Mapping the Gap

We’ve arrived in Vietnam, and I can already tell.  It’s going to be a good month.  We left our secluded villa in Indonesia to find ourselves in a narrow, 2.5-story AirB&B home in a quaint, sleepy corner of Hoi An.  We are on a quiet lane that runs along the slow-moving Thu Bon River.  Our little street is too narrow for cars, so only motorbikes and bicycles wiz by, along with strolling but purposeful locals and the odd foreigner out exploring on a hotel bike.  We are an easy, ten-minute Grab App ride to the bustling UNESCO World Heritage site of Hoi An’s Old Town, where colourful lanterns famously float down the waterways past 15^th century trading port architecture.  There is an orchid garden hanging above the patio outside our door and an enchanting Vietnamese restaurant owned by our hosts just four paces across our little lane. 

“Healthy Lifestyle Restaurant” has seating that extends over the water to where the family has a traditional Vietnamese boat hitched up.  This wood-roofed vessel unintentionally charms the scene with its classic ship-like steering wheel, wads of nets, plastic-pipe rod-holders, and two big, flat baskets spread with drying eggplant that has been harvested from the veggie garden a couple meters away.  From their fully-visible, outdoor kitchen adjacent to our orchid garden, the family serves local food and fresh tropical juices from 10am to 10pm every day with a sweet 10% discount for us “in-house guests.” 

The shy-smiling host-husband, who often wears camo pants and a baseball cap, is the chef.  We point to the pictures of what we want on the menu. Then, plate by plate, all the under-priced deliciousness arrives at our seats by the river, where the boys are usually trying some form of crab-hunting, fishing, or other water’s edge fun.  There are little lights strung overhead, flowering plants in pots all around, and the tassels of glowing pink lanterns swinging from a blooming Bougainvillea vine, gnarled with age. The tables, made of blue-painted wooden planks and old cupboard doors, are mounted to plastic Tiger Beer boxes.  We look across the water to palm forests, fishing boats buzzing by only occasionally.  The rapid-fire tut-tut-ing of their engines evokes images of choppers landing in Hollywood movies about ‘Nam.  It’s calm.  Idyllic.  And only steps from our beds.  This is all a hugely welcomed upgrade from our previous, tucked-away home where procuring beer and local eats was always a chore I pretended not to resent.

Inside the house is a contrast.  There are some discrepancies between the AirB&B photo gallery and the new digs we find ourselves in.  It’s mouldy, oddly-lighted, and devoid of any comfortable seating.  There are only six spoons in the house, and four mugs.  No spatula for flipping pancakes.  The marble floors are unforgiving- both to fragile objects and our early morning efforts to not wake the boys.  The door handles screech like metallic witches.  The power outlets eject our voltage adapters.  The fridge door opens to the wall.  There is a mattress-cover over the flat backed white sofa with olive-green mould spreading down the back.  There are few hooks to hang our towels on and no shelves for our clothes- except a wardrobe with an unacceptable smell.  The sheets and pillows are a bit damp, and there are windows that look out to brick walls.  Wires emerge through gaping holes, strung meters along mint-coloured walls, white boxes and modems a-dangling.  There are weird light switches all around, four to a panel with at least one of a mystery assignment. There are knee level knobs, fluorescent light strips, recessed LEDs, and dusty, green wine-bottles-turned-fixtures that give off an eery and ineffective glow. 

Additionally, each of the three bathrooms has a shower but not a designated area for showering.  Water just sprays the whole room.  This is typical in a lot of Asian countries, so not a surprise, but it’s a bit of a pain when little dirty feet walk on the wet floors and then paint brown smeary footprints all over the house.  There is a pair of plastic shoes provided to avoid this, but you try and train three boys to wear them on the run to the loo.  Oh, and the toilet paper gets wet if it hasn’t been placed high on a shelf pre-shower.  Along with your toiletries.  And the toilet seat too if not closed.  These are the fun and dirty details of a trip like this.  There is the curve of a smile in my complaints.  These are grumbles one would never utter back at home, the fine “art of making do” I was looking forward to.

