First trip  DAD · Hoi An

The app said my first motorbike ride, to a movie theater in Hoi An, would take 2 minutes.

Written and photographed by Ethan Ward
Went: 1 month

How long · 1 month

Getting there · A flight from Hanoi to Da Nang, then a car to Hoi An

The Grab app said 2 minutes to the movie theater. That seemed like an acceptable amount of time to try something I had spent months avoiding.

I was in Hoi An, booking my first ride on the back of a motorbike. I didn’t have to drive. I didn’t have to figure out the route. I had to sit behind someone who knew what he was doing and hold on. I had already decided that 2 minutes was a much better starting point than 30.

The driver arrived, and I used Google Translate to tell him it was my first time and I was nervous. He smiled, laughed, and handed me a helmet.

It was too big. It kept sliding back on my bald head.

A few weeks earlier, over Christmas in Bali, I had watched two kids pass my car on a motorbike. Neither looked older than 11. One was driving; the other held on behind. No helmets. They were laughing.

My first thought was, where are their parents?

My second came just as fast. In the U.S., someone would call CPS.

I kept seeing children on bikes around Ubud. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a passenger, stopping at warungs for snacks or parking outside shops. I didn’t know their ages, their families, or how they had learned to ride. I knew how young they looked to me, and how quickly I had supplied a whole story about their parents.

I asked Agus, my driver, about it. When I was that age, I told him, we had bicycles. I laughed. He didn’t.

I asked him to explain in Indonesian and recorded him while we drove. He described children riding around nearby areas, staying off the bigger roads until they were 17 and could get a license. His mother had given him his first motorbike when he was 12.

I grew up in the suburbs outside D.C. We rode bicycles in cul-de-sacs, often with helmets and knee pads. I remembered school assemblies about stranger danger and news reports about kidnappings. There was always another warning to absorb, another way to get hurt that I hadn’t thought of yet.

In Ubud, I had reached for CPS before I’d asked anyone a question.

In Hanoi, I had seen a woman in a dress and heels riding as a passenger, her legs to one side, texting on her phone. She looked as comfortable as if she were sitting in a café.

I kept thinking about that ease. I had spent months watching people get on bikes and go about their day while I stayed firmly off them. A motorbike left me feeling exposed. No car around me, no seatbelt, no airbags.

Still, I wanted to know what the ride felt like from somewhere other than the sidewalk. In Hoi An, I chose a short one.

The driver adjusted my helmet and tightened the strap under my chin. He showed me the handles beside the seat. That was where I was supposed to hold on. Not his shoulders, and definitely not around his waist, which was what I had pictured.

Then we were moving.

The wind hit harder than I expected. The helmet kept sliding back, and I worried it would blow off. I gripped the handles until my knuckles went white.

Every pothole felt personal.

On each turn, I felt as if we might tip over. I was acutely aware of the road, my skin, and how little there was between them. The driver was taking me to a movie. I was occupied with staying attached to the vehicle.

Cars, bikes, and pedestrians shared the narrow streets along our route. From a car window, I could watch everyone work around everyone else. From the back of this bike, I had a much less generous appreciation of the arrangement.

The 2 minutes on the app felt like 20.

We turned a corner, and the theater came into view. The driver pulled over. I climbed off slowly, holding the seat for balance.

My legs were shaky. I was laughing at myself, at how much had apparently happened to me on the way to a movie.

The driver smiled, waved, and rode off into traffic.

I stood there for a moment, breathing, feeling my feet on solid ground. I had done it. I was also thinking, I’m never doing that again.

Back in Bali, I ended up taking Grab bikes everywhere.

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