I’m so pleased to be able to stay here for one more year.  I was dreading having to go back to the UK. Anthony Bourdain knows how I feel and he’s exactly right – anywhere else just seems ordinary:

“I’m smiling – we’re all smiling so hard our faces hurt.
I love Vietnam.
I love it now.
I loved it from the minute I arrived for the first time, a few years ago.

A year from now, I plan to live here.
I will move to a small fishing village in a coastal area of Vietnam near Hoi An.
I have no idea what I’m going to do there, other than write about the experience.

I plan only on being a visual curiosity, the lone westerner in a Vietnamese community; to rent a house, move in with few, if any, expectations and let the experience wash over me.

Whatever happens, happens.

There are other beautiful places in the world.
And there are other places – just like Vietnam – where the people are nice, the scenery beautiful, the food extraordinary.

But Vietnam always feels so right.

I have a theory that it’s to do with pheromones for me.
Like when you meet the love of your life for the first time.

Later, trying to describe why you love her, you struggle: sure, she’s beautiful, she’s brilliant, she’s funny, she can take apart and rebuild a 1967 Mustang to original factory spec.

Yet that’s not why you love her.It’s something else.
Maybe she just smells right.

You sense, you know, that this is a woman you want to spend the rest of your life with.Reason and logic fly out the window.
A more primal, uncontrollable and unquantifiable force is at work.

This is the place you knew you always wanted to be.
Even before you knew it.”

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2005/04/why_anthony_bou.html

And again -

Something really happened to me in Vietnam. I think I instinctively knew it, and I think a lot of people around me knew it, but Asia ruined me for going back. Vietnam in particular ruined my whole life. My expectations for what I see when I open my eyes in the morning, or even little things like the condiments on the table when I sit down. That bar just went so high and so different that there was no going back.

I think it fits in very well with my Graham Greene worldview. If you’re lucky enough to live in a fantastic place in fantastic times and see incredible things, then you’re also doomed to be there, trapped in some terrible penance-like situation. To me The Quiet American is a happy book. I read it every year. It nails Vietnam. It’s still there, that Vietnam. It’s a perfect metaphor, he loves a woman who can never fully love him back. It is a perfect metaphor for colonialism and Western adventurism in the East. I don’t care, I just want to be there.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006_06_009085.php

moments

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Thoreau

I know what I don’t want. Now I have to decide what I do want.

“You’re never going to get the thing you want
Not ’till you work out what it is you want.
You don’t actually want the thing you want.
You only want what you can’t have. You want
it blindly. What it is you think you want

is nothing like you actually want.
You’ve still got to work it out, what you want
and what it is, the real meaning of want.”

Ali Smith The Accidental

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

The Real Work

Wendell Berry

When I was deciding to apply for my career-break I wrote a list of reasons for and against it.
Dissatisfaction with life in the UK was high on the ‘reasons to go’ list.

There were not many moments of pleasure in a typical day and 1,000 minor irritations wore me down. Traffic jams on poorly-maintained roads and shabby, expensive public transport full of idiot passengers. ‘Hoodies’ yobs and chavs, lanky youths on small BMX bikes riding on chewing-gum stained broken pavements looking for things they could steal. Ignorant aggressive people who never smiled. Children in buggies eating fast food while their parents stood on corners smoking and drinking.
Dirty hospitals. Tabloid media. Cheap food, fast food, bad food. Grey rainy days. ‘Retail therapy’ and rampant consumerism, but only shops full of cheap rubbish.

I’m not sorry to have left all this behind and am not homesick at all. It is a joy to walk down the street in Vietnam, a pleasure to go into a shop and be served by smiling staff.

I have thought for a while that there is something radically wrong in the UK and that trends are being ignored. I have met so many people who have left and are looking for a better place to live. From the Betting Shop manager (‘ Remember Brian, in England you’re never 4 miles from scum’), to the Surveyor and his wife who were tired of office politics, high taxes and poor value for money, everyone I’ve met thinks there are compelling reasons to leave and very few to stay.

Here are some links to articles that explore some of these reasons. Some of the comments are predictably racist and ill-informed, but others give a snapshot of the concerns and worries of British residents and expats.

The Daily Telegraph (I know….) asks why so many Britons are emigrating. (they say 207,000 in 2007- one every three minutes):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=BLOGDETAIL&grid=F11&blog=yourview&xml=/news/2007/11/15/view15.xml
There are 789 comments……..

In the Daily Mail (I know…) the figure has increased to 250,000, one person every two minutes:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=510701&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true#StartComments”
100 comments.

Common themes are high-taxation and unreasonable charges – ‘Goodbye to rip-off Britain’:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/martin_samuel/article3634764.ece
229 comments.

‘Social evils’ is another one:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7084044.stm

‘Greed and family breakdown mentions one report:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7356713.stm
There are 89 pages of comments.

John Redwood (I know…) wrote about it on his blog (and says there were 400,000 emigrees in 2007!):
http://www.johnredwoodsdiary.com/2007/11/16/why-are-so-many-people-leaving-the-uk/
58 comments.

And there are other blogs from people who have emigrated, trying to make sense of the whole process:
http://escapengland.blogspot.com

The debate will continue, but here in Vietnam the skies are blue and people cheerful. And everyone accepts that not working is not an option: if you don’t do something, anything, then you won’t eat.

I’ve no evidence, but I have a sense that the global balance of power is shifting from the West to the East and that this is the place to be.

Be the hero of your adventure. All travel is inner travel, because wherever we are, we are processing our experiences internally. Remind yourself that you are the hero of all your journeys, and that all your travel in the outside world is really travel inward, toward ever higher spiritual consciousness.

Joseph Dispenza

I’ve been away from the UK for eight months.
I’ve not had much inclination to write here, even though I did want to start to use it as a method of communicating with friends and family. I prefer sending individual emails, knowing that the reader will enjoy particular tales and adventures. This blog was never going to be to be a travelogue, and being the perfectionist I am, I wanted to make each entry a potential award-winning piece of creative writing so if I wasn’t entirely happy I didn’t publish the post. Time to relax and just use this as an online repositry to supplement and enhance my diary and emails.

I’ve loved every day and every month. And I’ve come full-circle – I started in Saigon on September 2nd and am now back again, via Hong Kong (twice), Laos, Thailand (twice), Cambodia (twice) and China. One might not think it’s a very impressive list of countries but it was never designed to be a country-bagging trip. I like it in this part of the world and wanted to see if I would feel differently after an extended time here.

I do: I love it more than ever and cannot now imagine a day without seeing the smile on an Asian girl’s face or enjoying a Vietnamese iced-coffee. It’s time to try and put down some roots here while branching out to new horizons. (Hence the title – clever, eh?)

So now I’ll be staying in Vietnam and Thailand for a while with the odd side-trip to Cambodia and maybe Myanmar – now the rainy season will soon be here it will a good time to visit Angkor Wat and Bagan. There are only four months of the career-break year left, and like a final year student with exams approaching I’ll try and cram as much of the things I wanted to write here over the last eight months as I can.

I’ll also put photos, quotes, snippets of conversations overheard and anything else that catches my eye. And some home thoughts from abroad, since the Escape England blog has linked to me!

The more intensely we’ve seen and felt a place, the more it becomes part of us, alters our terrain, redefines our horizons.

A traveler who’s done more than skate across the surface of a place – who’s experienced it, drawn it in like breath, reveled in its details – becomes reflected in a kind of prism. The mirror of place, like the traveler herself or himself, develops many facets.

Jim Molnar: The Place Of Journals: Travelers Map Out Their Personal Landscapes (essay found on the Internet)