Peapod on Purpose

If you’ve been here long, you’ll remember that we visited Vietnam way back at the beginning of our worldwide adventure. It was our family’s second stop (after Japan), and we traveled North>South through the country. While it was a total culture shock and everyday life went from easy to challenging, we absolutely loved the country. The people, the food, the beaches…stuff dreams are made of. 

So, when we found ourselves with forty days to fill (outside of the EU, for visa purposes), we decided on a trip back to the land we couldn’t stop thinking about. The 20 hours of travel from London would officially be our longest single trip of the year, and it made absolutely no sense logistically to fly all the way back across Europe and Asia. But it was absolutely worth it.

This time around, our month in the country began in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). The jet lag was rough for me, and it took almost a full week of lying awake until 3 or 4 AM before I was finally able to get on a somewhat normal schedule. Thankfully, no one else had this problem, and thankfully they let me have a few days to sleep in. 

We’d made some friends during our last visit to the city, whom we were excited to be reunited with, and had the best ten days together. Our lives quickly went from “no agenda” to “full agenda,” and we barely saw the kids the whole time because they were too busy swimming and playing card games and drinking in all of the quality time. 

During this visit, we stayed in a neighborhood called Thao Dien, which we absolutely loved. It felt so much more real than the location across the river where we’d stayed during our last visit, with winding streets that made no sense and locals lining the alleyways. As we walked out of our apartment on our first morning there, in pursuit of a steaming bowl of pho, we collectively took a deep breath and sighed. It felt so good to be back. There’s nothing like the hot, balmy air and the sights and sounds of Saigon. Of course, we took advantage of the fact that we could eat out for less than $12 USD for the family and did the least amount of cooking possible. We may or may not have eaten at the same restaurant 4 times in the 10 days we were there. 

Since we were in the last quarter of our trip, we also needed to get cracking on one of the goals we’d long neglected: learn a family sport. So, when we realized there was a pickleball court on every corner, we quickly found ourselves a coach and prepared to sweat. We did a couple of lessons and had a blast, with lots and lots of laughing. Let’s just say that our kids get their athletic abilities from their mom, and dad was left shaking his head at the end of every lesson. 

While we were there, we also participated in some wonderful Easter activities. One evening, our family visited a local orphanage to share the Easter story and put on an egg hunt. Watching the kids play together without any common language was another testament to the power of play when it comes to connecting with others. The kids also got to join a group of homeschoolers for a fun Easter egg hunt, which was extremely exciting for them, since our last few holidays hadn’t looked very traditional. As it turns out, lining a bunch of kids up at the edge of a field and telling them to go find candy-filled plastic eggs looks just about the same no matter where you are. 

Big Pea and I also got to participate in an egg dyeing outreach event put on by some believers in town and hear one of our sweet friends retell the Easter story in Vietnamese. I’ve never seen such intricately painted eggs in my life, and they truly were turned into beautiful art. We also got the chance to connect with some of the attendees after, and share about what Jesus has to offer. 

Of course, we couldn’t forget about the traditional egg-cracking game our family plays every Easter, which looked only a little bit different since it happened over video with our cousins back home. And to top off the Easter festivities, we got to celebrate Christ’s resurrection with a church service followed by a very American potluck. Overall, a holiday filled with old traditions done with new people in new ways.

After lunch, we headed to the airport for a quick flight to our next destination: Dalat. At this point in our trip, it’s become pretty common for us to realize we’re about to arrive in a new city without a place to stay. I guess that’s the result of one adult planning the accommodations and one adult planning the transportation…or maybe we’ve just become a bit laissez-faire about things. 

A day or two earlier, we realized we’d moved our flight but not our Airbnb, and we’d need a place to stay for a night. Since our Airbnb wasn’t available, our host recommended a hotel just a few hundred meters away. We booked it for the night, and were surprised when he showed up right at checkout time the next day on his motorbike, and started strapping our bags to the back. He made a couple of trips for the bags, then came back for the kids. Just a taste of the hospitality we were going to experience over the next week. (Rather than sending the kids on the back of a bike with a man we’d just met, we decided to walk over and meet him there.) 

Mr. Hung was an extravagant host who lived right across the street. He was there at a moment’s notice in response to any issue, and his wife even sent over a snack for the kids one afternoon. It gave us quite a laugh, because my American children weren’t interested in eating the giant bowl of steamed sweet potatoes (which we gathered was quite a treat) until they were mashed with copious amounts of butter and salt. C’est la vie.