These sorts of details are initially disquieting and even infuriating, yet amusingly they become affectionately appreciated oddities by the end of a stay.  These befriended nuisances somehow represent one’s adaptability and expansion.  They are evidence that we leave a place somehow changed.  They are the proof that we are, indeed, changeable.  I really wanted my kids to get this on our trip, to know that their rock-solid routines and the walls that contain them are far less substantial or prescribed than they seem. I wanted the boys to know that they are capable of adapting.  I wanted them to experience the truth that while there are certain requirements of daily human living, there is a dazzlingly infinite number of ways to go about achieving them. I wanted them to see that their existence is absolutely pliable, that they can curate their surroundings and also that they will be curated by them in return.  I wanted these kids to realise that it’s fun to try on other lives and see what we discover about ourselves when we do.  That’s happening.  I think.  Probably in little-boy ways I can’t fathom. 

AirB&Bs offer this awareness of our malleability with each stay.  So far, we have occupied seven AirB&Bs, and a behavioural pattern of adaptation is emerging.  There is always an arc of our evolving regard for each place we inhabit.  We enter many of the homes feeling alien, assaulted with discomforts that dress us in awkwardness.  We feel unmatched for the space.  Or maybe it is the space that it is ill-suited for us.  Regardless, we whinge, and we cringe, noting the ick, odd, and funk all around.  The essence of previous inhabitants seems to hang in the air and coat all the surfaces, even when cleanliness reigns. Give us a day though, and the evolution begins to bud.  As we move about and breath the air, we filter the past and fill the rooms with our own scents.  Once we have made some adjustments, moved lamps, shifted tables, cleared surfaces, and located all the necessary items, we transform the space, and simultaneously, it begins to transforms us.  Once we have made this proper acquaintance of mutual adaptation, the bond is complete, and we’ve found a home yet again.  

It usually takes a couple days, and it’s done.  Most of the glaringly foreign features become muted.  Without realising our own adaptation, we find we are reaching for the scissors intuitively, setting the faucet to exactly the right temp, and stepping over the toe-stubbing threshold with ease.  It’s fascinating to watch the reworking of one’s brain to a space.  How naturally our bodies adjust.   We quickly find we can navigate the light switches in the dark, hang the washing without thought, and find that funny smell to be the comfort of arriving home.  While some annoyances do grow in their potency, most fade, and we find sight for the details that charm: the sewing machine pedal under the kitchen table, the light fixture of painted branches above the bed, the bike wheel made into a trellis, a child’s name carved into the balustrade, the red ribbons of good luck pegged somewhere in each room.  Once we have achieved this intimacy, snuggled in close and settled into the harmonic hum of belonging, we have completed the arc of adjustment for this current, if fleeting, home. 

I must admit, though, upon arriving at this stay, I was more than a little grumpy as we kept coming across new inconveniences and unpleasantries in those initial hours.  I wasn’t grumpy with the hosts so much as the previous guests.  I put a lot of weight on the AirB&B reviews. We, travellers, have to look out for one another.  One of our top rules of travel: Always read the reviews.  And De Vong Riverside House had psychedelic, neon glowing reviews.  I couldn’t wait to count myself among these superbly satisfied occupants.  So, what’s the deal?  Well, this discrepancy is only a conundrum until you’ve had a proper dose of the woman of the house.

Thoung.  The English-speaking, mother of two, host-wife works in management at a 5-star hotel in Da Nang, the bigger city up the coast.  On our first night, we arrived at almost 2am.  Her slight, butterfly-fluttering form leapt into the lane to wave our driver to the entrance.  Smiling with a mother-like encouragement, she gave us a comprehensive tour of the place and then promised to see us the next evening.  In the morning, looking down from our second-story balcony, I saw her ride off to work on her motorbike just after dawn.  When she got home from work at 6pm, she popped out to the restaurant dock to deliver our dinner with a bright and admirable smile.  She conversed with the easy energy of a person wholly fulfilled in her life.  She flitted around waiting on tables and then stopped by to offer to meet us at 9am the next day, on her day off, for a neighbourhood orientation tour.  Despite having almost visible smoke at her heels from the pace of her overbooked days, it felt as though she would make anything happen if we asked.  Always a smile.  Never an expression of exhaustion.  Never a furrowed brow at our boisterous boys.  She is luminescence.  Generous of spirit.  A conduit of the world’s highest good.  Then, I understood.

