Get on the Bus

I must confess, I've been harboring a bad attitude.

When it comes to travel, I have had a bug in my bonnet about those group tours where a guide takes you and forty other tourists around on a coach bus to see all the sights of Rome or Dusseldorf at a breakneck speed. The guide invariably wears a windbraker with the company logo on it, waves a pennant on a stick, and carries a megaphone.

No thank you. Not for me. I'd rather be seen on the subway during rush hour with no pants on.

Like I said, I have been harboring a bad attitude.

But then I went to Vietnam for ten days.

Before school let out, I talked to several of my colleagues. They each gave me several great suggestions, but they all agreed on two things: sign up for a two-day trek into the mountains near Sapa and do an overnight trip on a tour boat in Halong Bay.

This was supposed to be a twentieth anniversary trip for my wife and me, but with Julie back in The States tending to family business, that wasn't happening. With less than a three weeks notice, my kid brother Nate stepped up to the plate. There was going to be a whole lot less cuddling, but a whole lot more backpacking.

Nate and I decided to do Vietnam on the cheap. We stayed in various backpacker hotels which cost us anywhere from six to ten dollars per person per night. It was at one of these backbacker hotels that we signed up for both of our side tours.

There were no retirees with their overpriced cameras, but there was a shuttle bus and a guide. No megaphone, thank Heaven.

As I climbed onto the bus and surveyed our fellow passengers, I thought to myself "What losers. Don't they have any better way to explore Vietnam than to take a cookie-cuttie tour?"

But I could not have been more wrong.

At the end of our ten-day trip, Nate and I agreed that these two tours were the highlight of our trip. First, we got to experience some amazing landscapes and encounter some indigenous cultures that we never would have been able to experience on our own.

Second, our fellow travelers -rather than being the stodgy, risk-adverse people that I had imagined them to be- were all very cool. The were mostly backpackers and disproportionately young people in their twenties. We met three American women who just finished their undergrad, a couple from Estonia, and a family of four from Denmark. Getting to know them was a highlight of the trip. Even though each of these side trips lasted less than 48 hours, when it came time to part ways I felt like a kid at the end of summer camp saying goodbye to his newest bestest friends.

I've had to swallow my pride and take back every bad word I have ever uttered about group tours. I am afraid that this means that one day in the not-so-distant future, I will be mounting an airconditioned coach bus with a bunch of the other retirees from the assisted living compound and heading to Branson Missouri to see Engelbert Humperdinck live in concert.

But when I do, I'll be packing my denture cream, Metamucil, and Reader's Digest in a backpack. Preferable an old beat up one with some dirt on it.

On the plane ride back to Hong Kong, Nate and I figured out that we'd met and had extended conversations with people from over 14 different countries: Ireland, China, Brazil, Spain, France, Mexico. Everyone of them seemed to have a fascinating back story.

Below are four of those stories.

-Jack

Note: if while backpacking through Southeastern Asia, you bumped into any young couples from Europe, just go ahead and assume they are not married. They probably aren't. (Does anybody in Europe get married anymore?)