It’s been five minutes, we have already stopped to decide which fork in the road to take, ridden through an ‘Officials only’ car park, swerved around a barrier and been waved through toll booths, but finally we are on the quiet, narrow backstreets we long for. My alert, hyper-attentive senses start to calm, eyes melting back into gentle focus. I start to truly look around me for the first time since leaving the safe familiarity of the air-conditioned, conventionally characterless airport arrivals hall. The streets are narrow and grubby, the pavement broken, the sunny yellow of the walls hides behind black stains of pollution and mould, thick vines take hold of every tree, their waxy leaves bursting out of the top of each branch as though gasping for breath.

Closely following Ted’s back wheel, I take a sharp left and we are met by a small herd of cows in the road. They are in no rush as they amble along.  Their elderly, shoe-less owner cajoles them out of our way with a large stick. As his gaze meets mine from below the brim of his wide nón lá (leaf hat) his eyes begin to glint with a smile which quickly lights up his whole face, his laughter lines deep and weathered.  He waves. I smile back and return his greeting as I pass. A moped slowly overtakes us and Ted points at the iconic Honda Cub as he shouts ‘classic’ to me with a wide grin. The driver is just as interested in staring at us, as we are at him. An elderly lady in a purple, patterned, pyjama-esk two piece cycles towards us on a wobbly bike, the wheel making a satisfying squeak with every rotation, and she too lights up with a toothy smile from underneath her nón lá as we cross paths.

Another junction, this time we turn to the right and a huge heap of rubbish welcomes us. But I’m quickly distracted by the large mound of sand sitting next to it, or more accurately, I’m distracted by the children running up and down the building material who instantly spot us and start shouting ‘hello’ with big waves and joyful faces. Ted and I both smile and reply back with enthusiastic gestures, trying to match their excitement.

Soon enough, the road widens back into two lanes, the walls disappear and the views open up to reveal flat rice paddy fields, lined with palm trees and complete with water buffalo underneath the hazy grey skies. The roads gradually become busier, moped after moped joining the flow of traffic. They are carrying anything and everything. Where the item is too big to be precariously balanced on top of the moped, it is simply attached to it and then dragged along the floor – steel beams, bamboo and wiring all just toed along behind. And no limit to the carrying capacity, a whole family of five, or was that six, all squished comfortably on board.

One road merges with another, and then another. We find ourselves amongst the trucks and buses and cars of the highway. Each vehicle beeping their air horns; at us, at one another, at anything else that moves. As we approach one of the bridges over the Red River on the outskirts of Hanoi, all traffic starts jostling for position as the lanes narrow. The hard shoulder is no longer our own; we are enveloped by the weaving mopeds and undertaking cars. We hold our position, owning our space on the hard shoulder and going with the flow of it all. Nothing is moving too quickly, so despite the sense of chaos, fear doesn’t creep in. The noise though. Wow. It was loud.

Crossing the bridge gave me a moment to look up and take it the muggy grey skied, polluted river and skyscraper lined view. Definitely not pretty.  But I always appreciate these moments when reality hits, like a great reminder of just how incredible this journey is. This time the realisation dawned, that this view couldn’t possibly be anywhere else. There was no mistaking it – we were in Vietnam and starting the South East Asia leg of our ride.

The abrupt jolt of the road leveling out after the bridge, shook me from my thoughts. My mind was quickly back on the traffic, the increasing number of lanes and where the black line of the Garmin took us next – crossing four lanes of traffic to take the next left; then merging with another four lanes; then around a round-about with no marked lanes but innumerable vehicles all moving as one around its hub; then what, a U-turn, what!? In that split second I had a moment to decide – do I follow the seemingly ridiculous Garmin directions, or do I ignore it, not knowing what that means for the route ahead, but accepting it’s likely to mean having to stop and reroute. It’s then that I see Ted. He’s darted through a gap in the crowds of mopeds. He’s committing to this U-turn. Oh heck. It means my hand is forced – I’m going for it too. A quick glance in my mirror, then over my shoulder, I throw my arm out to indicate and I make a break for it.

Now in the inside lane, Ted spots the gap in the concrete barriers. He reaches out, grabs a lamppost and in one graceful, swift, maneuver in front of me he turns on a dime, spinning his bike around 180°, using his weight to swing from the lamppost and propell him around into a perfectly timed gap in the oncoming traffic. Watching this dance in slow motion, I can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen. But I have no time to process. It’s my turn to negotiate my way through the gap and into the oncoming traffic, which I manage with absolutely non of Ted’s grace or style. Safely on the other side, we quickly turned off onto a slightly smaller, but no less noisy, side road. I finally allow myself to look up at Ted’s face, I’m laughing and he’s absolutely beaming – also unable to believe he actually pulled that off.

Another forty minutes later, after we had negotiated the ever growing traffic chaos of central Hanoi and checked into a cheap but disappointingly grotty hostel, I found myself reflecting on the last couple of hours. It felt like we had just experienced a condensed snapshot of all stereotypes of Vietnam – of all South East Asia really – in one go, like a strong tonic, delivering a taste of all pre-conceived notions of riding in this corner of the world in one wince-inducing shot. Ted joked that it meant we had experienced it all and could leave now, but the dreamer within in me really wanted to believe that there was more to it than this. And luckily for us, we would have time to find out.