Mr. Hung also took us to visit his coffee farm one day, which was a major highlight of our time in Vietnam, largely because we got to experience the vast differences in our two cultures. He arrived to pick us up in his truck early in the morning at the agreed time, and asked if we’d eaten breakfast. Of course we had…we weren’t about to take 3 kids on an adventure to an indeterminate place for an indeterminate length of time without having eaten. 

We squeezed into the backseat of his truck, and James asked him how long of a drive it would take to reach the farm. Because of the language barrier, we didn’t know if he said 15 minutes or 50 minutes, but neither turned out to be even close. (It was more like two hours.) 

After about 15 minutes, Mr. Hung pulled over on the side of the road and told us he’d be back in a few. (Presumably, he’d hopped out to find some breakfast.) When he returned to the truck, he handed me a plastic bag with a smile and resumed the drive. After about 30-40 minutes we turned off the highway onto a dirt road, which would eventually lead to his farm. In many places the road was more of a suggestion than a reality, and let’s just say I spent a lot of time praying as we traversed the significant changes in elevation on a road that looks like one heavy rain would take it out for good. 

We finally arrived at the farm and spent some time admiring the beauty and fending off the mosquitoes while we looked around. There was a small shack that we assumed was for seasonal workers, but we encountered the full-time employees when they pulled up a while later on their motorbikes. Maybe they’ve got something in their blood that wards off the flying pests, because there was certainly no effort taken to keep the hordes of crawling and flying creatures out of the structure. 

After some time, Mr. Hung revealed what was in the grocery bag he’d handed me a few hours before: snacks. If you’ve never eaten “sweet soup” out of a plastic baggie (of which your host has recently bitten off the corner with his teeth), well, you’ve been missing out on quite the experience. The substance that you squeeze through the hole is full of surprises…will the next piece be jello? Or a red bean? Maybe some rice or a nut? You’ll have to keep squeezing and sucking to find out. Out of respect for our host, we all gave it our best effort to eat as much sweet soup as we could get down. The rest was happily handed over to the employees for their mid-morning snack. 

After a couple of hours at the farm we piled back into the truck and began our drive home. Just a few minutes into the drive, Mr. Hung ran over a large branch that got stuck somewhere in the undercarriage. After much heaving and ho-ing, he and James were able to break it free and return to the car (in need of some clean clothes). During our time at the farm, we’d asked when the rainy season would start; this would make the road passable only by motorbike. Mr. Hung’s response was something to the tune of “probably in a couple of weeks…or maybe tomorrow.”

We found out in less than 24 hours that it would be the latter. The very next day, the skies broke open; the rainy season had begun. We were happy we’d gone on a hike earlier in the week, because it was no longer going to be an option. For our final few days in Dalat, we did the rounds of the fantastic indoor playgrounds. The kids were thrilled to have an endless supply of toys, and the parents were thrilled that the sound of the rain pounding on the tin roofs drowned out the sounds of bickering. 

After a week in the rain and cooler temperatures of Dalat, we were all ready for some sunshine. We caught a short flight to Da Nang, a coastal city that promised warm weather and beaches. During our last trip to Vietnam, we’d visited Da Nang for church a few times, but had stayed about 40 minutes away in Hoi An. While we loved Hoi An, we decided to give the bigger city a try. 

We arrived hungry after an early morning flight and no breakfast, and couldn’t wait to visit one of our favorite Western restaurants in the country after a week in the mountains with only Vietnamese food. There’d been another outpost of the restaurant in Hoi An, and we were thrilled to realize there was a second location near our apartment in Da Nang. We showed up to Bikini Bottom Express and quickly realized that the vibe wasn’t going to be the same as during our last visit. Maybe it was the location, or the season. Maybe the area exploded in popularity, or maybe it was because we were there later in the day than usual… but we were getting serious Miami Beach vibes. It was a completely different experience than we’d expected, and one that carried on through our two weeks in the city. 

In spite of the heavy crowds (mostly western retirees and backpackers), we had a fantastic time. The beaches were well-kept and beautiful; we were staying only two blocks away from the sea and surrounded with every kind of food you could imagine. It also happened that we were there over a holiday weekend, and we’d never seen such crowded beaches in our lives. After 4 PM the sun starts to set, and the locals come out in full force for a picnic dinner. The beaches got steadily more crowded until sunset at 8 PM, as the crowds moved out of the waves and onto the plazas for a cold coconut or iced tea. 

