From visa dilemmas to flooded roads, a traveler encounters a series of setbacks in Vietnam, exasperated by the go-with-the-flow attitude of her companions while attempting to accept the Buddha’s mantra that “Nothing is in your control.”
There’s a wasp in my room, and it’s the best thing that’s happened to me this week.
I’m in Vietnam, in a small town called Tam Coc in Ninh Binh. I am here by mistake, staying in a wood-paneled room with two traveling companions, Mikhala and Abhi, and a Texan named Sophie, who I met two days ago on a sleeper bus.
The homestay is down an alley too narrow for cars and run by a lady who wears the same fake Gucci shirt every day like a uniform. She doesn’t speak much English, and we speak no Vietnamese, but she is kind and a good cook. Every morning, we get crepes, eggs, and pounds of fresh fruit.
The wasp is not the first bug encounter we’ve had. It’s Southeast Asia in June; we’ve spent the month getting devoured by mosquitoes and warding ourselves against dengue fever. In a national park in northern Thailand, we’d even encountered a tarantula. But the wasp is an imminent threat. It is in our room and it is inescapable.
We spend forty-five minutes trying to catch the wasp. We are letting in one hundred mosquitoes in our quest to usher it out the door. While Abhi tries to blow it outside with a rotating fan, Mikhala hides her face under the bedsheet, and Sophie and I hold our shoes aloft, ready to strike.
It’s hard to overstate how alarmed we, collectively, are about this wasp in our room. It is a very scary-looking wasp. It is large and agitated. You can see its stinger from across the room. It kind of looks like an insect you might see on a TV show about World’s Most Dangerous Bugs. (We do, in the end, conclude it’s a relatively harmless wasp called a mud dauber.)
We are very frightened. But admittedly, it has also been a very bad few days, and maybe it is nice to have something small to worry about.
*
Two weeks before our wasp encounter, we head north and things head south. We are in Chiang Mai, and we are stuck there.
From the start, our plans were loose-laid. Now they were beginning to come entirely undone. Our plane to Vietnam had taken off hours ago with three empty seats in basic economy. And while I was spiraling a little, Mikhala and Abhi still had that self-assured it all works out mentality I’d envied and emulated throughout our four years of college.
Our next stop was supposed to be Hanoi, and then the Ha Giang Loop. On the backpacker circuit, this is a rite of passage. It’s a four-day motorbike tour you undertake on your own or with a driver. You can’t go five minutes in a hostel without hearing When I did the loop…
I was itching to get us there, but the problem was our visas. The HTML early-2000s-captcha hell that was the Viet immigration portal had spat out my application, citing missing middle names it never prompted us for.
When my application bounced back, I questioned my competence and quickly revised the submission without telling the others. I did not know I was doing game theory by omission; inadvertently invoking our very own prisoner’s dilemma that would keep us trapped on this side of the border.
Three business days after our original visa submission and one day before our flight, the middle name situation came to light over breakfast plates piled high with melon and dragonfruit. Immigration portal and email checking ensued. Mikhala’s application had been denied the same day as mine, for the same reason. This was not good.
*
Several hours of loophole searching later, we are coming up with very little. So we book another night in our hostel. Lug our luggage back up the stairs. The hostel volunteers are very kind and try to help us. But none of them are American, and the entry requirements are stricter for us than for other countries (wonder why?). So no one is much help, unless you count good listening ears and large quantities of free alcohol.
Privately, I lament. I am trying very hard to Go With The Flow, but this doesn’t feel like the flow. This feels like an oversight, a mistake. This isn’t a twist of fate, a bus breakdown, or a bout of food poisoning; this is something I’d had in my power and bungled. This is a different type of loss of control than I’d been trying so hard to anticipate.
Days pass. We lug luggage to the lobby, beg for another night’s stay, then lug it back up the stairs. My visa comes in, but Mikhala’s doesn’t.
On the third day, we decide it is our final day in Chiang Mai and make a series of increasingly desperate plans to escape. Our final absolute last resort is this: a 6 pm overnight bus to Bangkok and a 6:40 am flight to Hanoi.
We waste the day in a cafe. Our first deadline for plan execution passes, then the next, then the next. Abhi and Mikhala continue to inexplicably go with the flow. It rains all day, and I cry in the bathroom. When I get back, they don’t know quite what to do with me. Mikhala looks over my shoulder and laughs. Behind me is a poster of Buddha, serene. Printed below in English, it says Nothing is in your control.
Mikhala’s visa comes in at 5. We celebrate, and our hostel says they have never been so happy to see guests go. My friends go to buy tickets at the bus station, then they give me a heart attack by stopping at McDonald’s. We climb on the 6:00 bus at 6:08, lucky to get seats and happy to have chicken nuggets.
All is finally well, minus the potentially toilet-related water soaking the bottom third of my pants. Until we zip straight past Bangkok airport at 5:55 am.