We spent a couple of hectic, hot and noisy days in Hanoi. They didn’t start out well after a glass table in our room at the grotty hostel cracked and smashed in two whilst we were making our breakfast on it.

The heat from the coffee left sitting  in the pan on the table caused it to break.  So whilst munching through our unexciting, breakfast gruel of oats and water (we usually treat ourselves to some fruit, nuts, seeds or peanut butter to jazz it up but on this day it was just plain old, Oliver Twist-esk oats and water!) sipping our mugs of coffee, sitting on the bed on the opposite side of the room, not even touching it, the table catastrophically smashed into pieces with the sound of a gunshot and left a chaotic mess of pans and utensils and waterbottles all covered in sticky wet coffee grounds. Uuufff. ‘Good morning Vietnam’ is all Ted had to say.

But after leaving the calamity of the morning, and the grotty hostel, behind us and checking-in to somewhere much nicer (but surprisingly no more expensive!), we settled into our time in Hanoi and enjoyed the hustle and bustle (but not the filth!). We found cycling about to be much safer than walking. On the bikes we just blended in with the hoards of mopeds, not moving too quickly, cars giving way to us the way they did to the other two-wheelers. But trying to walk was more tricky.  There is no footpath in Hanoi that isn’t dug up, piled high with rubbish, used as storage areas for building materials or covered in parked mopeds.  It means that pedestrians spend a lot of their time walking at the edge of the road, in the drainage gutters, which are filthy. So we mainly used the bikes to hop about between the old ramshackled colonial streets and made the most of the many vegetarian restaurants. As always in these places, we enjoyed watching the tourists as much as experiencing the place itself. Wandering the narrow streets of the trainline, with all the twinkling lights, lanterns and night life was like being in another world.

On the morning we packed up, ready to head out of Hanoi, Ted ‘I never loose anything’ Robinson realised he didn’t have his pillow. Now, it doesn’t sound like much, but our pillows are a bit of a luxury item for us. On all our previous bikepacking trips over the years, we have never felt it necessary to pack a pillow, a folded down jacket does the same job – provided you don’t accidentally sleep with the zip against your face and wake up looking like Frankenstein! But for this trip, packing the small inflatable travel pillows has been absolutely worth it. So the fact that Ted had lost his was a bit of a disaster. We emptied every bag (which we had literally just finished packing!), we searched the room, we turned everything upside-down and inside out, but it was no where to be seen. We then realised we might have left it at the grotty hostel following our quick exit due to the glass table and coffee calamity. So we cycled back across central Hanoi, in the opposite direction to where we should have been going. But the grotty hostel were in no mood to help, simply saying ‘no’, they weren’t prepared to ask the people currently staying in the room whether we could check if it was under the bed, and had no sympathy for our lost pillow situation. So after all this time, all the occasions where Ted has been reunited with his misplaced bits and pieces, all these months of Ted ‘I never loose anything’ Robinson living up to his name, accepting that the pillow was truly lost was a hard pill to swallow. The thought of the months ahead with no pillow did not sound appealing for Ted, so we decided to cycle from one outdoor shop to another, criss-crossing the city again and again, in the vain hope that we might be able to find a replacement. By some miracle, by early afternoon Ted had a replacement inflatable travel pillow in-hand and we were, by now, well and truly ready to leave Hanoi.

As is always the case with cities, the route out of the centre of Hanoi was a filthy, polluted, noisy, toxic, smelly, unpleasant experience. Each waterway, no matter the size, was black, thick with pollution, full of rubbish with a stench that turned our stomachs even through our buffs pulled up over our faces. The further we cycled out of the city, the more the landscape opened up into smaller towns and then villages between rice paddy fields. But whereas we would usually reach a distance far enough away from the city to leave the pollution behind us, this wasn’t the case with Vietnam. Day-after-day, despite taking the smaller roads, despite trying to find the most traffic-free options, the noise and pollution remained. Every roadside was covered in rubbish, mainly discarded plastic bottles, beer or soda cans thrown from car windows or plastic bags blown in from who knows where. Every inch of roadside. Everywhere. And when the rubbish piled up high, the locals would burn it. Huge plumes of blue/black smoke to add to the already thick air polluted by old engines driving by. The smell was so toxic and acrid it burnt out throats as we cycled through it. We would try and hold our breath for as long as possible, but it was, dare I say it, better than the gag-inducing smell of the rotting rubbish itself.

The roads were also inescapably busy and so, so loud. Every vehicle, every truck, every bus, every moped that passed us by insisting on beeping their horn or bellowing their air horns into our ears. Apparently the use of horns here in Vietnam is a courtesy, to let you know they are approaching, but as a cyclist it is so loud and unnecessary as you can already hear the loud rumble of their old engines reverberate through your body even before they decide to beep their horns. It’s deafening and disorientating to be subject to so much loud noise all day long, not to mention how it raises your stress response so you always feel on edge. And you can never escape it. Even if you stop for a drink, or something to eat, or even when you pull into a roadside cafe or restaurant or sleep in a road house, the noise remains. It’s pretty exhausting.

