Reflection

     The night of the last post, Lou and I hopped a red eye flight from Hanoi to Seoul, Korea where we had an 11 hour layover before our flight back to San Francisco. Seoul must be an airport where many airlines make transfers because they are truly set up for travelers who must spend a LONG time in an airport. They offer four or five different free tours into the city of Seoul. There are lounge chairs set up all over the fourth floor for people to lie down on and sleep. They offer free showers and free computers to work on. We opted to rent a room in a short term stay hotel housed on the 4th floor and I grabbed 3 or 4 hours of sleep, showered and used the wifi before getting on the 10 hour flight for our final flight back to SFO. A sign at the little cafe where we grabbed some udon noodles for lunch provided our final smile before traveling from Asia to the US.

     We got home to feel like we had time traveled from another reality back to our more familiar one. Except for a few days on our own in Saigon and then a few days after the bike tour in Hanoi, we were in the hands of our two guides for two weeks of very chaperoned travel through Vietnam. We certainly could not have done what we did without them. We would not even have know what to see and where to go. So, did we see the "real" Vietnam? I think we saw much of the geography both rural and urban. We got an idea how people move through their lives - some of them rich and some of them very poor. We ate some of the food, viewed some of the history and the celebrations and observed how some of them try to make a living in this country. The biking made us move through Vietnam at a much slower pace than if we had been only in a bus or in a car. For Lou and me, the slower pace of the bike allows us to see more and experience more than we could on our own. We are very glad we spent some time in this country that holds a special place in our memories. Seeing many of the places that were names on the news in the 60's and 70's made the country more 3-dimensional  and we are very much richer for the experience.