To be perfectly honest, Phil and I were sad to leave Vietnam. After staying in a country for two and a half months, you get used to certain things about the place. You start to learn some norms and customs, as much as one can as a visitor to a foreign land where you don’t speak the language.
We were asked by a fellow traveler recently, during a food tour in Penang (which I can’t wait to tell you all about!), if, after such a long stay in Vietnam, we started to feel like locals. The answer was, No. Absolutely not.
It seems to me, in order to even begin to feel like a local, one really must develop connections to the place, such as: learning the language, finding a community of people, or both. This is what helped us when we lived in Spain. We worked hard and studied the language and were lucky enough to make friends with locals, who (lucky for us) also spoke English. We formed relationships and had a community and some really cool experiences because of it, but it took many, many months. Those things could not have happened if we only had a week or two or even just a couple of months in Asturias.
A big part of the romanticization of travel is picturing oneself having an unbelievable experience which gives the traveler unique insight and deeply connects them to the local culture. Of course, that sounds amazing, right? But experiences like that don’t often just fall in your lap.
Often, in online travel forums, people will talk about Vietnam (and many other countries) as being too touristy. They want to get out to see the “real” Vietnam and have a “genuine” or “authentic” experience. Travel packages and tour ads will often use phrases like “authentic” and experience XYZ “like a local” to sell more tickets.
There have been times during our past seven plus months of travel, I have thought that some of our experiences have been too curated. I too wanted an “authentic experience”, not just stopping in the same tourist spots as every other tourist. I think on some level, I had visions of riding a motorcycle to some small village and Anthony Bourdain-style, pulling up a plastic stool, ordering some hot noodle soup, drinking a cold beer and socializing with locals. Or while we had a coffee, some grandma or auntie would take a liking to us and invite us home for a traditional meal.
That hasn’t happened, at least not yet. This may have something to do with the fact that there ain’t no way I am riding a motorcycle anywhere, especially Vietnam, where learning the delicate dance of traffic seems almost as difficult as learning the language. Speaking of which, I don’t know the language. The chance of having a spontaneous conversation with a local diminishes significantly if you’re relying on them to be able to speak English.
Here is what I’ve learned: We can’t all be Anthony Bourdain. While he had a dynamic personality, genuine curiosity, and a thirst for connection…he also had chef friends, field producers, production coordinators, translators, and fixers working behind the scenes. Unbelievable experiences with locals in foreign countries didn’t just fall into his lap because he was a cool guy who was open to new experiences, they were carefully orchestrated and curated for our optimal viewing pleasure.
The thing is, any experience you have while traveling is a unique and authentic experience, because you are experiencing it. You are unique. It is your experience. Whether that is gazing at the same statue as thousands of other tourists before you, or having an amazing meal at a (seemingly) unknown restaurant or food stall, or wandering around a temple or church and having the place all to yourself, these are your experiences. Also, tourist spots are usually tourist spots because they are worth seeing, even if it means crowding in, elbows to ankles, with hundreds of other people. It doesn’t make the place any less special.
Sometimes, not often, a truly unexpected and unique experience comes your way because you were open to it, in the right place, at the right time. We met a local at an izakaya in Tokyo who we ended up having dinner with at a restaurant we would never have known about, eating dishes we never would have ordered, if we wouldn’t happen to have finished a tour and were looking for a beer in a less visited part of town.
We met a Greek chef in Hong Kong who invited us to his restaurant for an unforgettable meal, because we needed to do laundry on Chinese New Year and he helped us with the machine.
Just yesterday, we met a young Spanish man while in Kuala Lumpur when we offered him a ride in our taxi when the train we’d all hoped to catch wasn’t running. We shared an hour of good conversation and later helped him get to the train station near our rental.
Not all travel experiences are long or lead to life-long connections. Often they are simply sweet moments in time that remind you that we are all citizens of the world; in this together, living our unique and authentic lives.