Divine petroleum timing; we stop for gas only a few minutes later. We clamber out of the bus, desperately flashing our boarding passes to the attendant. Thank god for Thai kindness. We snatch our bags from the hold and flag down a taxi back to the airport. It’s 6:10.
It’s the maddest dash: hit the check-in counter, then slide over hard-earned visas. They say nothing but run. We do. Mikhala drops her shoe in security and is prepared to abandon it; Thai teens throw it over six lanes of people queuing, and she catches it. Abhi and Mikhala both get stopped for a bag check, of course, so now it’s me, my asthmatic lungs, and two backpacks sprinting for the last gate in the terminal. They’re calling our names on the intercom, and I’m shouting to every gate agent that that’s me! I make it, debating the merits of pausing on the jetbridge to dig out my inhaler. I tell them my friends are right behind me, and they are.
I sit down in my row. A kind flight attendant says it’s all okay now, but he’s actually wrong about this because a minute later, Mikhala’s texting me from 34B saying that they won’t let Abhi on the plane because (get this) her middle name is not on her visa.
*
My first instinct is laughter, my second is tears. The Universe owes us nothing for our trouble, but it feels like it should.
And maybe the flight attendant agrees because Abhi makes it on the plane after copious crying on both my part and hers, with the warning she will have to bribe Vietnamese customs. When we arrive, finally, in Hanoi, the customs agent waves her through with a stamp and a smile. No American dollars required.
Things go well for the next twenty-four hours. It’s a peaceful ride to the nice hotel we’d booked for our troubles. I take two showers and wash my clothes in the bathtub. It pours all day. Wow, we think, hope this clears up before we do the Ha Giang loop! I have never slept better.
The next day, we dodge puddles and play rummy on lantern-lined streets until we undertake the journey to the sleeper bus. The drivers point to me (five foot three on a good day) and make me get on first. It turns out the back of the bus has smaller seats, which is terrible and mean. My head is bumping the ceiling for all six hours. We unload our bags in the pouring rain at 3 am. I am comfortable in the knowledge that the wooden-pallet beds will be worth it in the morning.
We wake up at dawn in Ha Giang. On three hours of sleep, we trek ten minutes up the road with our packs, backpacker-uniform Tevas squelching in the mud. Breakfast is an egg banh mi and surprisingly good coffee. We sit for hours in a carpeted room with no shoes and a pool table.
Three hours after we were supposed to leave, I am on my second trip to the squat toilet when a tour leader gets on a megaphone and says the police have closed the loop for flooding and the tour has been canceled. This is the first time this has happened in 60 years, and they won’t be able to run tours for several days.
Although I wouldn’t realize it until afterwards, this was the final nail in the coffin for my dwindling tolerance for even loose-laid plans.
We get refunds (my bathroom break landed me a spot right next to the refund counter, which is good because some people were waiting for hours or even days). Over more coffee, we try half-heartedly to plan our next steps, but ultimately just hop on the first bus that shows up.
*
I am devastated. It was The Thing I was most excited for on our whole trip. What’s worse is that if we had made it to Vietnam on time, we would have made it through the loop before the mudslides started. I reflect on all this on the six-hour drive down the mountains.
I am planless, completely, for the first time. I have nowhere to stay tonight. I have no destination tomorrow. I am not even totally sure where this bus is going.
Everything is so wholly out of my control.
While I am having revelations about the true meaning of travel, Abhi and Mikhala are experiencing it and striking up a conversation with Sophie, the American girl in the bunk above me. I finally grasp what I couldn’t before.
The time is going to pass whether I prop it up with plane tickets and booking.com receipts. My plans are not holding together the space-time continuum.
Riding back to Hanoi on this bus, I do not know what trials await me in the coming weeks; my clothes destroyed by the laundromat, Mikhala’s phone forgotten in the Phuket airport, a fall down the stairs in Sri Lanka, the familiar sprint through London Heathrow on the way home. But these things I will take in stride. I have my passport, I have my ATM card, I have my backpacker sandals, and two working feet to put in them.
It’s not about what happens next. It’s about what’s happening now.
*
I don’t believe in signs from the universe, and I don’t subscribe to symbolism. It’s idolatry, a sin to Catholics and atheists alike. I have a rigid worldview, thanks to growing up the former and ending up the latter. But I will say this: I am a writer, which is a different kind of religion. And it’s not often metaphors so obvious appear in your real life, so when they do, it feels like a command to write about them.
There’s a wasp in our room, and it’s the least bad thing. We’re Googling wasp species and swatting with mud-crusted sandals. Forty-five delirious minutes into our war with nature, I think to look up ‘spiritual meaning of wasp’. We’ve spent a month in Thailand, after all, and spirituality is pervasive.
Guys, I say. I’m giddy. We’re already in laughing fits; I, last solid stem standing, have bent in the current of The Flow, everything is funny forever, and nothing matters at all.
Wasps symbolize control over your life.
We do not catch the wasp, and I go to sleep unafraid.
