I'd been awake for about nineteen hours when I landed in Hanoi and the heat was the first thing that I noticed. Not the noise, not the traffic, not the chaos everyone warns you about. The heat. It pressed into me the second I walked out of Noi Bai airport, heavy and damp, and I stood on the kerb with my backpack at my feet and my shirt already sticking to my back and thought, right, okay, this is real now.
The bus into the city cost forty thousand dong. About £1.30. I sat by the window and let Hanoi happen to me. Low-rise buildings with washing strung between them. Power cables everywhere, looped and tangled and sagging across the street in thick bundles. Women in conical hats carrying fruit in baskets balanced on bamboo poles across their shoulders. And motorbikes. Just, everywhere, motorbikes. I'd read about this but reading about it is nothing. There were thousands of them, moving in every direction, with whole families on single seats and cages of live chickens bungee-corded to the back. Nobody looked stressed. This was just how it worked.
I checked into the Old Quarter View Hostel on Ma May Street. Eight-bed dorm, third floor, no lift. The woman at reception gave me a cold towel and iced tea before I'd even asked, which nearly broke me after nineteen hours of Heathrow and turbulence and that particular exhaustion where everything feels slightly too bright.
There was an Australian in the dorm called Cal. Brisbane. Twenty-six. He'd been in Vietnam three weeks already and had that easy confidence of someone who'd figured out where to eat and how to cross the road and all the other things that feel impossible on day one. We ended up at a bún chả place that evening, Bún Chả 41 Cửa Đông, a few streets from the hostel. No real sign, just a woman grilling pork over coals on the pavement and a queue of locals on tiny plastic stools. You could smell it from twenty metres away. Charcoal and caramelised pork fat and something sweet that cut through the exhaust fumes.
I didn't know what I was eating when the bowl arrived. Vermicelli noodles, a broth that was sweet and sharp and sour all at the same time, grilled pork patties blackened at the edges, a plate of fresh herbs I couldn't name. Cal showed me how to eat it: dip the noodles, add the herbs, take a bite, chase it with a sip of bia hơi from a sweating glass. Fifty thousand dong. I think about that bowl a lot.
I lay in my bunk that night and listened to the city through the open window. It doesn't stop. It just changes. Horns and engines give way to kitchen sounds, then laughter, then a motorbike starting up somewhere far away, then quiet that isn't really quiet, just a lower frequency of alive.
The plan was simple and probably stupid. Buy a motorbike in Hanoi. Ride north to Sapa. Come back. I had no real experience on two wheels beyond a borrowed scooter in Bali that I'd dropped twice in three days. But I'd seen a photo of a mountain road somewhere online months ago and the idea had lodged itself in me and refused to leave, and that felt like enough of a reason.
On my second morning I walked to Phung Motorbike on Ngo Huyen, a narrow lane near the cathedral crammed with guesthouses and bike shops. Inside, a guy called Minh was working the counter. Maybe twenty-four, twenty-five. Spoke great English. When I told him I wanted to ride to Sapa he looked at me the way you'd look at someone who'd just told you they were planning to swim somewhere.
He talked me out of the Honda Win immediately. Chinese copy, he said. It'll break before Hoa Binh. He pointed me to a Honda Wave 110, semi-automatic. The workhorse of Vietnamese roads. No clutch, just a foot lever for gears. Every mechanic in the country knows it by heart. The one he had was silver, scratched, dented on the left side, with a cracked seat held together by electrical tape. Three hundred dollars. He'd service it overnight, new oil, new brakes, new chain, and I could pick it up in the morning. If I brought it back to Hanoi he'd buy it off me for two hundred, depending on how much I crashed.
I spent the next day riding around Hanoi and it was terrifying. Red lights seemed optional. Pavements were just extra lanes. Roundabouts were an act of collective faith. But there was a logic to it that I started to feel after a few hours. You don't brake, you flow. You make your intention clear with your body and the traffic moves around you. By the afternoon I'd stopped gripping the handlebars so hard and my hands had stopped shaking and I was starting to understand what the bike wanted from me, which was mostly just commitment.
That evening the hostel rooftop was doing its free beer hour and I ended up talking to a woman called Léa. French-Canadian, late twenties, travelling on her own. She was heading to Sapa too, by bus in a few days. We talked about the route and the weather and whether I was going to survive the mountain roads and then the conversation drifted to other things and the city played itself out below us and I went to bed thinking about the morning and the road and how quiet the mountains would be compared to this.