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Admittedly, asking the hotel receptionist in Hanoi to arrange your transportation to a remote area of northern Vietnam showed a blatant disregard for your safe traveler handbooks but, with no knowledge of local transportation, you didn’t know how else to get there. Sitting in the back of a ’97 Camry, discovering your driver speaks no English, you concede to your partner that there might’ve been another way. Your journey to northern Vietnam began with your father-in-law painting verbal visions of Mu Cang Chai as a rice-terraced wonderland sparsely populated by Hmong villagers. “It’s better than Sa Pa,” he said, “and it’s easy to get there. Just ask for help in Hanoi.” You call the receptionist as your driver rolls through red lights, honking. No one answers. You call the ecolodge in Mu Cang Chai and explain the situation—you’re either precisely on schedule or in the middle of a non-intimidating hostage situation. You hand the phone to the driver who spends 30 seconds becoming increasingly irritated before hanging up and returning your phone. “Okay?” you ask. “Okay,” the driver says, parking in the middle of the congested drop-off site at My Dinh Bus Station. He leads you past the ticket counter to a rear parking lot that is swarming with disorderly rows of mismatched buses. He hands a bus driver a fraction of the money you gave the receptionist and prepares to leave. You stop him and show him the address of the ecolodge drop-off site. He looks confused. You look terror-stricken. The bus driver looks like he regrets agreeing to transport foreigners. You stress-type questions into Google Translate. The Camry driver cocks his neck. The bus driver looks at the screen, rolls his eyes, and walks away. The Camry driver decides Vietnamese Google Translate is probably better and starts typing. You look on eagerly, believing in his belief. Bus go for and with to you. He makes three more attempts, all spit out 80% conjunctions and prepositions. From the outside, the bus looks like it was the last jalopy standing at a retired bus auction. A 12-year old boy side-steps you and climbs on unaccompanied, reinforcing that quiet narrative that you’re worrying about nothing. Pressured to act, you climb on. The western-style seats have been ripped out and replaced with something akin to fully reclined dentist chairs, stacked double-decker, three rows deep. If you don’t lie down, you’ll hit your head on the seat above you. Your legs are squashed beneath the seat in front of you. You can see out 10% of the window if you assume camel-like contortions. Your GPS indicates the bus moves in a north-westerly direction before it falls off the grid. It doesn’t matter. The ecolodge is seven hours from Hanoi, which means you should arrive at 2:30 a.m. You watch your clock like it’s a compass. The bus makes sudden stops along poorly graded mountain roads until it’s so full that passengers are laying head to foot down the aisles. A woman’s been puking into plastic bags for two hours. The bus driver is yelling at her. You have no idea why. Panic sets in at 3 a.m. You psychically scream for the bus driver to make eye contact, acknowledge that he remembers you, pull up to your stop. Any small comfort would do. You turn to your partner, who is, no joke, sleeping. At 3:30 a.m., the bus stops—the driver motions for you to get off. There’s nothing, not a bus station, a house, or a human in sight. There is the road and there is darkness. You climb off. As the bus pulls away, you spot two men with motorbikes across the street, waving. You feel like a jubilant fool. Every person along the way helped you get here. As you ride down the dark, winding dirt road, the shadows of the human-etched rice terraces jut from the earth all around you, and the stars break through every corner of the sky above you. Your father-in-law was right: to experience glory, you just have to ask for help. Later, when you ask your father-in-law how he traveled to the ecolodge, he says, “I took the train.”