Karmen Wiid

We made it to Saigon.

The drive down took nine days. Twenty-five hours of riding in total, almost a thousand kilometers by motorbike from Hoi An to Saigon.

Saigon… I love that name. It feels more haunting than the one it was given after the war, heavier somehow, like it carries ghosts. Saigon drips with colonial intrigue (if I may admit to that), a kind of modern oriental nostalgia that evokes neon lights and temples and seedy massage parlours, old men with curling moustaches and women gliding by in silk áo dài, hems catching the city’s dust.

Ho Chi Minh sounds like a layover destination. Saigon sounds like history that hasn’t yet decided what it wants to be.

I’m travelling with a beautiful German man I met two months ago. He has a beard that looks born of the Bavarian Alps, but the deep tan of someone with a strong passport and nothing but time.

I like wrapping my arms around him on the long curves. He drives as if every road is the autobahn. When the mountain passes get cold, I nuzzle my nose into his neck. He smells like sunshine and cigarettes.

On our stops, we eat bánh mì, impossibly cheap, made by old women in straw conical hats sitting on the front porches of their houses. Then he smokes. His eyes watch mine amusedly as I ramble on about all the thoughts I’ve had on the drive. Those eyes… they make me feel like a kid floating in the ocean, looking up at the December sky over KwaZulu Natal.

Our homestay in Saigon is nothing more than a dilapidated room at the top of two narrow flights of stairs. But it’s homey and adorable somehow. 

To get there, you have to walk through a string of shadowed alleyways, the steam from noodle stalls rising up from all sides, kids sitting on steps eating from plastic bowls, Grab scooters swerving past. We have a small balcony where we sit at night watching the sky burn a soft red as it absorbs the city lights.

The bustle here is such a stark contrast to the small villages we passed on our way down. Coffee farms, misty mountains, rice paddies rolling on for miles. We slept in wooden homestays that smelled of smoke and rain. 

In one mountain village, the family who owned the place invited us to dinner. We sat cross-legged around pots of boiling pho, communicating through laughter and hand gestures, broken English and wide, happy eyes. They poured us glasses of rice wine that I thought were water until I took a full gulp.

One of my favourite things about travel is those moments where you feel completely culturally stupid, deliciously out of place. That night, sitting on the floor trying to untangle a web of noodles with chopsticks, was one of those. They didn’t speak English, and we didn’t speak Vietnamese, so we just laughed through the gentle absurdity of our attempts at connection. I loved it.

I’ve been thinking about that… why I love that feeling of displacement, or “out-of-place-ness,” so much.

Maybe it’s because when I travel, I expect to be out of place. There’s no pretending to belong. You can’t fake cultural fluency when you don’t even know which way to pass the bowl. And in that lack of belonging, there’s a strange kind of freedom.

Back home, I always felt like an outsider trying to camouflage. Not Afrikaans enough, not athletic enough, not cool enough. There’s a specific kind of loneliness that comes from being misplaced among your own people, when you speak the language but it still feels like a translation. But abroad, the misplacement becomes context. Everyone knows you’re foreign. You’re not failing at belonging; you’re freed from it.

Sometimes I think it’s even a little masochistic, this delight in being humbled, in not knowing how to behave. A soft reversal of power. Maybe it’s the tenderness of realising how little the world owes you. Or maybe it’s just the wonder that comes when you surrender to being small, clumsy, human, and alive in someone else’s world.

I’m still thinking through this need I have to feel foreign, like I’m chasing the relief of it, or perhaps the joy of discovering that belonging was never the point.

As I’m writing this, another thought flits by… a piece of rolling paper caught in the warm wave of a fire. I have to catch it. Thoughts are so elusive.

What was it again?

Ah, yes.

Now I remember.

It’s this idea I’ve been circling during those long hours on the back of the motorbike, wind in my face, mountains spilling into rice paddies, the road humming beneath us. Wow. I’m travelling through southern Vietnam by motorcycle, with this amazing man I haven’t actually known for that long but who seems to know me inside out. 

