simple life

(this post was written while sitting on a bus, i am just getting around to posting now, sorry for the strange order of the past few posts)


i am on a bus driving from hanoi to halong bay, i am sitting among expat travelers from all over the world. all of us hoping to have good weather for the overnight boat trip that may be the visual high point of our respective vacations in vietnam.

as i watch the country side of vietnam unfold along the road, i am shaken by the simplicity of life so many people here live with. hanoi is a model of simplicity. nothing appears difficult to find. interactions are direct and easy, even when there is little shared language. although there is open poverty, people appear to be if not happy, than content.

this has helped to make my vacation a relaxing and easy going time. a direct contrast with a US vacation like going to LA and attempting to capture the west coast vibe, enjoy the sun, see a star, eat at a restaurant with a celebrity chef, and go to a sterilized theme park. none of those things, other than the sun possibly, would play in vietnam.

the road to the coast is a long stretch of shops, houses and rice paddies that show just how simple life can be if you could accept it. selling noodles in front of your house as an endless stream of bicycles with locals, motos with people moving from one city to the next and buses filled with tourists go by.

if that life is too stressful for you, you can work in the rice paddy. feet in water all day, crouched over tending to next months dinner. enjoying the placid pools of water and fields of spiky green plants sticking up like the hair of a punk rocker whose songs you would never hear. the required world view being the distance you can see; and the stone walls of your family house, that is half the size of an american child’s cramped bedroom.

the tourists chat about their travels, discuss visas, restaurants and flight plans as they pass by you. as you spend your day in the sun or hidden under a battered blue tarp that shelters you from the heat, the tourists complain they are getting too old to take a 3 hour bus trip to the boat that promises to allow them to rest and relax on their vacation. when they stop for gas there are groans of delay and demands for air conditioning; clearly focused inwardly rather than considering the life you are living just outside their window.

life can be simple, if you can allow it to be.