Goodbye, Vietnam.

My last day in Vietnam was appropriate for me: cold and rainy.  It would have been a good day to curl up in my luxury hotel room and read a book, sipping tea.  But instead I had to suffer the curse of anyone traveling to a foreign country: the slog home, through the airport world.  Enough has been written about how we all now hate airports, and that's actually too bad. They aren't completely bad because they are still a portal to the "other side" where adventure and journey await.  Flying was much more pleasant before fear and paranoia were inserted into the experience and before we were all (except the upper classes) treated like cattle.  But the process gets us where we want to go; without it we would still be steaming our way across the ocean.

While I could have done more in the two weeks I was in Vietnam, I think what I did was right for me. I am not the kind of person to zip into a city, zip around and zip out to the next location.  That's fine if all you want to do is see one or two things, but it rarely works for me.  I like to see how people start their day, how they wake up and unfold.  You can only do that if you are willing to get up early, before the city is wide awake.  I also like to watch people go about their daily business, how they open their shops, small rituals that are easy to miss unless you can take the time to pay attention.  Then there are the after work ballets that take place in any city: how people stop for food or for a drink with friends, how they rush through the small grocery stores shopping for dinner provisions, how some stop and eat in a quick cafe, how some join friends for a stroll down the avenue.  All these delineations of daily life are impossible to see if you are only there for a quick day and need to rush out to catch the bus or train to the next place. 

So, yes, I could have packed more into the two weeks I had in the country. Next time I will have a better idea of what it takes to travel from city to city and from country to country in that part of the world.  But I have zero regrets about what I did and how I planned it.  It worked for me, gave me some 'down time' to just hang out and I saw some wonderful things.  Going back is definitely in my future. 

This trip reminded me of why I love to travel.  It's not just to see new things and experience a new culture, but also because travel makes me question my own life and my own personal culture. Not the culture around me but the one inside my mind. I firmly believe that any kind of travel, whether it's by car or rail or on foot, should change you in some way. It should bend the way you see things, soften the edges and, at the same time, tighten the focus.  Driving to Texas, flying to Vietnam, walking the Lost Coast, anything that takes you out of your every-day world should make you question that every-day world in some way.  Questioning is good; it's the complacency, the lack of questions, that is not good. Most of us live lives that are not traumatic or dangerous or difficult compared with the rest of the world. We turn on the tap, water comes out. We don't worry about car bombs or drought and I know no one personally who lives on the street.  We, as safe, secure humans, need to question why we get to live like this and so many people live not like this.  Our questioning won't change things, but we still need to ask the questions.  Change doesn't happen without rocking the boat and even if that boat is just a paper sail in our own mind, it still needs to be rocked.

So I said goodbye to Vietnam, for now.  I can't wait for the next trip, whether it is back to Southeast Asia or somewhere else.  (My bank account would like me to stay home for a long, long time, however.  But that's like listening to commercials:  I don't.)  I do want to write about traveling alone, what that was like, and I will do that tomorrow.  Plus, there are still things to tell you about my trip, and that will happen soon. So, please, if you have read this far, stay tuned for a couple more days.

cheers.