This is the way

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 disingenuous at worst, that reality is an unavoidable disappointment. And while reality worsens the images never seem to and still we all come. You can't blame people for wanting to believe these idylls they see are in easy reach but they so rarely are. Yet...with the bike parked, my toes sinking into the sand and not another soul to be seen I am in one. The sun turns the sea a deep blue and the beach is just waves. Not for the first time in these three months I feel inconsequential. But now it is the universal big-picture kind where trivialities of existence and the joy of simply being rein for a brief period. Beach 10/10, facilities 1/10, service 1/10, would idolise again.

As I approached Hué the road again cut through the flat expanse of rice paddies. There were also swathes of arid, bone-coloured soil on which had been built tombs and temples. Life, after, death. At a petrol station just outside the city I managed to drop an earbud through a grating into a drainage channel. It only took a couple of minutes of forlornly looking through the narrow grating at the earbud a mere 10 centimetres away for helping hands to appear. And connected to those helping hands were slenderer fingers than mine that slid between the grating but still came up empty. Next appeared a metal tool shaped like a dustpan on a stick. This was wangled through the metal and managed to scoop the earbud and lift it high enough to be grasped. There was now four Vietnamese involved or invested in the operation and I have a felling that if the dustpan hadn't worked other ideas would have been tried until half the town was involved and somebody had been dispatched to find an angle-grinder. The people in this country have done nothing but live up to their reputation for friendliness and generosity thus far. Except the police. Fuck tha police.

Hué is a prominent feature on the tourist trail despite the fact that it took an almighty beating from both sides in the war. the old imperial city still stands, in parts, despite the best efforts of the French, the Americans and the Vietnamese themselves. It's always the buildings that suffer when relationships break down. Also the children. But, and I don't know if this is a dangerous and inhuman callousness, I mourn the buildings more. I suppose if you asked me to decide between killing a child or dynamiting the Taj Mahal I could never prefer the former but even as I begin to write that sentence with certainty I become less sure. The thought of something so unique, so beautiful, so perfect being lost is awful to me and doubtless most parents would describe their children in the same terms for that is an emotional connection that transcends all others. I do not and cannot care about their child in the same way and if I were allowed to make the decision without ever meeting them then I could maybe abstract my instinctive human connection enough that I could live with myself. But then could *others* live with me? Certainly a large part of society would judge me a monster, for who kills children but the very worst of us? Most people won't see that child as abstract to them in the same way they do a 10-year old garment worker in the rubble of a collapsed factory in Bangladesh. And because this is one child in a wildly hypothetical but brutally binary equation, not a hundred or a thousand in a Stalin-esque statistic. If the age of enlightenment was about anything though it was about the promotion of reason over emotion and I wonder what utilitarianism would say about this dilemma? Is a greater joy produced by a child or by the Taj Mahal? Certainly the latter as the joy of the person that stands in front of it pinching the dome or queuing for the Diana bench shouldn't be measured with less weight that the architect or Mughal scholar that feels deeply its cultural significance to their trade. And perhaps it is a good example to pick as it is a building of no particular religious significance. It is a tomb built by a person to honour someone they loved. It is a massively expensive edifice of colossal self-importance built by an emperor of impoverished millions. It is not *for* the people, it is not *of* the people. The Kabaa or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre would have an easier time in this argument I suspect. No matter whether you believe in the gods of the people that pray at those sites you cannot deny the emotional significance of the buildings to the pilgrims. There is a more tangible relationship between people and their places of worship and a more quantifiable despair when they are lost. Belief is tangible and quantifiable where atheism and secularism is not. I don't know if it would be the child or the Taj for me. But I begin to wonder if there is a hidden danger in the question, that to ask at all is a Pandora's box. Maybe the societal emphasis on the sanctity of life over everything else is to avoid the possibility of grading people's worthiness to live. The darkest chapters in our history did often include an element of human-accounting. I still don't know if it would be the child or the Taj, don't vote for me. I have spoken.