Lessons From Learning To Drive a Motorcycle On The Fly

And then driving it through North Vietnam.

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The engine of the little 110 CC Suzuki stuttered, sputtered, and stalled. I nearly fell over. My friends laughed at me.

“Shut up. I’ve never done this before!” I chuckled.

One of my friends (a random American I’d met two days before who had graduated from the same college as me) offered some advice.

“Driving a motorcycle is just like driving a manual car, but with different buttons,” he said.

Now, that sounds simplistic (and it is). However, when it’s all you have to work with, it turns out to be decent advice. It took me about 30 minutes of trial and error before I was proficient enough to hit the road with my group!

We were going to drive the Ha Giang Loop, a 3–5 day trip in North Vietnam.

Thinking back on that afternoon, I’m amazed at the situation surrounding my Vietnamese motorcycle crash-course. Thirty minutes before heading to the mountains, our group paid a stranger who worked out of a shed attached to our hostel $37 American each to rent a motorcycle for four days. Nobody asked for identification or proof of insurance. I’d simply said, “I have cash, may I have a motorcycle?” And I was given a motorcycle! My options at that point became:

1. Learn how to ride a motorcycle

2. Die or be maimed trying

3. Give up on the trip, and my friends

Travel Makes You Expand Your Comfort Zone By Removing Regulations.

There were no unnecessary signs in North Vietnam.

When I was 19, I went to Yellowstone National Park for the first time. I was amazed by the signs. Signs that say things that shouldn’t need to be told, like “please do not approach the buffalo/bears” and “The water from the geysers is scalding hot, please don’t try to touch it/drink it.”

What I say next may seem calloused.

Do we really need to warn the people who would try to approach the Buffalo and attempt to bathe in the geysers?

I’ll let you make your own decision. For me, it was a tremendous relief to be somewhere that didn’t cater to the dumbest imaginable person. Natural vistas weren’t cluttered by view-interrupting signs saying things like, “No matter what you believe, you cannot actually fly.”

The unspoken attitude was “have common sense, or die!” This allowed me to figure out how to drive a motorcycle by just trying. It was liberating to be given a chance to figure out something dangerous by trial-and-error! It ends, and I took off for the mountains. What followed were four of the most mentally challenging days of my life. Not only had I just learned to drive a motorcycle, now I was expected to drive said motorcycle through the mountains of Vietnam.

The roads were steep and often unpaved. Livestock walked freely across them. Thousand-foot dropoffs with no barriers were common on the side of the road. Dump trucks barreled around downhill corners, often out of their own lanes.

It was exhilarating.

Your Comfort Zone Will Be Blown Up In The Face of Necessity.

I grew up in Colorado, exploring the mountains from a young age. The mountains are a harsh teacher, and they taught me this:

The situations that cause the most personal growth are those which you have no choice but to get yourself out of.

Climbing in the backcountry, stuck in a spot on the wall where you cannot fall without risk of injury? Fantastic. A panic attack won’t help you. You’ve got to slow your heart rate and get yourself down.

Traveling is the same.

Depressed? Thousands of miles from home and your support network? Make changes, or stay depressed!

The situations that have caused the most personal growth in my life are the ones where I had to put fear away and get myself to safety. The Ha Giang Loop was no exception. There were many times that I wanted to stop because I went through a near-miss scenario with a dump truck or a slippery puddle. If I had stopped, my options would have been:

1. Walk to the next village, and find a way to get off the mountain

2. Die on the mountain (or, you know, hitch a ride behind a friend)

Scenarios like this cause growth or break you.

Traveling often puts you in scenarios where you have no choice but to display mental strength, and once you know how strong you can be, what can stop you?

Those four days were the closest thing to complete freedom that I’ve ever experienced. No itinerary, just a boundless ability to explore high-mountain villages, going off the path as much as we wanted to. It was a loop! Any road would do, as long as we stayed inside the loop.

On the third day, two of us drove lazily on what was essentially an ox-path, for hours, through a misty valley in the light rain. That was one of the most meditative experiences of my adult life.

We stopped to climb a waterfall in the valley, a waterfall whose name I never knew. The name isn’t near as important as the waterfall. I doubt the waterfall cares what its name is.

I stood there feeling the mist on my face, reveling in the fact that I didn’t even know about the Ha Giang Loop four days before.

There Isn’t Actually a Destination

How many times have you accomplished something and thought, “well, fantastic, that feels exactly like I imagined, now I can be done forever!”

If we’re living similar human lives, I’m guessing the answer is zero.

Goals are important. They’re a metric for measuring how well we’re using our limited time on this earth. However, they’re never actually an endpoint.

You’ll get to the top of each mountain only to find other mountains, new challenges, and storms that are waiting to try to blow you off course. Having goals is important, but they are just another piece of your too-narrow comfort zone if you never look up from them.

If you want to expand your comfort zone, you must learn to love the journey.