by Matt Gross
And then we arrived. The Lucy Hotel, just off Pham Ngu Lao Street at the edge of the backpacker quarter, looked not much different from its neighbors: narrow, seven stories tall, the sidewalk its driveway. It was, Ms. Thanh explained, what was known as a minihotel, a residential building that catered to both tourists and long-term visitors; the neighborhood was full of them. Yet even from the outside, the Lucy betrayed subtle signs of sophistication. Its concrete façade looked freshly painted, and a movable white picket fence separated the entrance from the terra-cotta-tiled parking area. A door opened for me. I walked in.
Inside was cool and spacious. Tiled floor. High ceilings. Water trickled in a fountain somewhere. A willowy teenage girl practiced piano, the notes echoing gently off the walls. I sat down in a lounge chair, its frame cast iron, its pillows fresh and soft and linen-white, and was handed water by a thin, kind, middle-aged woman who spoke excellent French. Maybe I was exhausted from the long journey, but I couldn’t quite believe where in this New Vietnam I’d wound up—an oasis of peace and order. A somewhat illusory one, I would later learn, but for the moment that illusion was enough.
My room lay at the very top of the building, a thirteen-by-thirteen-foot square with a queen-size bed, a writing desk, an electric fan, a spacious bathroom (no hot water, alas, but it was 90 degrees outside), a large closet, and windows overlooking the sprawl of Saigon, as everybody seemed to call it—a ragged field of ochre buildings and TV antennas in which, if I looked carefully, I could pick out the aging, still-elegant curves of a French-colonial building or the bright fresh layers of paint on a Buddhist temple. The room was not exactly chic, but it had been put together by someone with an eye for aesthetics: Everything was either black or white—no garish colors, harsh fabrics, or plastic kitsch. Even better, I had maid service, provided by Thuy and Duyen, two impossibly sweet-faced girls from the countryside who, giggling shyly, would scoop my sweaty clothes off the floor and wash them every day.
The rent was $300 a month.
As I sat there in my new home, watching thick cumulus clouds hover disconcertingly low over the city, I . . . What did I do? This is one of those frustrating places where the intervening years have left my memory blank. Did I realize I’d bumbled into a situation where I was dangerously out of my depth? Or did I think I’d lucked out? I feel fairly confident in saying I wasn’t scared or depressed—at least not yet; those emotions leave too deep a scar to fade so easily.
And so I must not have thought anything at all. I was in that weird jetlagged state that encompasses both total exhaustion and total alertness, and I had certain things to deal with, like asking Ms. Thanh when I’d start teaching at the Open University, arranging to take Vietnamese classes somewhere, finding my way around the neighborhood, and, most immediately, getting something to eat. I walked down the seven flights of stairs and out into the streets.
Pham Ngu Lao was a mess. Along one side of the street, where in the 1960s and ’70s the city’s railroad terminal once stood, was a vast shantytown of improvised tin-roofed shacks selling bootleg Vietnamese pop CDs and filthy-looking noodle soups. The proper buildings on the other side—mostly mini-hotels and other four-meter-wide concrete structures—were better, but not by much, primarily because the sidewalk, such as it was, was half rubble, and the half that wasn’t rubble was overrun with minivans, Honda mopeds, street vendors, and small, panting, short-haired dogs with prominent nipples. As I picked my way down the block, cyclos—the very vehicles I’d been reading about in ancient journalism!—began to follow me in the road.
“Cyclo, you!” the lanky drivers called out. “Cyclo! Cyclo you!”
“I’m walking,” I said firmly, as much to myself as to them. They did not give up.
That evening, I ate a mild, coconut-milk-based curry with shrimp—a dish I knew was not very Vietnamese at a restaurant I knew was not very Vietnamese, but then again I didn’t really know where to go. I had no map and had given up on my guidebook and hadn’t yet realized that Lonely Planet existed or that bootleg editions of its “Southeast Asia on a Shoestring” guide were being sold all around me. After dinner, I walked a little farther down Pham Ngu Lao until I found the Saigon Café, a dumpy corner bar whose folding tables were covered with tall bottles of beer, whose chairs were occupied by white expatriates, frazzled by heat and booze. I sat down and ordered a beer. I was in Saigon, at last.
There is no perfect arc I can draw between then and now. I only know that, for the next year, my ignorance both hindered and protected me, allowing me to make mistakes but not realize them until later, when it was far too late for sharp stabs of pain and humiliation. Over that year, however, the ignorance faded, and by the time I returned to America I was a savvier traveler, comfortable with the idea of blind adventure.
Or was I? Hadn’t I always been comfortable with this? Throughout high school, I’d driven across Virginia with my skateboarder friends in search of new places to practice our pastime. Afternoons and weekends, we’d roam without maps from Surrey to Washington, D.C., following up on rumors of dry drainage ditches or backyard half-pipes, eating Taco Bell and sleeping on couches, and not once do I remember ever feeling any hesitation, any sense that things might go wrong in a dreadful and permanent way. And luckily for me, nothing did go wrong except for a speeding ticket and the disappointed looks on my parents’ faces when I returned home, late for dinner, the Toyota’s gas tank nearly empty. Perhaps something should have happened, something to teach my teenage brain a lesson about the risks a human being faces in the world. Instead, I got lucky and stayed lucky.