How could anyone give this saint less than a 5-star review?  Even with 13 varieties of fungal growth around the place, I can’t do it.  Not with knowing how even the slightest reduction in stars can affect the proprietors of these establishments, I can’t dock her a bit.  I get it now.  And my reading of the reviews grows ever more sophisticated.  Looking back at the words of the previous guests, the state of the place is not so conspicuously unnoted.  One must sometimes read what is between the lines as much as what is on them. “Host is amazing!”  Read: “I may be hiding an ugly fact.” Got it.  And I’ll follow suit.  After buying a few cheap spoons as an act of penance for my lie of omission, I’ll rave about the location and excellent WIFI too.

So, while our homebase is nice and sorted, the outside world of Hoi An is beckoning outside our door big time.  Through Worldschooling contacts, I found myself on the most vigorous WhatsApp chat I’ve ever joined.  Every time I pick up my phone, there are about eight new posts.  Here’s a sampling of what they were promoting for the kids this past week: aerial yoga, rebuilding motorbikes, driftwood carving, make-your-own-scrunchie, regular Roblox and Minecraft meetups (which I am hiding from the kids), chess club, beach volleyball, coffee-making workshops, poetry slams, Rubix cube sessions, a neon paint party, woodblock-printmaking, acrobatics, board games, flag-football, local bird scavenger hunts, drop-in badminton, local artist talks, ocean explorers course, survival skills classes, wakeboarding tasters, an artist sustainability workshop, a river clean-up initiative, and a teen-led video-editing class. My mother brain is short-circuiting with all these dopamine-milking events.   A month would not be enough, but I’m glad that’s all we’ve got.  Cause it’s probably too much.  A FOMO bait onslaught each day.  And this list doesn’t even include all the shows, sites, and activities one is supposed to do as a typical tourist in Hoi An.  We’ve gone from a Ramadan famine of activity to the feast of a Worldschooling extravaganza.

Having a good idea of what I was getting into but a mind to make family connections, I mustered the guts to attend a Ladies Night off-shoot of this group of highly potent humans.  Not surprisingly, I found myself at a table of amazing stories.  Gap-year-turned-travel-lifestyle all around.  Two years.  Three years.  Seven years on the road.  One Floridian mother has a teen, a tween, and a toddler on the road.  I cannot imagine the range of challenges this would pose.  An Italian mother of three is hosting a world-schooling “pop-up hub” in Florence and then going off to “do the -stans” for the summer.  You know, Uzbekistan, Kurdistan…the lot.  A mother from Turkey has been “doing winters” of family traveling for the past five years.  A Chilean mother of two boys is unsure if they will leave Hoi An in September or not… “We’ll see how we feel.  Who knows?”  Shrug and smile.  Another mom from Montana just finished a year of sailing with her crew and is now slipping into their new operation on land.  I only spoke to half the table, but I heard enough to catch the common thread that binds this defiant and free-spirited clan.  It was salacious and magnetic, but also cool and collected.  Quite the unique company to keep.

Among these ladies, I’m such a newbie.  Cute, green, clueless, and untested.  Not that they weren’t welcoming.  They were, but it was clear.  My Boldness is nothing compared to the gusto of these seasoned souls.  I liked sitting at their knees, listening to their tales.  So much to marvel among these matriarchs of the modern nomadic family.  Such a captivating sub-culture to study.  And I can’t lie.  Part of me wants a sip of the Kool-Aid.  And part of me is ready to keg-stand.  Yet, a teetotaller part is in the corner, swinging her heels in hesitation, twiddling thumbs of serious doubt. I mean, these families are rearing children in a parallel universe, unbound by any laws, standards, or expectations.  It’s free-range to the max, the wild, wild West of parenting.  I have great respect for their faith in these child-led ways, yet there are a few things that don’t seem quite right, issues swept under the rug, challenges being downplayed.  I don’t know. I’m not sold.  They would say these inklings of concern are symptoms of my institutionalisation, something that one sheds over time.  Not so sure.  But I’m thinking there is a red-pill-blue-pill reckoning waiting for me at the end of this whole gap year undertaking.  Hauntings of roads-not-taken may follow me for the rest of my days.

Anyway, for now, you can see why I have this notion, my suspicion of a good month ahead.  One week in, and the view from my dusty Birkenstocks is quite fine.