Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 97 - Hoài Tân I'm somewhere but I'm not sure where. In a geographical sense I'm by the beach in Vietnam. In a town that may or may not be called Hoài Tân. It's the place nearby whose name remains when you zoom out of Google Maps. In a numerical sense I'm 1000km into a 2000km journey so, according to Pythagoras, halfway. In a specific sense I'm in a bar that is so empty of other people that my thoughts seem to echo even though the place has no walls. The only sound is the fan cooling me and the waves hitting the beach. I cough and it sounds like a foghorn. The staff mill about in the background but they have no English and I am deeply alone. I find the situation strange rather than unpleasant, though I feel bound to search my feelings. In a personal sense I find myself unsure if I'm the person I was, the person that pursued an unfulfilling life to breaking point. I suspect not but it is hard to judge when you're inside the fishbowl. Rory would insis...

Day 95 - Hội An Umbrella eh? Would you like an umbrella sir? Eh Eh? Cometh the rains in central Vietnam (and they do cometh) cometh the men with the means to keep you dry. My path had crossed Rory's again and we were sat outside a bar in Hội An as rain gently pattered the glistening streets. We took it in turns to politely decline the repeated offer from the salesmen who appeared in their multitudes after the first drop hit the ground. There was however no need for their flimsy, mass-produced protection from the elements. We *were* the elements. Toughened and smoothed by hills and valleys and time. Two pebbles in the stream. I'd got to Hội An the night before and realising that Rory was in town had agreed to join him on an organised pub crawl. It was like a form of speed-dating without the prospect of a date at the end of it. Most conversations with the other 'crawlers lasted only a few minutes and covered the basics of name, nationality, where you'd been and where you...

Day 95 - Huè My similarities to a Mandalorian begin and end with the wearing of a helmet. While the life of an interstellar bounty hunter is undoubtedly exciting this journey is also imbued with a certain freewheeling self-determination. I just hope I don't fall into a sarlacc pit. And for the first time in a couple of days I don't feel like I will. A night's sleep unruffled by (excessive) booze has led to a morning free from hangover and riding that is fun again. My mood is reflected in the landscape as the road bends to skirt the South China Sea. It becomes free of traffic and to my right is countryside. To my left begins to stretch mile after mile of empty beaches broken only by colourful fishing boats pulled up onto the sand. The road is good and I can safely take my eyes off it long enough to be lulled by surroundings that finally reflect those scenes I conjured in my mind before I started the ride. We are fed so many idealised images of travel, inaccurate at best and...

Day 93 - Dong Hoi Is hair of the dog a universal concept? (certain stricter Muslim countries aside). If so there may be something in it. Nevertheless I declined the café owner's kind offer of a beer and a toke on his enormous pipe (arf) and settled for a black coffee instead. A coffee served neither hot nor cold and the fact that the right word for this temperature escapes me shows the effects of my escapades over the past two nights. It was but a bitter drop in the black ocean of my fatigue. Anticipating an even worse day than yesterday I wearily swung my leg over the bike. After a few kilometres of riding that felt like nails on a chalkboard, if my brain was the chalkboard and the nails were nails, I pulled over to the side of the road. There was only one thing for it, I needed the help of a patron saint. Now you'd think that Saint Christopher would be the obvious choice, his specialism being travellers and all. But I felt a bit hypocritical calling on the help of a holy man...

Day 92 - Vinh Even in the most nihilistic recesses of a life lived under a 'light-touch' regulation of desire I struggle to justify the decision to ride with a steepling hangover. Not only because it increases the likelihood of death but also because it makes the time leading up to that death also feel like death. Not for me the rat-a-tat of Bonnie and Clyde's defiant end nor the Thelma and Louise weightlessness of being beyond reach. I haven't named the bike so I can't even meet my surely imminent demise was a plus one. Not that the bike would die of course, just look at the speedo. They'd pick it up, the police perhaps if they could spare a second from grift but more likely the locals, and it would be dusted off and back on the road in a day or two. Me they'd sluice into the gutter like they were shopkeepers cleaning their shopfronts, which they could be. To die on day two of this epic journey would make it look like a foolish idea and I can't have pe...

