Ethereal

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 great 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. And yet we are evolution turned up to 11, the most staggeringly capable thing it ever came up with. This puts us at odds with nature, we need it far more than it needs us. Intelligent design would do better. But there is no god atop this mountain only happenstance and immemorial time. And beauty.
It is day 2 of the Ha Giang loop. The stunning vistas of day 1 have been eclipsed by, somehow, yet more jaw-dropping landscapes today as we wind further up into the limits of our wonder. It would be pointless to paint this scene, it is irreducibly 4 dimensional. And while my jaw does not literally drop a momentous serenity does fill me. It's a feeling in the stomach and the heart, as we proxy feelings to those organs, that the petty concerns we have at sea level do not matter here. Those great waves carry us above the plain of mortality. And there's hundreds more kilometres of this. The Ha Giang loop weaves sinuously through the mountains of Northern Vietnam. Ten years ago it was barely a thing, now it is a touchstone among travellers. Between those that have done it and those that want to, very few people fall into neither category. In ten years it has become accessible with better roads and a plethora of tour companies that will take you around it on the back of a motorbike. Or, should you wish, you can ride it yourself. I wished to and I hoped I could. I had accumulated enough confidence on a bike by the time I arrived in Hanoi to sign the waver that freed the tour company of responsibility should I drive off a precipice or lose a game of chicken with a rock wall. Like so many decisions on this trip the bravery or stupidity of it will only be determined by the end result. And, in a microcosmic way, isn't that the essence of life anyway? Our tour group is nine, seven with 'easyriders' (the guys that take you on the back) and two of us riding solo. The other is Rory, a Dutchman in his mid-twenties. With his blonde hair, blue eyes and spiralling height he looks like a Dutchman in his mid-twenties. We were at the same hostel in Hanoi, with the same intentions and hit it off immediately.

Now at the peak of day 2 we stand at the side of the road and look down at snaking valleys and those great waves and try to think of profound things to say. Well I do anyway. He is less concerned with the immortality of a phrase, less uncertain of his place in time. He's lived a small lifetime already and been exposed to trials that have shaped a person of equanimity and precocious wisdom. He wears it lightly though and, with little aggrandisement, imparts it to others to improve their lot. To be educated by a 25-year old doesn't touch my ego as I might have thought. Perhaps because he delivers his wisdom with a salesman's reassurance. He elides complexity in his prescriptions for happiness and despite my inclination to argue the points I find I am arguing against happiness and, really, what is the point of that? We talk for hours about life's challenges and their solutions and self-help is invariably it. Unavoidably it. The 'it' that makes me want to scream "I can't!", "I've tried!" and like the punch-drunk boxer "no más". Bruised as I am, through swollen eyes near-closed I can still see the truth of it. Help myself where no-one else can or remain the person that once wrote -

There's a land called happiness, I almost glimpsed it once upon a time. It was just on the other side of that valley, it was just over that hill. Keep walking and I'd reach it. Wind road where you will! I had time to spare. My stairway to heaven was steep but I wasn't tired. Now I am tired and the landscape is scarred. Scarred by heaving rises of anger. Pits of pity. The fields swell with the deluge of emotion. Hard emotion. Happiness now seems like a hole in the ground where the sound doesn't reach. Protected from the elements, safe from civilisation's suffocating grasp. Free to scream into still space. Wreaking cruel vengeance on the splinter that scratches me, the worm that bites my toe. Pushing at the walls that confine and crush my thoughts.

That is not a manifesto for happiness, it is the stylite on his inverted pillar ostentatiously decrying all that ever was and disowning all that ever could be. Rory would have no truck with that. If the 'self' in 'self-help' is the fly in the ointment of our conversations and prescriptions maybe it is also the grit in the oyster. If I can accept that without grit there is no pearl maybe I can get somewhere.
The rest of the Ha Giang loop was more of the same really. Stunning riding followed by copious amounts of 'happy water' (rice spirit) to which Rory and I never said 'no más' (but how strong Cat? How strong??). More jianzi during the breaks in the day and more great conversation under the stars at night. Oh and a little girl who thought dead Nazis were hilarious. Weird? Exactly! To say I was a changed man after four days on the road would be overstating it but I was starting to feel a bit grittier...