Motorcycle Tour(ism)

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Every place has a set of standard experiences that a minimal amount of tourist research should reveal. Toronto has the CN Tower and Ripley’s, Paris has the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, etc. During the year that birthed this blog, I rarely did them.1

The standard experience I came closest to doing was the Ha Giang Loop. An astute reader might see that much of my year was actually building towards driving this legendary road. I first rode Grab bikes in Bangkok and learned to drive a motorcycle around similar geography in Chiang Mai. Much of inner monologue during — and maybe even my motivation for doing — the meditation retreat was about whether I should do the loop. Even to this day, I can recall the polished wooden floors from my left-back position in the meditation hall. I remember the curved roads and drunk hostel parties that filled up my imagination of what the loop was. The mountains, which are the real appeal of the experience, didn’t occur much to me, as I weighed various questions of whether I would be safe, whether I wanted to hire an easy rider, whether I would even enjoy the parties.2 In the end, doing the loop didn’t feel right; Ha Giang remained unconquered.

Two years later, my exchange friends expressed interest in going. With a WhatsApp message react, €20 deposit, and flight that took three clicks to book, I was signed up to meet my old foe again.

On return to Hanoi, I flew to Siem Reap. Angkor Wat theoretically operates as a complete opposite to the Ha Giang loop. The famed period is sunrise rather than sunset, which marks the end of driving and the beginning of happy water. Smoke wafting from incense sticks replaces the traditional wooden tobacco bongs. You are now meant to walk through the sweltering Siem Reap heat rather than being driven around the cooling mountain air. And yet, two of the people in our tour group had — like me — just completed the loop.

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The end of Ha Giang felt underwhelming; my victory lacking in glory. Over the course of four days, we were dressed in plastic ponchos by our drivers and taken to see stunning vista after stunning vista. We ate the same cheap carbs friendly to Western palates and learned some new monosyllabic ways to trigger a collective downing. During the frequent stops, before the details of the mountains had fully expanded, there was always a new dubstep-remixed song played, or an offer of tourist-priced coffee, or a stray shuttlecock flying by; and so before I knew it, our group was sitting in a row off the edge of a dock, soaking in the last mountain, looking up & more so looking at each other. I was on the verge of completing what two years ago, felt decidedly impossible. All it took was joining the big group and allowing myself to be driven.

At one of the earlier stops, I got onto the bike before my driver did. Jokingly, I put my hands on the handlebars, as I had done a few times; this particular time, my driver laughed along and got on the back. I had forgotten where the on switch was, which made my driver laugh even more. Unfortunately, that was the only thing I had forgotten, and I peeled off the curb in second gear, smoothly accelerating to third. Laughter faded to “no, no, no!!”, and I realised that he had only just now understood I knew how to drive.

So right before the end, I was on my way to join the big group sitting in a row, but then I switched courses and sat next to my driver. Throughout the trip, I had a lot of questions and I had no questions in particular; now that it was clear I liked the motorbike element innately, more than the average participant who sees its instrumental function, we spoke more easily (over Google Translate) about some technical driving pointers. As a concluding remark, I asked what he was doing before he was driving. He answered that he was working in Shanghai. I then asked whether he spoke Mandarin, which Google Translate mistranslated to orange, at which point we both jumbled through the phrase “speak Mandarin” and then leapt up simultaneously. This entire time, we could have communicated.

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Our tour guide for Angkor Wat introduced himself as Indiana Jones, saving us the trouble of remembering a non Anglicised name. He had an inconceivable amount of energy for 4:30am. When talking about the temples, his voice naturally took on a lively lilt, with perfectly-timed jokes simple enough to guarantee even the non-native English speakers know to laugh. When we spoke quietly at the front of the group, in transit from landmark to landmark, Indiana was more reserved. He is Mahanyana Buddhist, he was married in front of 500 people, he was born in a refugee camp, he says these biographical details like we share fun facts, just enough interest to match the recipient’s virgin ears but with the inevitable monotony that comes with repeated interaction. Tourism lets you feel like everything is new, interesting, fresh, and that all these properties will extend to the questions you direct at the locals. For them, however, the most beautiful sights in the world are backdrops to daily routines; and maybe the same is true of interactions that we carry home with us but are just a part of home for others.

Both Ha Giang and Angkor Wat were extremely smooth trips. We had breaks often and at the perfect time, with seemingly every possible reason to complain pre-empted. Everything is priced just right: cheap enough for droves of travellers to fondly remember their trips to other potential travellers, expensive enough to stimulate the economy. Our guides had an intuitive sense for when we were too hot, when we were tired, etc. The best courses of behaviour are well known and planned for you through Instagram Reel itineraries, like the Hanoi-authentic Arcteryx jackets that sprawl across artificially supported viewpoints and the four photo spots for Angkor Wat that Indiana Jones conveniently labelled A, B, C, D. You flit in and out of each others’ lives, putting your time and your life into the hands of these kind locals who in turn make a living off of the constant flow of your relatively stronger currencies. Perhaps this infrastructure is why there are travellers with untanned skin dancing on the back of the bike and cell phones pointed upwards at the sunrise like it’s a Travis Scott concert.3 Perhaps this support is why these two ostensibly opposite attractions have an overlap in crowd.

On my gap year, I was pretentious and dismissive of these kinds of experiences, but also secretly envious, with the mimetic desire that the “can’t miss” attractions were obligations I failed to fulfil. The pretension was wrong: the mountains are still calming, the temples still beautiful, the concept of eating at tourist restaurants with “high food safety” holding merit. “Staying at the resort” isn’t equivalent to the original sin, especially if you enjoy the resort, and the same is true for Guinness at Temple Bar or $1 pizza in Times Square or TeamLabs in Tokyo.4

Nonetheless, on my last day in Cambodia, I determinedly found a fish noodle roadside stall. I got stares and huge grins as I walked in to order. I tried to suppress the anxiety of my friends who had gotten food poisoning and lie confidently when she asked if fish was okay (I was psychosomatically intolerant for my whole life). The food was good, don’t get me wrong, but when I got up to pay, I received an accommodating-but-exasperated motherly smile when I handed over a $10 USD bill (the smallest I had in my wallet). Before I turned to return to the safety of my hotel, the shopkeeper asked “you could eat it?”, curious if my obvious tourist tendencies had allowed me to stomach the bowl. I said “yes, thank you”, for the bowl, but more so for allowing me to experiment, because while it wasn’t salient to her, it was salient to me. That night, we ate at a Western steak restaurant. I remember it all as a great trip.

Footnotes

  1. This was due to a range of factors: I wasn’t that interested; many of these experiences take a long time; they’re generally aimed at groups/people with more stable financial lives than a solo backpacking 18 year old. ↩

  2. Well, to be honest, I kind of knew I wouldn’t really enjoy them, and so my inner monologue was more about whether it was worth doing them in order to see the mountains. ↩

  3. Credits to Pablo for this one. ↩

  4. Or maybe I’m just trying to justify having done all three. ↩