Deciding to go to Vietnam was little different from deciding to sneak off to Washington without informing my parents. One moment I was wondering if I should do it, and the next I knew that simply by wondering I’d already made the choice. From that point on, I can’t remember ever hesitating about a destination, either in the occasional travels of my twenties or the professional trips of my thirties. Cambodia at a time of political instability? Okay—there’s a film festival to cover. The Zapatista villages of Chiapas, Mexico? Sure, I can fake my way inside. A walk from Vienna to Budapest, a horseback excursion into the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, a mapless drive across dismal Ireland—why not?
Of course, none of these was particularly dangerous. I have been to no war zones, and I have merely breezed through the wilderness. And yet I think such adventures might give pause to many travelers: Is this really something I can do with no special knowledge or training? I don’t want to make myself sound too special, but that question makes no sense. That’s because I already know the answer, which is “Well, I guess I’m going to find out, even if I don’t speak Kyrgyz and haven’t ridden a horse since that one time at summer camp when I was fourteen.”
Perhaps this is a failure of imagination. If it’s boredom (with regular life) that impels me to travel widely and strangely, then boredom, I assume, will also hold sway over my wanderings. Not that my adventures themselves will be boring, but that whatever drama ensues will be muted: I will not die, or otherwise destroy my life, and any troubles I confront will be of the psychological and emotional variety, which I think—I hope—I can handle.
This assumption has, on occasion, come very close to being disastrously wrong.
One day in July 2006, I rode off on horseback into the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, accompanied by Bakut, the middle-aged proprietor of the yurt camp south of Lake Issyk-Kul where I’d spent the previous night. That morning, there’d been one minor hitch—Bakut had showed up two hours late with the horses, after getting lost in what he called “the badlands”—but I was optimistic. The horses were small and seemed easy to control.
“Pull left, go left,” Bakut showed me. “Pull right, go right. Pull back, stop. Go forward, say ‘Chut!’”
“Chut!” I said, and the horse stepped forward. I could handle this.
The landscape we trotted through was stark and dry, with scrub grass and patches of lavender sprouting from the sandy e
arth. There were big snowcapped mountains we could barely see beyond the ridge we were slowly ascending. The sky was a hard, blank blue. I felt I could ride forever.
About an hour in, however, I remembered I’d left my hat, my sunglasses, and my bottle of water back at the yurt, and although Bakut had assured me we’d find natural springs in the mountains, the fact that we were riding through an arid sandstone canyon suggested otherwise. I kept my mouth shut, though, and put my faith in Bakut. How could this gold-toothed seminomad lead us astray?
Soon, he’d proved his knowledge: we reached a broad green plateau covered with tall grass for our horses to graze. While they ate, Bakut and I relaxed in the shade of some bushes, and he asked me what I did for work. I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. This trip was part of a three-month around-the-world Frugal Traveler jaunt, and I’d grown accustomed to deflecting questions about my employer. Tell people in the hospitality field you work for the New York Times, and their attitude instantly changes. They become friendlier, more involved; they make sure you have whatever you need, and often won’t let you pay for it. But I wanted to be a normal traveler, and so I kept it a secret.
Here in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, however, these secrets seemed silly. The other day in Bishkek, the capital, I’d met a young, educated Kyrgyz guy who’d never even heard of the Times. Surely gold-toothed Bakut was no more worldly.
“Journalist,” I said, pronouncing the word in the French-Russian way, the j a zh.
“Oh?” Bakut said with a glinty smile. “New York Times?”
“Ha ha ha! I wish!”
That was the end of that conversation. We remounted our horses and covered more ground, taking in the enormity of the view, across the lake to yet more mountains. The sun glinted on the steel domes of far-off mosques. The sense of space was boundless—the opposite of Vietnam, where all was dense and humid.
As the day wore on, I was growing thirsty, and we’d still not found any water. Worse, we’d left behind the grassy areas and moved into a zone of rough red cliffs, like something out of an old Western. This, Bakut decided, was where we would descend, and as the narrow non-path grew slippery with sand, we dismounted and led the horses by the reins. But even then, the horses balked, and we found ourselves perched precariously, a sheer drop below, an unclimbable hill above, and the horses refusing to negotiate the way down.
“Chut!” Bakut yelled as he yanked the first horse’s bridle. “Chut!” he yelled, leaning back with all his weight over the edge of the cliff. “Chut!” he yelled, then paused and, chuckling, turned to me and said, knowingly, “Extreme.”
Meanwhile, I sat on the hill with my head in my hands, trying to envision a way this could end happily. It was difficult. I was on the verge of freaking out, as one might expect. But with nothing to do but watch Bakut teeter on the precipice, my imagination took hold. With the hot afternoon sun blazing, I saw the horse slip, taking Bakut with him over the cliff edge, one last “Chut!” echoing through the canyons as they fell. And what then? It almost seemed like this would make things easier for me—I’d just tie up my horse, descend on foot, locate Bakut’s mangled body, and return to the yurt camp for help. It was horrible to envision, but at least it would let me do something, move forward, instead of just waiting here, puzzling out horrible eventualities precisely because I knew I would soon have to write about this very adventure for the Times and needed to make it sound dramatic.
