Hanoi is flat out traffic crazy town and you'll die of old age if you insist on waiting for a break to cross a road. Stepping out into the maelstrom is actually a lot safer than it looks, but it still feels like taking your life in your hands.
Ah yes: The quiet streets of Luang Prabang - where a cat could lay around and be cool - are a fond memory...
OK then. Taking Amber's lead, I thought I'd also venture into territory unintended for this branch of the dreaming track. What the hell - there's not a lot going on in cold old Hanoi at the moment. We can blaze whatever trail we like, no?
The time we've spent in here in Hanoi has been similar in many ways to our time on Molloy Island before we left Australia. It's cold. It rains most days. We have an internet connection and Amber is busy working on a project. We're not getting out much and await the completion of processes we can't hasten before taking the next step on our adventure.
I'm in the process of re-inventing myself as a travel photojournalist, but I can't be sure that it's going to work. If it doesn't, I have absolutely no idea what I'll be doing when we eventually have to return to Australia. I know where we're planning to go, but I don't know where we're headed. Life's like that I reckon, so I'm not overly concerned. In thinking about it though, I recalled a few times when I'd found myself acting according to a script that wasn't my own. Nothing wrong with that. We all have to do it from time to time. I prefer to be aware of it when I am though!
I'm going to write a personal post. I don't do it very often because I feel like these thoughts don't really fit into the feeling we had in mind for these pages.
The problem with that is that our internal lives are like a set of lenses we see everything through – some days rosy, some blue, sometimes like a crazy hall of mirrors.
It's only been 6 months since Doug and I arrived in Southeast Asia, but I feel that this journey began for me more than 5 years ago, when I was 23 years old and I booked a flight to Canada.
Back then I had been working for the same company for 2½ years. I'd been in the same apartment for 18 months, in the same relationship since I was 18. I had a lot of friends who I related to, who were living similar lives to me. I had a lot of understandably naive notions about myself, other people and the world we live in. I left partly because I thought I could define myself by rebellion, by the things I didn't want – a car, a mortgage, a husband, kids, a career...
I once read that Bohemian peasants with a congenital blood disease which causes severe iron deficiency may have inspired much of vampire mythology prior to ol' Count Vlad. Symptoms include pallor, an aversion to sunlight (which causes skin lesions and rashes in sufferers) and the skin being drawn up around the mouth exposing the teeth. Drinking iron-rich blood alleviates the symptoms and garlic (which activates a haem-destroying enzyme) makes them much worse.
We haven't noticed any excessively protruding incisors or a lust for blood yet, but we are becoming increasingly nocturnal and are probably developing a bit of an iron deficiency.
That's life in Hanoi for vegetarian internet addicts who are missing their passports.
You see, it took us a while, but we finally decided on a longer term travel plan. We've signed up for a five month journey along the silk road. Starting in Tunisia in March we'll venture through Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, across the Caspian to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, along the north of Tibet and into western China, reaching Beijing just in time for the Olympics. It's going to be one hell of a journey.