Day 91 - Hanoi "Of course I want to take it for a test ride". I don't want to take it for a test ride. I want to give this man $600 and quietly crash my new bike around the corner where he can't see me. But that wouldn't be proper so I gingerly take the bike down the unnecessarily steep ramp from the warehouse to the road. I say 'new' bike but it's got over 500,000km on the clock. Is that a lot for a bike? It sounds like a lot. Too much? I don't know. The ignition only started with extreme reluctance I know that much. It's been sitting there for a while the man explains. Is that a bad sign? I don't know. If I stall it during my test ride I'm walking back to the warehouse I know that much. Can you stall a bike? I think so. Well the thing goes forward and all the gears work and so, eventually, do both of the brakes. It has a wide comfortable seat and has luggage racks and a mobile phone holder for the navigation and is $600 too much for ...

Day 86 - Ha Long Bay If you're in Northern Vietnam then you certainly have to or at least ought to or possibly shouldn't visit Ha Long Bay. With this sort of conviction Rory (my Dutch friend from the Ha Giang Loop) and I find ourselves on a minibus to the bay and our path unavoidably intersecting with *shudder* a tour. The bus driver has a drop-off itinerary for the passengers and virtually no English. We stop to let off some other passengers and, noticing that we're only six minutes walk from our own hostel, we hop out. But the bus driver knows that this isn't our scheduled stop and enthusiastically waves us back onboard. Well alright we could get a bit closer and save our legs so we comply. My spidey sense is tingling though. And reader, sometimes you must trust these instincts when travelling. Because the driver then drives us back in the opposite direction with any logical hopes of looping back to our hostel rapidly diminishing. We end up miles away and on the phon...

Day 85 - Hanoi The bus back to Hanoi deposits me at 3AM and I stagger, dead-eyed, into bed. When was the last time I got eight hours sleep? Not for a while. But I've had four days of indisputable joy. Looking upon monuments to the meaning of life and swaying on tightropes where there was only forward, no turning back. To ride for hours along sheer drops and over unmade roads was surely beyond me. Until it wasn't, until I did. One of the best things I have ever done. It seems like a worthy trade even though my brain in its deprivation pulls low speed turns like an over-cautious Thai driver (but only on turns mind). One of the problems with dorms...one of the several problems with dorms is that sleeping in requires the hibernation ability of a bear or an industrial quantity of alcohol. Lights flick on, ladders creak, people chat and zips move endlessly back and forth, I wake not entirely refreshed. Back in the city I feel that welcome anonymity after four days of enjoyable but r...

Day 80 - Ha Giang We speed along our narrow path cutting through the great waves of history. They crash around us, breaking surf tumbles down inclines into oblivion and timelessness. Monolithic yet fragile. We sweep along the grand banks of time. These waves of rock seem frozen in their act of creation and destruction but they move, as all things do, to the unwavering beat of the world. We specks of dust twirl with furious energy and burn brightly, briefly. This stone will see many more of us before it too is gone. But we see something it cannot. We see the beauty of it all. There is no intrinsic beauty here, it only exists because we perceive it. The only meaning this place has is the one we give it. Whatever destruction we wreak, and that is plenty, we are also the only things that create meaning. There is no beauty without us. I could say I was humbled by this landscape, by this nature, but really we are nature. Sprung from the same well as the simplest amoeba, the biggest mountain...

>Day 75, 76, 77, etc.. I'm sat in the café in the hostel where I'm staying in the Laotian capital. There's a gramophone playing records from the 1920s. I feel like I've been here since the 1920s. The gramophone is set to the wrong speed, too slow, so the music is stretched and the vocals have a bassy, interminable groan. The gramophone is on all day and the sound makes time viscous and motionless. If I don't hear another saxophone for the rest of the trip that will be fine. Maybe I should get out and explore the city. But there's nothing to do in Vientiane except wait for your Vietnamese visa to come through. That's not quite true I suppose, there'd been some diversions in the evenings. I'd been having a quiet beer in a bar a couple of nights ago, studiously avoided the attention of an Australian bore who said things like "I've got nothing against aborigines right, but abos...", when I was co-opted into an odd social group of expats...

Day 74 - Phonsavan Phonsavan has the plain of jars. Thousands of jar-shaped vessels up to three metres in height and up to 3000 years old are scattered around the town. They were constructed by giants to store rice wine, at least according to local legend. The plains are also littered with unexploded bombs dropped by the Americans in the sixties to eliminate the giants whom they probably thought were communists. After my relatively successful time on a bike in Thailand I feel emboldened to get another one to tour the jars. Thus far the bikes had been automatics with nothing more to worry about than faster and slower. But this one was semi-automatic with controllable gears thrown into the mix. My confidence evaporated as I stuttered down the road with the engine howling. Flight was preferable to fight as I contemplated turning around, throwing back the keys and, shamefaced, leaving town. But I didn't. I learned. I learned my response to adversity is automatic and it is limiting. In...