Much like the noise of the wind in our ears in Patagonia, it made me shrink into myself and want to shut myself off from the world, and it made Ted loose his sh*t, shouting and screaming at the lorries as though expelling some energy in their direction was a release of the anger he was feeling inside. The noise also meant we couldn’t really talk to one another, as any attempt to speak turned into a shouting match between us, one not being able to hear what the other was saying. So we put in our headphones, listening along to cheery music, podcasts and audiobooks to get us through the days. It felt like our only way to survive the noise and pollution was to try and shut ourselves off from it and fall into a world of distraction through our earphones, but it was kind of lonely.

The whole experience meant that looking up and appreciating the beauty of the thick jungle blanketed hills, or the peachy golden tones of the setting sun became harder and harder to do. But the people of Vietnam somehow managed to pull us out of this with every interaction, like microdoses of joy that kept our heads above water everyday. Their smiles and waves were so cheerful. Such a contradiction to the environment within which they were living. Our favourite time of day quickly became the beginning or the end of the school day, when the children would all jump on their bikes to and from home. For a few minutes of each day we would be joined by a cheering, laughing gang with an accompanying soundtrack of ‘hello’ [giggle] ‘what is your name’ [giggle] ‘goodbye’ [giggle]. It seemed that this bright, cheery, disposition wasn’t even something that diminished with age, instead the adults faces also lit up with smiles, accompanied by big waves as we passed by.

The women in particular (who absolutely run the world here) were quick to stand up from their jobs in the fields, or stick their heads out from the engines they were working on, or take a moment away from looking after the children to cheer me on, give me a thumbs up or a flex of their arm muscles, in a show of communal strength as a fellow woman making her way in the world. No matter where we went, people were always excited to get photos with us and ask us where we were from. A total juxtaposition to the grey clouds of pollution filling the air they breathe or the noise that shakes the fabric of their homes every time traffic rumbles by.

As the days went by, we gradually started to climb into the hills in the West of the country. We began to believe there was much more of our kind of riding to come. We experienced a taste of the lush, dense, jungle covered hills, the steep, rocky outcrops and the layer upon layer of mountains of green. By the time we reached the beautiful, butterfly filled Phong Nha – Ke Bang National Park we were so, so, so ready to head into the more remote hills, leave behind the busy roads, the noise and hopefully the pollution.

But sadly it was not to be. The weather had other plans. The rain rolled in. It turned the roads to thick peanut butter mud and meant the dramatic views were hidden behind ominous black clouds.

The forecast was the same – heavy rain – for the next five days, so we made the hard decision to change our plans and head towards the lower lying roads near the coast, in the hope of avoiding the worst of the weather. We optimistically hoped that being by the sea would be different, surely people come on holiday to the beaches of Vietnam for a reason, right!? Well we couldn’t see it. Maybe it was because of the driving cold wind and the rain, maybe the relentless noise had finally got to us, maybe it was the night after night of grotty (only clean at first glance) hotels we were staying in, maybe it was because of the empty, concrete tower blocks or maybe it was the ghostly holiday towns but it all felt very depressing to us. But with only a couple more days until we reached the border with Laos we pulled up our poncho hoods, plugged in our earphones and kept pedalling onwards.

The day before the border was up there with one of the most unpleasant days we’ve done yet. A whole day in torrential rain, under ever darkening skies, on a busy road, covering almost 100km, climbing over 1000m with lung-busting steep inclines, unrelenting traffic blasting their air horns into our ears all day, lorries full of animals and their waste churning up the road spray to create an emulsified excrement shower that was splattered all over us as they passed, accompanied by the ever-present piles of rubbish along the curb and beyond the metal of the road barriers. And at a momentary break for a piss, Ted’s bike, leaning on a lamppost, whilst both hands were occupied, slipped and fell into a pile of goat poo. Cue Ted loosing his sh*t, at his bike now being covered in sh*t, shouting and waving his arms in the air at the sh*t-ness of the sh*tty day we were having. It was hard not to give in to the tears that I had been fighting off for most of the day. But we knew that the only way out of the sh*t was to ride through it, stopping and wallowing at the road side, getting colder and colder in the pouring rain, as the traffic hurtled by, was not an option. So again, we pulled on our poncho hoods, plugged back in our earphones and kept on pedalling.

As we finally reached the village of Khe Sahn, near the border with Laos, and checked-in to a warm, comfortable roadhouse, the sense of relief was huge. We hugged one another and acknowledged how awful the day had been, and how deep we had had to dig into our mental reserves. But we had persevered and although it is hard to say out loud, that is something to be proud of.

I feel sad to say it, but we were both looking forward to leaving Vietnam behind. So we were pleased to know that the following morning, all that stood between us and Laos, was a fun run down the hill and a border crossing well renowned for it’s corruption! So there was nothing else for it – we would keep rolling with it.