Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Now is as good a time as ever to get back to the basics. By now, as you may have heard, there's a global pandemic endangering the lives of people with compromised respiratory systems (like my 99.5 year old grandfather and our nearly-six year old nephew) and the economies of, well, basically everywhere. To date, our experience has been very different than most of our peers in America. When we arrived in Singapore in mid-February the country was already mobilized to contain the risks, mainly through personal hygiene but also social distancing. In Cambodia and Vietnam, where many people wear masks on a daily basis because of pollution, our guides told us that the biggest change was that tourism was way down, mostly because the Chinese were barred from traveling. So over the last two months, this has been an everyday concern for us as we have traveled between and within countries in Asia. Our kids have gotten used to washing their hands many, many times a day and occasionally ...

Saying goodbye to Hoi An and our guide, Luong The last post described the first half of our time in Hoi An. The two themes of the second half of the week are beach and clothes. Hoi An is famous for its custom clothing industry. We learned from our guide that many aspects of Hoi An's development are attributed to its role as a significant port for hundreds of years. Food and other aspects have been heavily influenced by the interactions that have stemmed from this. Today, many tourists come to Hoi An to have handmade clothes produced at a fraction of retail. Our guide told us about one of the stores ("the best one!") and we followed her instructions. Step 1 in the process is to have your measurements taken, to pick out fabric and to provide a picture or model of the garment you want. Roughly 24 hours (or more) later, you return for step 2. Here, you try on the first iteration of your clothes and identify any needed adjustments. Afterall, if you produce a full sui...

The sign says "Please do not leave your children unattended." We're smiling because, technically speaking, we complied with this rule. Read on for more. On Tuesday (2/25), we were on a bus at 6:30am to the Ho Chi Minh City airport for a short flight to Danang for the next segment of our itinerary. We were glad to be done walking on the semi-existent sidewalks of HCMC.  Without customs to navigate, our arrival in a second Vietnamese airport lacked all the drama of the first. We easily met our guide, boarded a bus and drove about 40 minutes to our hotel in the beach community of Hoi An. Along the way our guide offered interesting commentary on all sorts of tours and activities available to us during our stay. After checking into our hotel, we rode taxis to the old town. Most of old town Hoi An is closed to cars so we had a few blocks to walk from the taxi stand to a restaurant. After eating, which included some local specialities, we began a short walking t...