Fifty Days
Whenever travel came up in conversation before I left, I'd say the same thing: "I haven't planned it all out yet, but I know I want to eat remarkable food, explore the mountains and cities alike, meet new people, and find some beautiful slices of paradise." What I was really saying was that I had no plan. I'd spent months combing travel blogs and maps, writing down places to eat and things to do, but within two days of landing in Hanoi, that plan was toast.
It started with a nineteen-year-old British lad I met minutes off the plane, walking the city with him, drinking beer, trying not to get run over by motorbikes. Then came egg coffee, the American War museum, a $1 Banh Mi on the side of the road, a pub crawl that ended at 3am, and an hour spent tracking down a friend who'd wandered off the crawl. Hanoi didn't slow down once in three days, and I didn't want it to.
From there it was a bus into the mountains and, almost by accident, the Ha Giang Loop — days on the back of a motorbike through the north, hot pot and rice wine and karaoke with the tour guides, the Chinese border, a killer lunch every single day. It was, without exaggeration, one of the coolest stretches of the entire trip.
Then Ninh Binh, and the trip's one real low point: violently ill on an overnight bus, discharged from a Vietnamese ER at 3:30am with the help of Google Translate, three days spent on rice, electrolytes, and bad movies before I was well enough to rent a bike and canoe through the mountain lakes I'd been too sick to see. Hoi An came next, timed perfectly with Lunar New Year — fireworks, a rented bike, a going-away party for friends I'd made in a matter of days. Then Da Nang on my birthday, a beach club, and an 18-hour bus to Saigon, where I watched the sun rise from a hostel rooftop before realizing I had to leave the country the next day to avoid overstaying my visa.
Cambodia opened with a wrong turn in Phnom Penh and a TukTuk ride to the coast that had me fully expecting to be kidnapped. Instead I found Koh Rong Sanloem — bioluminescent plankton, cheese toasties, and three days I still think about more than almost anything else from the trip. My mom flew in to meet me in Phnom Penh not long after, and together we toured the Killing Fields, flew to Siem Reap, and stood in front of Angkor Wat at sunrise, the muted gold light rising slowly over the five towers.
Thailand and Malaysia moved faster — a 63rd-floor rooftop bar in Bangkok, a mountain town in Chiang Mai with the best market of the whole trip, elephants, a reunion with the British lad from day two, and then Kuala Lumpur, which somehow became my favorite city of the entire fifty days without me being able to fully explain why.
It ended, fittingly, in Singapore — Marina Bay Sands lit up at night, one of the best meals of the trip from a stranger's recommendation on the plane, and the Botanical Gardens in the brutal heat of a final afternoon. Fifty days, and not one of them went according to the plan I'd spent months making. I wouldn't trade a single one.