Which it was. Tired, thirsty, ill-equipped to handle the situation, I was worried. But not so worried that I would do something rash, like try to help Bakut pull the horses down or storm off on my own. Instead, I remembered Siddhartha’s proclamation—“I can think, I can wait, I can fast”—and did likewise here, in the foothills of the Tian Shan, a mere thousand miles north of the Buddha’s birthplace. Honestly, I’d always liked waiting and watching and thinking, maybe even more than I liked doing and moving and talking. Waiting and watching and thinking was how I’d not only survived innumerable intercontinental flights and interminable bus rides but come to enjoy them, look forward to them. Those interstitial moments allowed me a rare freedom—freedom from the need to act and interact, as I’d had to at home and would have to once I arrived, as well as freedom to imagine the future, to revel in its glorious potential: Who knew what would happen on the far side of Customs? In the raki bars of Istanbul? On the slopes of Cerro Catedral? Around the hot pots of Chongqing? Not I—but I could let my mind run wild, unconstrained by reality. None of these fantasies—in equal parts tragic and heroic—would likely come true, but in contemplating the extremes I’d prepare myself for the easier to cope with realities, like being stuck with stubborn horses and no water on a sandstone mountain far from home.
If there was a difference between my blind adventure in Vietnam and my blind adventure in Kyrgyzstan, it was this: in neither case did I know what I was getting into, but my absolute innocence in the first had in the latter been tempered into mere ignorance. The distinction between the two actually came into my mind in my first months in Vietnam. Among the many books I’d lugged with me was The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, which follows the late-seventeenth-century adventures of a poet, Ebenezer Cooke, as he travels around colonial Maryland, guarding both his innocence and his virginity (the same thing, kind of). The novel continually returns to the problem of innocence and ignorance, as in this exchange between Ebenezer and his former tutor, Sir Henry Burlingame:
Burlingame showed more irritation by the minute. “What is the difference ‘twixt innocence and ignorance, pray, save that the one is Latin and the other Greek? In substance they are the same: innocence is ignorance.”
“By which you mean,” Ebenezer retorted at once, “that innocence of the world is ignorance oft; no man can quarrel with that. Yet the surest thing about Justice, Truth, and Beauty is that they live not in the world, but as transcendent entities, noumenal and pure. Tis everywhere remarked how children oft perceive the truth at once, where their elders have been led astray by sophistication. What doth this evidence, if not that innocence hath eyes to see what experience cannot?”
Ebenezer is, of course, a fool who overvalues his unworldliness. And when I read his story, in my hot little room atop the Lucy Hotel, I was equally the fool for failing to see how it applied to me. Or—and let’s be generous here—I was perhaps slightly less of a fool, for Barth’s musings on innocence and ignorance resonated with me. It made sense, as Barth (through Ebenezer) explains, that Adam and Eve were punished not for violating God’s laws but for being innocent of sin in the first place; it’s only when one knows and understands sin that one can consciously choose to commit or abstain from it. In other words, you have to lose your innocence to begin to come to terms with your ignorance. Unfortunately, innocence, unlike virginity, is not lost in a flash, nor ever fully expunged.
One night in late 2007, I even tried, somewhat tipsily, to make this argument to a couple of strangers I met on a boardwalk on the island of St. Martin—who were not at all amused to hear their beloved Adam and Eve described as “ignorant,” a word that in the Caribbean implies not lack of knowledge but roughness, anger, internalized stupidity. In the English-speaking Caribbean, you do not call someone ignorant lightly—it’s a fighting word—and once I’d realized this I quickly backed down and apologized. An innocent mistake, right?
Or perhaps just lingering ignorance, for I really should have known better—this had all actually happened before, in the fall of 2006, a few months after I survived Kyrgyzstan. I’d gone on assignment with my friend Michael Park to Jost Van Dyke, a tiny island in the British Virgin Islands, and within minutes of arriving, we’d settled into a rickety beachside bar for a late lunch, a beer, and a cup or two of local rum. As happens in the Caribbean, we soon wound up participating in a bar-wide argument—they called it a “discussion”—that ranged from who was worse, Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin (“Idi Amin ate children,” I declared), to one man’s rant about, as Michael later put it, “how violence against all white people
was justified because of the area’s history of institutionalized anti-black racism or something.”
I don’t recall the precise details of Michael’s response to this, but apparently it included the word ignorant. The gentleman’s response was predictable—or would have been predictable, had Michael or I known what we were doing. He was angry—rum-drunk and fighting angry—and things might have escalated to actual fisticuffs had not someone stepped in and calmed things down on both sides. (Michael, too, has temper issues.)
That peacemaker, oddly enough, was me. Why don’t I remember this—what I did, what I said? Why is that not as vivid to me as the mistakes I made? Why do the memories of failure, pain, and humiliation nag with undying ferocity, while the successes—my successes, the moments when I performed admirably—fade into oblivion?