Vietnam

It wouldn't be right to spend a month bumbling around Vietnam and not write a little post about it...though admittedly, it's a pretty tall order boiling down a month of experiences into a few snappy paragraphs.

So I guess for the most part, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. First and foremost, hus and I just had such great fun together. After a year of so much activity (see previous post) - lots of it not necessarily together - it was wonderful just to hang together, talk together, adventure together, point and laugh at the other person as they fall off their motorbike into a ditch (again)...you get the idea.

The pictures tell the rest: were wowed and cowed by hyper-sensory cities, we ventured into remote islands, walked through lush northern mountains, hung out on white beaches, ate meal after meal of wonderful food and learned how to cook some ourselves. We watched paddy fields unfurl from train windows - usually with a stranger's foot draped on some part of us, we were choked up upon learning more about the country's terrible history; we were shown great warmth by many of it's people and subjected to impressively well-orchestrated scams by others. We battled with feelings of guilt at the decadence of our trip, and then embraced it and drank in the glorious REST it afforded us.

We didn't make it to Laos or elsewhere, but I'm actually really glad we had the whole month in Vietnam. It allowed us to experience so many corners of the country and understand its currents and rhythms and appreciate it as a whole organism: the beauty, the brokenness and the downright bizarre.