It sounds like something out of a movie. The kind of Mamma Mia-style story a daughter might one day read in her mother’s old travel journals: When I was twenty-four and roaming through Asia with nothing but a backpack and an inability to stay put.

This awareness comes to me often, the way I see my life as a story even while living it. The present already feels like memory, as if it’s being filmed, narrated, romanticised by some future version of me who wants to remember how it felt.

And that’s part of the joy of living this way: noticing the poetry of it. Seeing your life from outside yourself and thinking, God, what a beautiful mess this is.

But there’s a delicate line between romanticising your life and performing it. Between living something extraordinary and narrating it as if someone else is watching. Sometimes I worry that the more I frame my life as a story, the more it becomes about the framing, about how it might sound, or how brave or spontaneous I might seem… and less about the unruly, unphotographed moments that actually make it real.

I thought a lot on the back of that bike. I treated it like a meditation, just watching my thoughts pass without grabbing at them. It was astonishing where my mind went.

Funny enough, as Vietnam flitted by, I had some typical white-girl-abroad thoughts: I should start a wellness retreat here. I should adopt one of these adorable kids. Then, as quickly as they arrived, the thoughts twisted in on themselves.

I started tracing the impulse behind them, this endless need I have to create. Retreats, books, art, businesses, selves. Where does that urge come from? That life-force that wants to build everything except a child.

Sometimes I imagine running away with one of those babies (problematic, I know) and then recoil at the thought of actual responsibility. Does that make me selfish? It’s a question that follows me like a shadow. I live for myself, my freedom, my work, my pleasure. I can’t imagine my life revolving around anyone else.

And yet, I think I’m kind. I care deeply. I love people, stories, strangers. So how do you reconcile that – being tender toward the world but unwilling to tether yourself to it? Can you be gentle and still selfish? Sometimes I fear that I am. And then, just as quickly, I fear that I don’t really care.

There were so many thoughts like that – half-formed, half-forgotten – carried away with the wind before the next turn in the road.

I loved the mundanity of what we experienced, the localness… kids waving as we passed, old men giving thumbs up, the bahn mi and pho bò stalls. But being in Saigon reminds me how much I love big cities too, that endless sense of possibility, of lives pressed up against one another, of the breathtaking, casual intimacy of so many stories colliding.

Cities hold secrets. If you linger long enough, they reveal themselves to you. You find the cafés tucked into back alleyways, the bookstores that sell the best coffee, the old locals leaning over balconies, flicking ash over the railing. They watch us mostly without interest. I think I like that better than the eager friendliness of small towns. There’s something freeing about being nobody’s novelty.

Again it seems, everything I love comes back to freedom. How interesting. Maybe that’s the real reason I like big cities so much. Nobody cares who you are. You step into the bustle and become just another breath in the tangled rhythm of the place.

You can be anyone. And everyone else can too.

I love that feeling.

And I love that, as I sit here and write, I can hear the rain pouring down on the corrugated roofs that nestle around this little café. Somewhere, a radio plays. Somewhere, a woman washes dishes under a flickering light. And I feel this colossal weight settling in my chest. But it’s not bad. I recognise it. It’s a feeling I get often when I’m writing or wandering. Something I can only describe as… the beautiful nowhere of being alive.

But it’s more than that. It’s the gravity of being a constellation of every self you’ve ever lived, if only for a moment. 

Because a few decades from now, somewhere in the world, an older version of myself will stumble across this and read what I’m writing now, and I know she’ll remember me as I sit here. In that remembering, she is here. I can feel her. And I can feel the girl I once was, the one who dreamed of sitting in cafés just like this, in far foreign places, writing stories as the rain pours down. 

And for a moment all the versions of me watch over my shoulder and smile.

And for a moment, I am my own mother, my own daughter, and myself. 

It’s almost unbearable, isn’t it, how infinite one life can feel.