Diaries from a dorm room in Hanoi

There you lie, in your ten-person mixed-sex dormitory. How ruinous can a young man in your bed-chamber really be?

There are particular days when travelling whose memories linger achingly in my mind longer than others - perhaps indefinitely.

Particularly as these very days are often two, fused together by a total lack of actual sleep - sleep which would usually signify the successful passing of the night. You may be thinking of frivolous parties or impassioned walks along wave-lapped beaches until sunset. But no, it’s much better than that. I offer you the snorer:

There you lie, in your ten-person mixed-sex dormitory. How ruinous can a young man in your bed-chamber really be? An innocent traveller, the judge concedes, yet punished with the formidable snuffle and wheeze of the occupant of the adjacent bunk 29. Ever-multiplying in decibels, the snore and its mutated echoes devour the chambers of your mind until you are not sure whenever it didn’t.

You wonder what other sounds sound like. You try to remember. A bird’s cheep? The pop as you open a stiff jar of pickles? Nothing... oh, come on! A car horn... you must remember that! But no. No other sound can be recalled from the pre-snore epoch. Aural existence has been swept up in an abrupt and monolithic drone.

Ok, new plan- head under the covers. Finger stuffed into ear. Swift release as peace is crept up on by stifling heat. Sacrifices must be made. I begin to feel like the inside of the dumplings I had for dinner at the local street diner: hot and full of beef.

Come back up for air-SNGRRPPPPPPPGH. Single tear rolls down war-torn cheek. Battle lost.

A strange thing happens when you can’t sleep. You dribble through the time, not really sure where it went because, like you, it had nowhere to go, and you flick through your thoughts like a notebook. A pre-written notebook, though. They’re the same thoughts: tiresome, overthought thoughts, such as counting through the alphabet backwards or walking through the storyboard of your ex-lover and yours’s first kiss. There seems to be so much time to think of new thoughts, alone in the swathes of your blanket. Yet, new does not come. It is as if we are too fearful of new thoughts in the dark – as if we don’t know what will happen. We stick to grey pictures of the past.

You know ‘time’ has passed from the blink of the ‘08:23’ on your phone, but the movement has been incorporeal. Sleep has eluded you. Sleep has slipped by, tripped you, untrappable. And it is morning. Occupant 29 chews his omelette industriously. You smile at each other across the breakfast table. He wonders if your piercing stare and tossed curls are a gift of a Baltic heritage? You imagine beating him up with your water bottle. Comrades: the youth hostel.