• Ninh Binh, Vietnam

Write. For the love of all that is just… Just write. Pen to paper, fingers to keys, rattle and scratch and let it all out. This is my new mantra, speak it slowly, speak it over, mumbling memoranda as I limp sullenly, petulant and pitiful, into my fourth decade on this accursed Earth.

Sapporo
Wednesday April 2nd, 2025
14:40

I am sitting at a 20cm high table on a ‘sofa’ made of a ‘mattress’ that can fold into a sofa shape. It is an unconvincing object that operates neither as a convincing sofa, nor as a convincing mattress. As I sit, I write. I tap away at clattering keys, hunched in an uncomfortable cross-legged position, surrounded by filled up notepads, unread comics and the neglected textbooks reminding me of my much-maligned study regime. My eyelids wilt, lowering, then lowering more, the lunch of fried fish, pickles and a ‘nikuman’ (meat bun) that was almost entirely ‘man’ with very little ‘niku’ is pulling me slumberwards. I am firmly in the ‘napping’ epoch of life now and it is one of the few aspects of these ever-advancing years that I actually cherish.

From the ninth floor window of my rented apartment, the snowcapped ridges of Mount Moiwa dominate the view, a layer of ice and snow covered in the brown bristles of skeletal winter trees. Between two of the peaks, at around 6pm on a clear day, I can see the sun set, casting deep pinks and vibrant ambers into the blue sky. This magnificent landscape is criss-crossed and partially blotted out by great grey buildings and the persistently buzzing motorways that run parallel to the teeming expanse of the Toyohira river. Grey scars accumulate here, all the beauty blotted out in time.

Today, there will be no sunset. Not a visible sunset at least. The sky is overcast, although not with the grim, soul-depleting grey I associate with England, but with a sharp whiteness, a blanket of ice and snow hanging heavily, yet still not quite ready to fall.

It has been two long and eventful years since I brought my regular travel contributions to an end. I lost sight of the ‘why’, as I did with so many other hobbies. I know I have grown lazy, too content to idly drool into a screen at the infinite stream of memes, endlessly squeezing that moreish dopamine milk from the pert neural teat. Fear got the better of me, perhaps. Errors in syntax, inaccurate facts or simply too much ‘Max’, overly frank, (“No one wants that,”) so I held him back. But time is relentless and unforgiving, and some things that are lost can never be brought back.

I flick through notebooks, looking for some past scrawl to toss into the pit. To do lists and timetables, calculations and memoranda. Every scribble practical, pragmatic and pedestrian until two coffee stained pages catch my attention.

Ninh Binh, Vietnam, April 2nd, 2024.

“Sunburnt skin, pock-marked tarmac, the rhythmic squeak of the spokes of slowly spinning wheels. Sweat drips unnoticed from the nape of my neck onto my soaked shirt. I want to find somewhere peaceful, where nature still dominates, far from the noise and the dust and the hum of traffic, shaded from the unrelenting heat of the day. I follow the path between vast, green walls of the karst landscape, trundling along this meandering, sun-cracked path, this gouge in the ancient earth.

“Ninh Binh is an area unlike any other I have been to thus far. This area, this vast and serene landscape transfixed me the moment I first arrived. Vaulting, slender towers of black limestone surge into the sky, topped and teeming with unreachable, isolated forests, the vibrant life tumbling down the sides and pouring into wide, flat rice fields, lakes and rivers below. 

“The mountains, domes, towers and cones chiefly comprise of limestone gradually eroded over time, with storms, winds and floods weathering them away leaving thousands of standing sentinels keeping watch like aeons-old gods. In time, this whole area will be reduced to a single level plain, beaten and worn, featureless and flat.

“As I roll along the road, the tarmac turns to stone, turns to mud, turns to not much road at all, just spine-shaking, cartilage-crunching paths rarely ever ridden upon. These are the kinds of paths that take us where we ought to go. Follow this particular path long enough and you will reach an idyllic, enormous lake, surrounded by mountains and trees on all sides. I come to a halt and rest on a decades old concrete wall, now covered in moss and weeds. No main roads go through this wide open area, not yet at least, and so I am free to sit, in this perfect depression carved out from the rest of the world, and to listen to the echoing calls of a thousand creatures I will never know the names of. I take out my notebook and I write.

“I praise the beauty that abounds, the half-eaten leaves, the sun-baked mud, the peculiar froth at the edge of the water, the nibble of a defensive ant on my ankle, the rank odour of dung on the breeze. It has taken all too long to reach such a haven by bicycle. Not ones to let such splendour go unaltered, the human population is doing its best to assert dominance over this paradise. Ninh Binh and the Trang An area have sadly fallen foul of progress. There are a number of locations in this vicinity that have become popular stops on the tourist trail heading through Vietnam and the locals are understandably keen to capitalise on the success of the earliest hostels, hotels, restaurants and bike rental shops. Construction continues apace, but before anything can be built, what went before must be cleared, cut, broken up and buried. It is a fact of life that places that become popular draws for tourists will inevitably expand to the point where the original draw that made them popular; the wilderness, the natural spectacle, the peace and quiet, the rural beauty, is razed to the ground and replaced by bustling, noisy streets and man-made monoliths, plate glass sentinels stretching tall into the sky. 

“So, make haste, and go see it whilst you can, before the echoing call of bulldozers becomes the dominant sound of these valleys.”

I place the notepad on the table and sip my lukewarm coffee. This is the last I will write in my thirties. Onwards and upwards. Progress. Grey scars accumulate.

Write. It has been almost two years since I was a regular contributor to the world through this minor medium. So here I sit, a mock-writer, mourning mock-aspirations on a mock-sofa, on the eve of a very-much-not-mock-40th birthday, and as I sit I realise that time is of the essence, and it would be cruel, crueler than I would ever want to be, to withhold the fragmented, crude contents of my rapidly desiccating mind from the world. You deserve that much at least, for your sins. So, I plan to release more of my work this year. A lot of it is work I have fretted about and held on to for fear of it being terrible, or unfinished, or derivative, or of little interest to anyone. But, as I clamber up the gnarled oak tree of time, I gleefully accept the cantankerous, contrarian mindset of the older gentleman, he who could could not give a monkeys, and I now plan to swing simian-like through the upper canopy, flinging all of my efforts out into the wilderness, gibbering and hooting with all my heart until the sun sets one final time.

Write. For the love of all that is just… Just write.