Yes, I do get lonely sometimes.
It makes sense. In Vietnam I am often the only foreigner in
the hotels I stay at, and I spend many hours on my motorcycle moving between
them. Conversations are mostly with Vietnamese with the same level of English
as my Vietnamese, or with much younger travelers breathlessly telling me all
about themselves.
When I’m on top of my meditation (which is less and less the
further I get from my extended retreats in Myanmar), I automatically look at
emotions like loneliness as mere mind states. If you’re around me and hear me
say the word “Blip,” that’s because I’ve noticed a mind state, and I’m noting
it.
In Myanmar I was always eating breakfast and lunch with
dharma friends and engaging in intense discussions about things like blips. In
my Bangkok guest house it was a crap shoot, sometimes I’d luck out and meet
someone who had something to teach me if I listened closely, other times I
could only think of the Grateful Dead lyric, “Please don’t dominate the rap,
Jack, if you got nothing new to say.”
About three weeks into my Vietnam journey I headed toward Ba
Be National Park, in the north-central part. I found www.babenationalpark.com.vn,
which connected me with Mr. Linh, who runs a homestay inside the park. He’s a
hustler in the positive sense of the word, making the effort to learn English
and paying for a nice-looking website. He runs group tours, and when he invited
me for a two-night, one-day tour of the park with eight others who were driving
up from Hanoi, I figured it was a chance to take a little edge off of my isolation.
Here’s three pics. Although it's a national park, they've decided to let the villagers who have lived there for many centuries keep their homesteads and fields. They're also allowed to catch lake fish for sale.
You can go here
to see more professional images. Prepare to be gobsmacked.
I was first to arrive, in the early afternoon, and I spent
about an hour chatting with Mr. Linh, his wife, and his four-year-old son. A
wonderful hour spent with a happy family. The homestay was pretty rudimentary,
but it’s all about location, location, location, right? I was in a park that is
on par with Yosemite and the North Cascades.
My tour-mates showed up while I was exploring a nearby cave.
Three French, one Dutch and his Romanian girlfriend, a Sicilian living in the
U.K., and two Vietnamese. I hit it off with Yves, a 70-year-old Frenchman who
could, and did, talk about any and all subjects that came up. By the end of the
following day, the rest of us were taking turns giving each other breaks from
his cheerful, informative, and sometimes overbearing monologues.
The next day we spent seven hours getting in and out of a
boat to do brief walks through villages or caves, and ended the day with a
short but very steep hike to what the U.S. Forest Service used to call a
“scenic climax.” We went back to the homestay, showered and ate, and segregated
ourselves into three groups: the foreign tourists drinking beer and tea around
one table, a group of Vietnamese men feasting and getting loaded on rice wine
at another, and the Vietnamese women gossiping, taking care of the kids, and generally
doing whatever needed to be done.
It was a peaceful tableau destroyed in the time it takes for
two small motorcycles to slam head-on into each other.
All I saw out of the corner of my eye was a young man zipping
by, emerging from the darkness on one side of the homestay and disappearing
into the darkness on the other. He was going too fast, but that’s just part of
the Vietnam scenery, so it didn’t seem exceptional to anyone. A second later
there was that repulsive sound of two objects crashing head-on. Not the
heavy-metal crunching sound of two cars, but the crackling sound of cheap
plastic parts disintegrating from the impact.
Everyone ran toward the accident, we foreigners keeping our
distance, not being in a position to do anything but add to the confusion. In
the slivers of illumination from flashlights I could see the motionless form of
the young man who had sped by, and my only thought was, “He’s gone.”
Along the side of the road there was a frantic search for
the other motorcyclist, who had flown off into the trees along the side of the
road. The wails of the searchers told me that they knew the victim. It was Mr.
Linh’s wife, dying no more than 50 yards from her home, where her son was playing
with a friend. If she was in her 30s, it was just barely.
Inconsolable, Mr. Linh picked her up and carried her toward
the road, screaming for someone to get the van that the foreign tourists had ridden
from Hanoi. Blood was streaming from her external injuries and mouth. From the
brief glimpses I got, she likely died immediately from massive head trauma,
hitting a tree or one of the two-foot concrete pylons that you see next to most
highways in Vietnam. She was not wearing a helmet.
Perhaps acknowledging that she was already dead, the van
driver was slow in arriving, first recruiting other men to move the half-dozen
motorcycles blocking his parking spot, and letting the engine run for a minute
before putting it into gear. A screaming Mr. Linh placed the body in the van
and they drove off. Several older women from the neighborhood wailed and collapsed
in grief. When I gazed back at the male motorcyclist, he was standing under his
own power.
People wandered back to the homestay, where they rehashed
the facts as they perceived them, with Yves dominating bilingually. After a
while I went to my room and did what I currently believe is the best thing to
do in these situations: a Buddhist practice called powha, which ends with the line, “And through the power of her
death, may she benefit all sentient beings, living or dead.”
If there was any grief in the minds of the Vietnamese in the
neighborhood the next day, they sure hid it well. I heard a surprising amount
of laughter. The foreigners, though sober about the previous night’s event,
were also in a good mood while saying our goodbyes.
They left in their van, which made me the only Westerner still
in the homestay. Mr. Linh’s father, a bit older than I, took me by the arm and
invited me for some tea. We tried to converse. I watched as he took one hand
and ran it up and down along his arm, and then touched his head, and then touched
his heart while he talked. It’s hard enough to say something meaningful in your
own language in such situations. I said something about rebirth and the feeling
I got from spending an hour with his daughter-in-law, while touching my own
heart. Then we sat quietly.
Leaving Ba Be, I remembered what an old Tibetan Lama once
advised a group of Western students to do every evening before sleep: if you
have a water cup, turn it upside down by your bedside. And put out the fire,
there’s no need to waste the wood in case you don’t wake up. You just don’t
know.
