Expectation Will Wreck a Thing

Reflections from Hanoi on the price of overplanning

“What you’re doing is EPIC!”

We heard it too many times to count. I had even agreed as we planned our trip.

“We’re lucky we get to do this. I can’t wait!”

But one month in, why wasn’t it epic yet?

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The hours, days and weeks passed and I felt just like my regular self, but in Vietnam.

Highs, lows and the in between

By the four-week mark, we’d had two or three truly epic moments – moments I knew I’d remember forever even as I was experiencing them.

The sight of Crocodile Lake in Cat Tien National Park as we walked out of the forest.

The clifftop ride on Cham Island that ended in a local guesthouse owner climbing a palm tree to fetch us coconuts when we stopped for refreshment.

The view down the Da Nang coastline from Linh Ứng Pagoda on Son Tra peninsula.

Yet we’d spent too much time with our heads in toilet bowls to agree with our friends that our trip was epic.

We were regularly glued to our phones searching long-distance coach timetables.

There was also the depressing amount of plastic pollution and gross overcrowding.

And we were sweating from our eyeballs in the heat. Avoiding dehydration was a constant battle.

There had been many highs, definitely, but there had also been very grounding, very humbling lows. Plus all the nothingness in the middle.

People forget about that bit of travel. The mundanity.

Incredible experiences are treasured and remembered fondly. Travel nightmares with hindsight become good stories.

Yet the part that forms the majority of your time is the ordinary life in between.

Discussions on what to eat for dinner, comparing prices of hotel rooms, packing and repacking and repacking again and repacking yet again…

Panicking about the overwhelming ordinariness of some early days, I booked for Danang, a holiday within a holiday, paying a little extra for a boutique hotel instead of a homestay.

We gathered ourselves after a bumpy start. We relaxed by the infinity pool. We restored our gut health. (Such luxury.)

We put the vomiting episode behind us and I tried to get over the disappointment that my epicness hadn’t arrived.

Enter the epicness

After some rest, we travelled north via a stunning coastal train ride to Hue followed by a short flight to Hanoi. Next, we saw Halong Bay by boat, a longheld dream destination. Then we’d gone on a three-day motorbike road trip in the mountains around Ha Giang.

When the epicness arrived, it arrived hard.

Tears of frustration from just two weeks before turned to tears of gratitude.

A lot can happen in a fortnight and we’d seen a lot more. Yet that wasn’t why the epicness was landing.

In Hanoi, a new feeling settled in as I realised our friends hadn’t been talking about the bucket list stuff. Ticking off experiences you’ve always wanted to do? Cool, but epic might not arrive on those specific days.

Maybe you unexpectedly get your period right before you go snorkelling or you have a crap night sleep before a long hard hike. Perhaps you’re on a trip with some loud obnoxious tourists or the well-researched street food gives you stomach cramps.

When we plan a trip of a lifetime, it may seem like epicness is inevitable. All those experiences we get to have, all that energy poured in...

It all has to pay off.

That’s a lot of pressure on a plan though.

Overanticipation has a habit of wrecking a thing.

So does overcontrol.

Enjoying the everyday

I have a policy of not spending more time arranging an event than I’m going to spend enjoying it. I’m wary of peak moments.

When it came to our wedding, that was next to impossible, because other people wanted to make it more complicated than it needed to be.

“You have to have this.”

“You absolutely can’t do without that.”

Honestly, I could’ve done without a lot of it.

Complicated adds cost too, of course, which made some vendors super insistent that their service was absolutely essential.

Some people like planning and I get that. Sometimes you get as much enjoyment looking forward to something as you do once you’re there.

I don’t like to go in knowing every detail though.

And when a long trip needs a fair bit of organising and the anticipation builds and builds, the trap is you think your adventure is going to be epic every moment of every day.

Truth is you can’t have a prolonged high like that. Apart from anything, that’s not how brain chemistry works.

We only know joy in contrast to misery. We can feel awe, but not always.

When it hit me in Hanoi, I realised life was only epic looking backwards. And expecting a solid six weeks to feel exceptional all the time was unrealistic.

Epicness accumulates.

By the time we were wandering around Hồ Tây lake on our last Sunday in the Vietnamese capital, I’d made peace with lowkey, restful, meandering days.

They were necessary.

Some even turned up beautiful little finds, away from tourist ripoffs and hoards of visitors.

That day, I tried Muscovy duck with the weirdest sauce I’ve ever tasted -something like creamy anchovy paste is the closest I can describe.

It sticks in my mind for the unremarkable nature of the afternoon that ended up being interesting and lovely and something a little different. I even remember the painted mural on the sunshine yellow wall by the restaurant terrace.

If you asked me for a memorable moment of our Halong Bay cruise... I don’t think I could give you one. All that anticipation for what? Photos, photos, photos, just like the rest.

The dishes we ate on that afternoon in Hanoi, though, I can still taste in my mind.

People will ask about the highlights, but that question is so hard. Because the things you remember are the surprises, the things you can’t plan, the days you don’t wreck with expectation.

The everyday is a patchwork of moments.

The ideal is to experience the contrast.

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