JOURNEY BEGINS

The journey was long and at times rather confusing. It began in Hanoi, where I met Mark, the local Australian guide and asked the Intrepid Group recommended in the Lonely Planet guidebook to take me from the North and all the way down to the Mekong Delta in the South to end my journey in Saigon. For ten days I traveled by overnight sleeper train to local bus, from hitchhiking motorbike rides to bicycle rentals, boating with an ore to cyclo rides. We took the one and only one highway turned east to the coast and continued down to Saigon. I hitchhiked to Sapa and trekked among the nearby Zao and Hmong villages and met up with a group of Brits. I returned to Hanoi and continued to Halong Bay, then to Hue. Finally I took my pack and hitchhiked alone from Hue, to Hoi An and back to Danang to take a domestic flight to Saigon City where I met with fellow backpackers and Orla, the Irish girl I bunked in for several days.

I spent one hundred dollars over the whole journey (not including camera equipment, airfare and international calls). I kept company with bedbugs, ate on the street and sometimes slept there. Travel is a time/money tradeoff. I don't travel on a shoestring because I'm cheap (I prefer to think of myself as thrifty). For me traveling is about meeting people and the only way to do that is to put myself in their path. That means if you rent a luxury jeep with tinted windows you will most certainly be more comfortable than if you cling to the top of a bus for several hours, but you will also have isolated yourself from the local population.

The other tradeoff is weight-comfort. I start out with a 13-kg pack that has everything in it from my favorite pair of pants to my lucky rabbit's foot. By the end of the trip my pack is 7 kg. I've whittled down my toothbrush to half size (and hollowed out the handle). I'd memorized from A to G of the Lonely Planet guidebook and have used those pages as toilet paper. I'm hating every minute of it, but it's going to make a great story when I get home.