When did I become a full-time traveller? On the day I sold my house? When I visited the first ‘foreign’ country on my journey? After one year, or five? Why did it take over seven years of full-time travel and over 30 countries (albeit most of them in Europe) to get me to actually believe it?
Not on day one … I might have got cold feet and turned around and gone back (although I had no home to go to!) Then in my first year I was pretty close to ‘home’, in Ireland, France and Germany. Covid came when I was back in the UK – so was I travelling then? In Malaysia, Albania and Thailand most people I met spoke English. In Vietnam it was much more smiling, nodding, pointing and laughing. Maybe that’s the answer: it wasn’t distance or time that made me a traveller. Vietnam was one of the first places that actually made me work at it – navigate, guess, get it wrong, without the safety net of a shared language.
In HCMC, Saigon to many locals, I definitely felt I was travelling. Many of the things I did were things I could do in almost every city. I rode the buses (albeit that’s unusual in HCMC), I drank in bars, I went to museums and art galleries, to the fish and vegetable markets. There was nothing I did in HCMC which was unique to the place, and yet I found it a unique place – not just because of the traffic and pavement chaos, but because of the friendliness of the people, the smell of food and blossoms everywhere, and the need to look down. So much happens at ground level – even much of the food is sold off the pavement by people sitting or squatting there.
Finding food became its own kind of navigation. I’d been told that there was a supermarket in a nearby shopping mall. I walked over to the imposing building and through the front door – ignoring a little side entrance that led downstairs. I went in and up to the second floor, where supermarkets are often located – but not here. I asked and was told it was in the basement, so took an elevator down to the bottom floor – a car park. I opened an unlikely looking door to one side and found it was a storage area for old toilets. I walked up a floor – nothing, another floor and I was back where I started. I shrugged my shoulders and walked out, and only just then did I remember the little side entrance … yes, that was it, and there was a completely different exit arrangement to the car park as well. The supermarket and the mall above just didn’t connect.
Eating at the supermarket became a staple for me after that – partly because it felt safer (although I never had food poisoning during my time in HCMC), partly because it was cheap, but it didn’t have the atmosphere of the outdoor food stalls and the colourful, low plastic chairs. And the food itself was one of the real surprises of the trip. I had seen videos of the baskets of leaves that are given to you with most meals – but nothing prepares you for the taste of these. The sheer variety, and the excitement of not knowing what you were going to get, since each vendor does things differently. Basil and mint mixed were a wow for me … lettuce a disappointment. There was also the time I tried to order soup at a café inside a supermarket, not realising it was poured over the ingredients for pho and that I needed to pick up a bowl of what I wanted first for the server to pour over.
It was the buses that connected me to the rest of the city. I was surprised to find out that most tourists don’t use them – the younger ones hire a bike, oldies like myself use Grab, the local ride-hailing app. I just loved sitting on one of the small buses (larger ones are banned from the narrow, city-centre streets during the day) and watching the skill of the drivers as they they threaded their way through the weaving scooters that fill the roads. I did take some Grab journeys too, especially when I needed rescuing from being lost, including getting in one and finding out I was only two minutes from where I needed to be.
Crossing the river near my accommodation to get to a small park in the evening, and seeing it all lit up and reflecting in the water, became one of my favourite rituals. Later I found out this is listed as one of the ‘best things to do’ as a tourist in many guides – but what’s not mentioned is the tai chi practice in the evening light, or the sound of birds roosting in the numerous trees.
I did go to some of the tourist spots too. The Old Post Office, the War Remnants Museum (though I had to leave early, as I found it too harrowing), the Museum of Fine Arts. But my month there was more about discovering the pulse of the city than ticking off its sights.
I don’t collect souvenirs – I don’t have room for them in my full-time travel life, but I did pick up some scars when I crossed a field to look at a memorial placed at the other end. Some building work was just starting and I took care to avoid it – but failed to notice the wire that had been staked out at ankle height, presumably to designate the boundary. I suppose that mistake could have happened anywhere. But in some societies, people wear scars to show their social status, and I felt I was taking away my own sign of membership in the travelling community. I’ve added a few more since then.
So that could be it, in the end. Not the buses or the bowls of pho or the wrong turn into a basement full of old toilets – though all of that is what the month was made of – but the sense, finally, of having earned a small mark of membership. I am a world traveller. The scars helped, but it was successfully crossing a busy Saigon street that finally made me realise that.
