understood why she was so far from home, with nothing but an old rucksack and the weight of memories she longed to recall but wanted desperately to forget.
The Ninh Binh Pagoda after a rainstorm.
Of the hundreds of expats and long term travelers I encountered in Vietnam, only one seemed to have escaped this hollowed out existence. He was handsome, thirty something Dutch physical therapist named Jop. Jop thrived in the humid, sluggish environment of Hoi An without letting it rot his soul or cloud his judgment. He was ambitious, kindhearted, fit, bright, and full of life and a spirit of adventure. Jop had recently separated from a longtime girlfriend and–like many travelers I encountered in Vietnam–had journeyed to Asia with the hope of discovering something new about himself. Jop took his occupation as a physical therapist quite seriously and when I complained of the residual pain in my left knee from a motorcycle accident a month earlier in Turkey, he insisted on giving me a proper examination. Jop was one of those people in life to which you instantly, inexplicably warm. There is a goodness in them that exudes through their smile, their actions, and their thoughtful perspective on life.
The lingering intoxication of alcohol and cheap cigarettes heightened the emotional resonance of the moment. As in a dream, there seemed no progression from one moment to the next. From one location to the next. Just jumps. Sudden lurches that had a kind of logic to them, but you still could never determine how you arrived at the place you were from the place you had been previously.
The archetype of the washed-up expat stands in distinct contrast to the character of the local residents, who are almost uniformly industrious, kindhearted, entrepreneurial, and ambitious. Though it feels like well worn Western characterization, I can confidently say that in all of my travels I have never met a people more hospitable than the Vietnamese. I used to wonder at stories of American G.I.’s returning to Vietnam after the war because of their great love for this beautiful country and its wonderful people. But having travelled here, I realize that there is something uniquely welcoming about this land and its people that I have not encountered elsewhere. The memories that I cherish from my whirlwind journey to Vietnam are a credit to its beautiful vistas, its captivating history, and most of all, its fascinating and inspiring people.
Sunrise over Tam Coc, a picturesque village in the Ninh Binh province.
Before I had even realized it, Los Angeles was gone. I had no idea where to. I just suddenly found myself alone with her. We were walking down a rain-slicked sidewalk. Colorful shop windows and signs cast weird colors across dirty puddles that I tried to avoid and she walked through without seeming to notice. My arm was around her slender waist. Her head occasionally nestled into my shoulder as we walked. I felt somehow younger, childlike even. Like I was taking a long-expected walk with a long-admired crush. As we approached the hotel, beneath the ghastly flicker of street lamp, I stopped suddenly and pulled her into me. Her slight, soft body melted into mine in a liquid embrace. There was an unlooked for tenderness in her kiss. It was without restraint, but contained no trace of the erotic. It was like a whispered sigh, or prayer. Without pretension or remorse. It had nothing of the transactional arousal of excitable bodies that a kiss between strangers often elicits. We stood outside the hostel, trying to prolong the fleeting moment. It was a moment of calm and understanding, despite the rush of passing buses and motorcycles. A light rain like dew gathered on our clothes and ran down our hair in tiny droplets. She drew her head away from mine and looked into my eyes. The sickly colors of the street pooled into still warm tears which formed at the corners of her eyes and mixed with the cool evening rain. She smiled, suddenly, turned, and disappeared back through the hotel door.
Travel is an invitation to surrender. To surrender your comforts, your routines, your preconceived notions about how the world is, or how it should be. It is an invitation to surrender to the little interactions, the new friends, the home-cooked food, the harebrained ideas. Even if that means white-knuckling it down rain-slicked Vietnamese highways and flooded dirt roads in a motorbike or flying a drone for the first time off the back of a cruise ship. Travel reminds us that sometimes happiness is little more than finding yourself in the right place at the right time. That sometimes joy comes from opening yourself up to the strangers around you, stripping away your expectations and emptying your heart of your endless quest for purpose. In an age where we live for the future while remaining haunted by the past, throwing yourself onto the mercy of a new place, in a new way means surrendering–at last–to the wonder and opportunity of the unknown and the endless potential of the present moment.
Josh captures me capturing a final sunset over Ha Long Bay in the Gulf of Tonkin