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Fate? Accompli.

Day 101 - Saigon
Saigon...shit, I'm in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in Bridgwater...
I stopped the bike on some non-descript bit of pavement in the middle of the city, turned off the engine and called time. It wasn't a triumphal ride down the Champs Elysée but I was done. Mission accomplished. Even if I got squished under a bus riding from this spot to my hotel they couldn't take my achievement away from me, 'they' being no-one in particular. And what about me? I do a brief monologue to camera to record the moment. No-one looks twice at foreigners talking enthusiastically into little black boxes on sticks anymore but this is only for my edification.
So, again, what about me? I think I feel relief. I don't know if I have more pleasure in the success of achieving my goal or at the evasion of disappointment. Those may be two sides of the same coin but they may also be reflective of how a person views their life. Do they view it as a pursuit of achievement or the avoidance of failure? If that is indeed the question then I would answer that my life has been marked by failure rather than success. The turned down corners of my book are on the pages titled 'education', 'driving', 'career', 'relationships'. I'd be lying if I said that the flitting successes I caught in the butterfly net stand in any great counterpoint to those universal milestones against which we all seem to be measured. They say you can't lose if you don't play the game but, Jesus, everyone is playing it. The failures aren't for want of trying. Well, they are and that was the problem. They're not for want of participating. It's a little less credible to be the counter-culture radical decrying the game just 'cause you weren't very good at it. And it's a lot easier to sit aloof from other's opinions of you when you're drifting through South-east Asia unshackled by expectations. But when I wash up again on more familiar shores unshackled I must remain. So while no-one will say I can drive I will say I can ride. And while others will say I must die I will say that I lived. And oh how I will wish I could live every second of it again, even the worst ones. Because only in the counting of the seconds is the scale of it understandable. And it is only in the living of those seconds that there is meaning. That is why it will be everything to me and nothing to anyone else. And that is fine.
I'd done the ride with days to spare, one in the eye for the planning fallacy. All I needed to do with my remaining time in Vietnam was sell the bike and tourist a little. The curbs still crumbled and the horns still honked but there was something a bit more ordered about Saigon (sorry Uncle Ho the old name is too evocative) compared to Hanoi. Thinking in terms of the war I could see how the energy of gritty, confined streets overcame the indolence of broad, reclined boulevards.
I was staying in a pleasant little guesthouse down a quiet alley just off a street whose closest parallel was...Khao San Road in Bangkok. This realisation came to me late, too late, at night in fact. The street shook with the ferocity of the sound systems and dancing girls on podiums out in front swayed in the pressure waves like those giant inflatable stick-men in car dealership forecourts. Young Vietnamese men tried to tempt punters in with promises of cheap vice and hearing loss. I resisted their solicitations because I have a strong moral objection to things like hearing loss. During the daytime in Saigon I found it was difficult to really stir myself to visit museums or temples or palaces, despite Saigon's fine selection. The touristing felt like a chore. It could have been weariness from 10 days on the road, it could have been weariness from 100 days on the road. Content though I was to potter around the city recharging my batteries for the next part of the trip. At least I wasn't drinking myself into a hallucinatory stupor in a hotel room and punching mirrors like Captain Willard at the start of Apocalypse Now though there is something a little racy about losing your mind in Indochina.
The second-hand bike market wasn't as lively as I had expected and I only managed to flog my trusty machine to a dealer a few hours before my flight to Thailand. Some Saigonese was very close to getting a pair of keys chucked into their hand. I'd miss the old girl. She'd given me no real problems through those 1800km, I couldn't have asked anymore. There was much more to see on this trip but I felt for the first time that I had struck out alone. Not in the sense that no-one had ridden from Hanoi to Saigon before, but in the free-form nature of my recent days. The tourist trail had thus far been surprisingly difficult to detach myself from. As in Egypt there often seemed to be a hidden hand pushing you back towards it (the market?). I fancied myself an adventurous traveller, drawn to novelty and a little danger, but maybe I just wasn't trying hard enough. Or, just maybe, it didn't matter.
The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological.
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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