How to: get to where you need to be (on time)

You’re pretty okay with time management.

On average, you’re usually no more than 5 to 10 minutes late to a function (as long as it’s socially acceptable to be 5 to 10 minutes late), and if you really need to get somewhere on time, you’re pretty good at wrangling those haphazard thoughts and limbs to get there and can often be seen sprinting—knees jerking out at odd angles—to the now-defunct Canterbury train station.

You don’t run to make the Southwest link buses. You kind of despise the Southwest link buses, and it seems your loathing manifests as a refusal to ever look at the timetable on the Pro version of the TransportNSW app, which you paid for when you were fourteen at a point where you liked to kill time before school by catching the trains up and down the Blue Mountains line, timing your arrival to the second. 

So, when you wake up after a somewhat restful sleep on an overly firm hostel mattress, you immediately jump into mentally mapping an hour-by-hour rundown of your day. Last night, under telephone wires and a roseate sunset, you and your new friend, Layla, made plans to leave the hostel by 10 a.m. That way, you’d have plenty of time to drive around Đà Lạt and still make sure she would be back by 3:30 p.m. to pack and catch her bus.

She reminds you a lot of your housemates, as did your night of take-away Indian food eaten in your bunk together while watching Eat, Pray, Love. You can often find the residents of your house also curled up together with a curry, watching a show like 'How To with John Wilson'. Actually, that show is the reason you've decided to write like this today.

But anyway. Back to it.

Unfortunately, you immediately hit a bit of a hurdle because you can’t figure out which laundry to take both your washing to. After reading many mixed (and sometimes worrying) reviews of the various laundries across Đà Lạt, you decide the only thing to do is to climb up to the top bunk and shake her leg to wake her up. You apologize profusely when she turns to face you, but you’re even now because she woke you up by shaking your leg in the middle of the night last night. You ask her which laundry she went to the other day, and she gives you some general directions, followed by an explanation in both bits of Dutch and bits of English about going back to sleep (you think). You can’t bring yourself to ask again and disturb her slaap (that's sleep in Dutch) any more, and the soles of your feet are starting to hurt from balancing precariously on the cold metal rungs of the ladder, so you decide on the laundry closest to you because you know you still have to hire the scooter and lie back down for at least 40 more minutes.

Languor washes over you rhythmically this morning; it reminds you of the women you watch empty their buckets of water over the long, steep driveway. You make it out of your room, which always seems to smell slightly damp, a bit after 11 a.m. A couple of years ago, not sticking to the plan you mentally mapped out would have induced a bit of a panic. But you’ve been trying to remind yourself that slowing down isn’t so terrible, and that your poor nervous system has been begging you to do so for years.

After a cold-but-delicious breakfast of leftover curry and biryani, a swap in scooters, and a comprehensive discussion about all the places you want to visit, you actually get out the door and up the long, steep driveway. It's now about 12 p.m., which gives you 3.5 hours to do two one-hour-long drives, see three waterfalls, a silk farm, and a pagoda. As passenger princess, you have three jobs today:

1. Timekeeper: You take this one very seriously, numbers running through your head as you glance back and forth from your watch to Google Maps.

2. Photographer: With one hand on your prized 2003 Olympus C-5060 digital camera and the other on your less-prized iPhone, you simultaneously take photos and videos and can't help but think about how your mum would react if she saw you on the back of this scooter with both hands out as it weaves through the mountains.

3. Map Bitch: Look, there's definitely room for improvement here, but you were doing such good work at the other two jobs that accidentally going the wrong way for 20 minutes is really only a minor detail.

   
   

Besides, you're both craving coffee now, so you tell Layla you don't have time to stop at the Bonsai and Coffee Garden, and that you can definitely get coffee somewhere where you don't have to pay an entry fee. After you find another place for coffee and get back on the scooter, your ETA is about 50 minutes later than it was when you started. But don't worry, you can still see 3 waterfalls, the silk farm, and the pagoda, and drive back all in two hours. Probably.

As the minutes sputter out of your exhaust pipe and you take the final turn down a remote street, you feel relieved. You'll get back in time. But then, you drive past the silk farm's red pinpoint on the map, so you turn around and drive past again. And again. And once more just to confirm it's not there (it's not). Layla put in the wrong address, but now you're even, and it's pretty funny that you keep messing up what had seemed like such a simple plan the night before. You get back on the bike, vaguely acknowledge the storm brewing in the distance, and drive back the way you came for 10 minutes until you get to the actual silk farm.

Once you're there, you tell Layla you're estimating about 20 minutes in total for activities before you need to drive back home. So, you join someone else's private tour to get more information about the place, and he tells you that you can see one of the waterfalls from inside the statue at the pagoda.

You eat a fried silk worm to distract you from worrying about needing to go back and it tastes like roasted peanuts.

You tell Layla you don't think you have enough time to go to the statue, and she asks, "Are you sure?"

You're actually not sure, and Layla makes a great point that the hostel says to be there at 4 p.m., but they don't actually go anywhere until 4:20 p.m., so really you have another 20 minutes, which is definitely enough time to climb up a statue and look at the waterfall.

It's just around the corner and as you walk up to it you're struck with a thought:

The worry is gone.

It seems to have been chewed up, along with the silk worm, so when you climb up all those stairs and stare into the waterfall's refracting spray, all that's on your mind is that this place is beautiful, and you don't think about anything else but that.

You check the hostel address back into Google Maps and see you're due in a bit after 4 pm, but you can see in the way Layla pulls out onto the main road that you'll get there a lot quicker. You don't take any photos on the way back this time; you're much busier telling Layla every time she shaves a minute off your arrival time.

Also, remember when you saw those storm clouds earlier? You're now driving straight into them, and they grumble with the motorbike as you twist through the traffic on the mountain, begging the rain to hold off for 15 minutes, 9 minutes, 4 more minutes. It doesn't.

You're grateful that, although you're a bit wet, the rain has already stopped by the time Layla drops you off at the top of the driveway, right next to the laundry, so you can get your clothes and hers into her bag and then her onto the bus.

You do manage to do that, with only one lost item and two missed waterfalls, but the point is this:

You got to where you needed to be (on time),

and figured out a little something people have been telling you for years which, somewhat ironically, you actually didn't say on the back of the scooter:

slow the fuck down.