shaba daba da, shaba daba da

he's got a baguette tucked under one arm and a smile in his mind (but not on his face) after reaching the bottom of a cup of coffee so good he had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming. like everyone else in town, he's well dressed as he boards his little motor-scooter and slips away through narrow streets of gorgeous french-facaded buildings. no, readers, he's not the personification of a city in the museum that calls itself western europe - he is hanoi: home of patisserie, cafe culture, high fashion and motorcycle mayhem.


some of you may know how much i love streets and lanes. others have been witness to my love affair with the motorbike. put them together and what do you get? gerard and ondrej, clinging to man and machine as three become one and speed, swerve, slip and slide through vietnam's amazing capital.


traffic is hectic - i'm talking intersections where 50 motorbikes from each direction plough towards each other at the same time whilst children play and grannies hobble straight through the middle, unblinking and unscathed (usually). and to think that we too were in the middle of that fracas going for it! we (almost) didn't even have an accident. ok - gerard didn't have an accident, and i had only a little one: as i was mounting the kerb to park the motorbike on our last day, the bike jerked forward towards a parked pushbike and a garage fence, jerking my hand to cause further acceleration, in a vicious cycle that had spectators wondering what the foreigner was doing trying to ride up the side of a building. the moto and i got away relatively unscathed, but the garage door was injured and the pushbike was simply murdered.


we headed to tam coc for a day which was just like yangshuo in southern china, except that people were speaking vietnamese and bad french instead of chinese and bad english.



from hanoi we headed up to sapa in the mountains of northern vietnam near the chinese border to do a two day trek just like everyone else who's ever visited vietnam. despite this fact, it really wasn't very touristy, the mountains and rice paddies were simply gorgeous, and the pleasure of swimming in a deep and fast-flowing mountain river with fat warm raindrops hitting one's face can never be understated.



we stayed in a little tourist-hosting farmer's hut and ate dinner with the family. rice wine shots were had by the dozen, yummy food was gorged, more rice wine shots were had, speeches were made by the head of the family about god knows what, and finally more rice wine shots were drunk. with the family head eyeing another bottle, gerard and i slipped away before things got out of hand and passed out in the loft.



it rained for much of our hike, and the paths were just rock and mud. remember slip and slide? throw one of those over a few boulders at at least 30 degrees, turn it on, walk up it for a few hours with a backpack and you too can relive the magic of sapa.



community chest: go forward to cat ba island. if you pass go you may collect 200 dong (which is shit all).


after a day of motorbiking around cat ba island off the north coast of vietnam, we took a fisherman's boat (replete with cook and driver) and sailed for two days through world-famous halong bay.


the first day we did a bit of snorkeling, but the water was so dirty that we couldn't see anything. i stumbled upon a shallow area of coral, but was so scared of getting coral-induced lacerations (and subsequent infection) that i quickly swam away, only to find myself in super-shallow water surrounded by sharp coral danger. the panicked thrashing that ensued ensured cuts to every limb.


we later saw a jellyfish the size of a small submarine and it put us out of mind of swimming again for a while.


the scenery is stunning, there's no doubt about it. even the occasional coke can, plastic bag or load of human waste that floats by can't really dent the beauty, which is protected by its unesco status.


anchored near a small island in the evening, we pulled two mats on the roof of the boat and just lay back down under the stars. the wooden boat creaked and rocked from side to side and we just gently drifted away. tres ahhhhh.



we returned to hanoi a day early because we were just so fucking in love with the place. we saw a few things there, like the wax replica of uncle ho (only lenin to go now) and the famous water puppets, which were the shittest thing i've ever seen in my life (a shared opinion, apparently, as half the audience were on their feet and out the door before they'd even finished the final scene).


mainly, however, we were back in hanoi to just enjoy the city itself. sitting on little plastic chairs in sidewalk cafes, eating pastries, hooning around on the moto, and falling in love with hanoi, with life, and everything. shaba daba da, shaba daba da. peace.

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sometime a fire

we’re sitting around a table in a hotpot restaurant in downtown chengdu, cooking ingredients in molten lard. i didn’t believe it was lard until a puddle of it solidified on the table. it’s an eclectic group – they’ve all just come back from tibet – and sibastian has been exaggerating about my chinese abilities again, which makes me feel shy, but it’s so good to see him.

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there’s this girl – maybe 14 or 15 years old - and her limbs fold like rubbery old celery as her mother ties the sickly body to her back with a blanket before picking up her begging bowl. i’m on the other side of the road in the tibetan part of town stuffing strawberries into my mouth. they're so tasty, these strawberries, but there's a new emptiness now.

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david and flori – the austrians from hainan – have explained the way group dynamics rule all of our social interactions, and i champion the omega role – the bottom of the heap. we’re looking out over the forests of qian shan from a taoist temple, hypnotised by the rhythmic beating of the wooden drum, and i suspect that something’s changing in the way i view the world. it always feels like that.

we’re doing 140km/h down the freeway towards the chengdu airport, and i’m surprised that my taxi actually gets overtaken. i’ve got the window open and the air feels like it’s flattening my face, as if i’m approaching the speed of light or something. cindi lauper’s ‘time after time’ is playing in my head so loud it might be an aural hallucination, and i feel filled with a deep-down goodness. the voice in me says something like ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’.

you can find love anywhere i realise. in the trajectory of a super-sized burger king drink on its way down from the second floor of the victoria peak observatory building, in a chinese medical clinic even after the doctor’s walked in and seen your dick by accident, in that market area in wan chai where the next bird flu pandemic will be born, and even in the hong kong ferry terminal, where i always seem to be leaving gerard with a racing, confused heart. i look over my laptop screen and see the way the end bits of my plain socks form a really nice pattern when i put my feet together, and that suggests a deeper truth about the life of boys.

the weekend before i leave again, vov and i head out of brisbane to the chilly beauty of bald rock and girraween. it’s a good end to a period of time in which nothing happened, but everything that needed to did. i’ve secured a job in darwin for the rest of the year, my legal problems haven’t budged, and i’ve arrived back at point A with with regards to my health, armed with realistic expectations. i ride my sister’s bike along the river looking up at a sky that is bluer than anything i’ve seen all year, and i’m really pushing myself. i say ‘if you can make it up that hill, you can do anything with your life’. i always make it up that hill.

so life’s tumbling along in its usual manner of unthinkable adventure and surprise that could be interpreted as heaven or hell depending on your mood. in 72 hours i’ll be in vietnam with my arms wrapped around a frenchman wondering how that door into the normal world of my past clicked shut and locked itself without my even noticing it. there’s a tinge of sadness in my great relief, which i’m thankful for. there’s still light out, so i’m going for a bike ride.

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