our little sampan, with our own crew of 3

I feel kind of breathless about this — it’s coming up so quickly, and I’m so excited — but a week from this Friday, at 1:30am, we’ll be flying off to Hong Kong for our next great adventure. From Hong Kong we fly to Hanoi (one of my favorite cities in the whole world), then we’ll take an overnight train to Sapa, in the mountains near the Chinese border. Back to Hanoi on the overnight train, then we’ll fly to Kuching, on the island of Borneo, then to Malacca, on the Malaysian peninsula, then up to Ho Chi Minh City where we’ll travel out into the Mekong Delta, on a private sampan. Our last night we’ll stay in a beautiful lodge in the delta, before heading back to Ho Chi Minh City for our flight back to Hong Kong and NYC. We’ll be gone for 16 days.

I always thought New York City and Paris were my favorite places in the world, and I do love those places, with all my heart and everything I am. But I very deeply love Vietnam — can’t say why, exactly, though I can list all kinds of things I love about it. I keep finding myself on the verge of tears, so happy that I get to go back there. I went to Vietnam in 2005 with my husband (6 months before we got married), and it was my first jarring travel experience. Before then, I’d been to Montreal and Quebec City, Cozumel and Isle Mujeres, Paris, London, and Glasgow. None of those places were jarring, they were Western and familiar, obviously. But Vietnam, it just blew me out of my socks. After a full day, I kind of hit a wall and didn’t think I could bear it. The alphabet was different, I had no idea what was going on, I couldn’t make sense of the money, almost no one spoke English, the food was sometimes mysterious, I couldn’t read anything, and some of the rules were unknown and scary, like the time we were taking a photo and an armed policeman ran toward us. That panicked feeling passed, and I relaxed a bit, though I continued to feel that sense of Otherness for the entire trip.

But the people were so gentle and busy and fast and laughing, the architecture (in Hanoi especially) was so distinctive, like Parisian architecture is. In both those places, you know where you are. The food was fresh and delicious (but don’t ask me about what my husband ate in Hue, he still can’t talk about it). The countryside is beautiful. But mainly, I think, it’s the people. I feel like I could live there and be very happy.

Will I feel the same sense of Otherness this time? Probably not, because I’ve been there before and I’ve now traveled to a lot of places that were uniquely foreign to me. I’m just so thrilled to be going back, I keep getting all choked up.