When the Curtain Calls
A trip to Vietnam and why travel doesn't help us escape life, it teaches us how to change it
Travel doesn’t help us escape life, but it can teach us how to change it.
Clock Strikes Midnight in Taipei
As soon as I got off the plane in Taipei, I felt it.
That familiar jolt of electricity sizzling through my veins. The thrill that comes with hearing languages you can’t understand and seeing signs written in indecipherable tongues. The curiosity that comes with being somewhere you’re not accustomed to. Relying on the translate app. Googling how the local transportation system works. Looking up currency conversion rates. Figuring out where to eat and what to order.
It was close to midnight but I was wide awake, striding through the bright lights of Ximending eating a rice ball from FamilyMart and sipping soy milk from a Hello Kitty-themed 7-Eleven. Taipei felt like a cross between Tokyo and Hong Kong. I didn’t expect to feel so emotional about my return to Asia with the FamilyMarts, the bidets, and the swapping street shoes for house slippers in the hostel lobby. Turns out those things that were once foreign to me, now had me almost in tears at our joyful reunion.
I had just 24 hours to taste the best food and explore the sights of Taipei before hopping on a plane to Vietnam where I would spend 10 days and meet up with my family who were joining the trip.
For years I’ve used travel as a temporary escape or reset button, only to return home to the same routines and stresses I’d left behind. This time felt different. Traveling has always taught me to adapt to changes. Maybe it’s time I applied that to my own life.
The Curtain
This trip isn’t one of my typical solo travels and it wasn’t a relaxing vacation either. It was more of a bookmark indicating a season of change in my life. For the past few years I’ve been pouring every ounce of myself into something that was quietly draining me. I hadn’t realized how deep the waters I was trying to swim in were, until my body and mind started paying high taxes for it.
This trip to Vietnam became the curtain between two chapters of my life. The former having brought joyful moments and a lot of action and growth, but strained by mental exhaustion and an unsustainable weight I'd been carrying longer than I should have. Knowing something has run its course and actually accepting it are two very different things. The warrior in me wanted to keep going, but the sage in me woke up just in time.
The timing of life is sometimes supernatural. That’s how we know the things that are unfolding for us are meant to be. Back in January, my family decided to plan a spring break trip to Vietnam. Don’t ask why we opted for 32+ hour travel days instead of something a bit closer… adventure to far off places is part of our DNA. We planned it for March when tickets were cheap and we could all get time off work. I felt grateful embarking on such an odyssey and sharing it with my family.
But on the week of my 30th birthday in late February, it was as if the planets agreed to stir up my life. I got an opportunity to go in-house and started eight days later. The week after that, I was somewhere above the North Pole on a 14-hour flight to the other side of the world.
When I returned, I'd come back to a fresh page, but not a blank one. The chapters before it, the lessons from the road, the people I’ve met in faraway places, all of it informs what I write next.
The Vargas Family Adventures in Vietnam (a preview)
My parents are no strangers to adventure, but this was their first time somewhere truly foreign, where even the alphabet is unrecognizable. There’s something special about watching people who raised you, get to experience that jolt of electric awe for the first time. I guess the love of adventure had to come from somewhere…
Together, as we figured out how to cross the chaotic streets of Hanoi safely, we left our old identities and took up new roles— as map navigators, money administrators, transportation coordinators, history investigators, and food managers scanning Google Reviews for the next great meal.
We wreaked havoc on a sleeper train near the Chinese border. Got scammed by an expensive dragonfruit seller. We almost fell for a fraudulent scheme cooked up by a Grab driver who earned himself both a “domestic iguana” and a “gargajo en tapia” title from my dad (I’ll let you Google that last one).
We ate fried rice and noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Overindulged in cardiac-arrest- inducing ice cold sweet Vietnamese coconut coffees. Rowed through the impressive limestone peaks and waterways of Trang An, smelled incense in thousand-year-old temples, and made great new human, cat, and water buffalo friends at a homestay in Sapa. Even the guy at the black market jewelry shop started recognizing me after so many visits to exchange crisp Benjamins for wrinkled dongs.
Overall, even with a few bumps here and there, travel became a shared experience where the best part of the day was also the debriefing. Where around the dinner table of fried spring rolls and 25-cent beers, we learned that while we all experience mostly the same activities, we somehow all came away with different observations and lessons.
Having newly emerged from the curtain now, the thought stirring in my head now is this: Travel doesn’t help us escape life, but it can teach us how to change it.
Stay tuned for the next story about our family adventures and misadventures in this fascinating country. If you enjoyed reading this, please give it a “like” or share this post. Thanks for reading!
