Chapter 4 : Hello, Hanoi

Before I Knew It Was Lupus: My Vietnam Story

19th July 2025

Somewhere along the highway, the mountains gave way to dark lowland, and the weather that had been threatening all afternoon finally arrived not as rain so much as a mood, a pressure that pressed against the windows and made the driver grip the wheel a little tighter. Vietnam was changing its face for the evening, and none of us, half-asleep against the glass, understood yet how much.

Hanoi met us in ruins of a smaller kind. Trees lay uprooted across the streets, as if the city had shrugged and let them fall. Branches, leaves, torn awnings — the debris of something that had already happened and moved on before we arrived. We had driven, without knowing it, straight into the aftermath of a hurricane.

Even so, exhausted and rattled as I was, the city found a way in. Hanoi did not look like Kuala Lumpur. Where I was used to narrow shophouses stacked tall and close, Hanoi unfolded differently — French colonial windows and shutters surfacing between newer concrete, old bones under a modern skin. And through all of it, motorcycles. They didn't just use the road; they were the road, filling every gap and lane with the same restless hum, as if the whole city breathed through its engines. Chaotic. Charming. Both at once, the way certain places manage to be.

But there was no exploring left in us. The storm had taken that too. We went straight to the room and let the door close behind us like a decision already made.

Dinner was quiet, the kind of quiet that comes from bodies with nothing left to spend. My legs had settled into a deep, aching stiffness — the sort that oil could soothe but never actually fix. I worked it into my calves anyway, into my shoulders, into anywhere that was screaming the loudest, rubbing slow circles into skin that didn't seem to believe me. No Panadol. No medicine of any kind. Just oil, and whatever willpower I had left, and the quiet hope that sleep might reset something the day had broken.

20th March 2025

The next morning brought devastating news. The overnight Halong Bay trip, one of the highlights we had looked forward to most, had to be cancelled. But this time it wasn't simply the weather being inconvenient. The night before, as we made our way back from Sapa, a boat accident had struck Halong Bay. Dozens were dead.

The news settled over us quietly, the way shocking things sometimes do. What had been a disappointment suddenly became something else entirely; a strange, uncomfortable gratitude sitting alongside the grief of strangers. We were supposed to be on those waters. The storm that had ruined our plans had also, without knowing it, kept us on dry land.

Nobody said much. We just redirected to Ninh Binh instead, carrying the weight of news we didn't know how to hold. We went bamboo shopping first and wandered through stalls of woven crafts and handmade things, the kind of market that smells like wood and earth. 

Ninh Binh was something else entirely.

We boarded a small wooden boat, just wide enough for a few of us to sit comfortably, and a local woman paddled us forward with quiet, practised ease. No engine, no rush — just her steady rhythm and the soft sound of oars breaking the water's surface. I watched her hands move and thought about how many times she must have made this same journey, through this same river, past these same stones. There was something deeply calming about that.

The scenery unfolded slowly around us. Towering limestone karsts rose on both sides, ancient and unhurried, their reflections rippling gently in the green water below. Then we drifted into the caves. The air inside turned cool and still, the rock ceiling arching low above our heads, light fading into a soft dimness that felt almost sacred. I looked up and said nothing.

My legs still ached. My ear still rang. But sitting on that small boat, moving slowly through one of the quietest, most beautiful places I had ever seen, my body felt, just briefly, like it was allowed to rest.

Ninh Binh didn't cure anything. But it healed something.

I looked so fine here, but deep down, I was hurting like hell. 

By the time we made it back into Hanoi, evening had settled thick over the city, the kind of dark that makes streetlights look warmer than they are. We had heard about this place before we ever landed in Vietnam — the narrow street where the railway tracks run so close to people's homes that you could reach out from a café chair and touch the passing carriages. Everyone talked about it like it was one of those things you had to see to believe.

We found the street tucked behind a row of shopfronts, easy to miss if you didn't know to look for the gap between buildings. Cafés lined both sides, packed close enough to touch, their chairs spilling almost onto the rails themselves. People sat with drinks balanced on knees, phones already raised, waiting for something that hadn't happened yet.

I was nervous, if I'm honest. Not the excited kind of nervous — the other kind. The kind that comes from standing that close to something so much bigger and heavier than you, something that doesn't slow down for anyone's curiosity. Someone walked along the tracks a few minutes before it was due, calling out for people to clear back, to fold in their chairs, to press themselves against the walls and doorways. The street seemed to hold its breath along with me.

Then came the sound — first a distant rumble, low enough to feel through the ground before it reached the ears, then the growing rhythm of wheels on rail, steady and unhurried in a way that felt almost indifferent to how much attention it was getting. A light appeared at the end of the street, small and then suddenly not small at all.

The train came through slow, but slow didn't make it any less enormous. It filled the whole street, filled the whole moment, passing so close to the walls and the huddled crowd that I could feel the air shift and push ahead of it, warm and metallic. Somewhere near me, someone laughed the nervous laugh people laugh when they're thrilled and slightly frightened at the same time — I think it might have been me.

And then it was gone, as suddenly as it had arrived, the sound trailing off down the tracks and the street exhaling all at once. Chairs slid back into place. Drinks were lifted again. Conversations picked up exactly where they'd left off, as though the street hadn't just held its breath for something that could have flattened us all if we'd stood an inch too close.

I stood there a moment longer than everyone else, feeling my heartbeat settle back into its ordinary rhythm, and thought about how strange it was — that a city could carry both this kind of quiet, reckless charm and, just a day earlier, the kind of grief that comes from water swallowing people whole. Hanoi held both without apparent contradiction. Maybe every place does, if you stay long enough to notice.

Indonesian Halal Restaurant 

See ya in the last chapter of Vietnam.