One of the most entertaining parts of the beach experience in Dan Nang was the lifeguards’ love of whistles. Because of the strong undertow, there were designated swimming areas indicated by ropes, each patrolled by a vigilant lifeguard. If someone were to drown inside the ropes, it would be A-OK, as long as they don’t cross outside the line. 

During our stay here, we spent two Sundays at maybe our favorite church of the trip, Da Nang International Fellowship. We connected with many of the same families we’d met last year, and Big Pea was thrilled to join the youth program since she’s been missing out on moving up to youth group with her friends at home. 

Nearing the end of our time in the country, we made a last minute decision to meet up with a local photographer and capture some pictures in Hoi An. When we woke up that morning, Big Pea wasn’t feeling awesome, but she said she was OK to move forward. Well, as soon as we hopped out of the car after the 40-minute drive, her stomach let us know we’d made the wrong decision. After a quick puke and some water, she rallied for some photos, and was an absolute champ as she went between smiling and throwing up for the rest of the afternoon. This day turned out to be the hottest and sunniest of our time in the country, which was perfect for showcasing the actual amount a person can expect to sweat when visiting a tropical country in Southeast Asia. Even though the afternoon was a comedy of errors, the photographer was able to capture some great shots of us enjoying some of our favorite activities. 

The next day, we began our four day (you read that right) journey to our next destination. First, we’d fly back to Saigon for one night so we could catch our flight out the next morning. We chose a place near the airport with a pool, and after a couple hours of swimming we set out for dinner in the nearest mall. We quickly learned that the rainy season wasn’t only in the center of the country, as a few drops quickly turned into a downpour that quickly filled the streets to ankle depth. After hiding under an overpass for twenty minutes with a bunch of folks on motorbikes, we were wet to the bone and realized it couldn’t get any worse. We continued on the path to the mall, but realized we couldn’t walk into the building wearing clothes that were wetter than if we’d just gone for a swim in the ocean. We waited and waited for a driver to take us back to our apartment, and finally made it inside to order dinner.

Since all of our bags were completely packed except for the outfits on our bodies (which we’d planned to also wear on the plane the next day), I spent the evening blow-drying our shoes. Thankfully, this was one of only two or three places we’d visited that actually had a clothes dryer. So the clothes got a quick wash and dry before we headed to bed in preparation for our early morning flight. 

Because of a snafu by the airline, we would fly to Guangzhou, China and stay there for 24 hours before continuing on to London and then Amsterdam. We didn’t think we’d be able to spend any time in China during this trip, so we were excited and planning to make the most of it. A typical visa for an American family of five would cost $700, but the country offers a free 240-hour transit visa that worked out in our favor. The visa-on-arrival process was quick and easy, since there weren’t many others waiting their turn for an interview. But as it turns out, that was the only thing that was quick and easy. 

Before hopping on the plane we’d downloaded the app for the local rideshare service, and followed the signs out to the location only to realize we couldn’t use the service without one of the local forms of payment. This is when we began to realize we were in a communist country that really believed in doing things its own way. None of our forms of payment worked at the airport or with any of the taxi/rideshare companies, and we spent way too much time at the airport trying to jump through the hoops to set up Alipay on the free wifi that blocked every American website. We finally made it to our hotel, and set out to explore and eat. Because, priorities. 

Having just come from Vietnam, we expected a completely different vibe. The part of China we visited was much more similar to Japan, with everything very clean and orderly. Of course we were in a major business capital and an area of affluence, but we’d expected to see more poverty, crowding and trash like we’d experienced in the big cities of Vietnam and India. Not so. There was also very little western influence, and we saw zero expressions of the English language, like we’d gotten used to seeing in most parts of the world. We ate a fantastic, traditional dim sum dinner, accomplished with lots of pointing and guessing, and realized again that Chinese food just isn’t our favorite. 

After 16 hours on the ground, we headed back to the airport for the next leg of our journey: London. We had a fourteen-hour flight ahead of us, during which we planned to stay awake to help adjust to the time change. It went off without a hitch, thanks to the fact that the kids don’t have access to TVs or video games during the other parts of their lives.

Because of the airline issue, we’d spend about 10 hours in London before catching our train to The Netherlands.  The hotel where we’d originally planned to stay was too expensive to be worth a quick sleep, so we cancelled it and decided to spend one night in a private room in a hostel that was very near the station where we’d catch an early train. How bad could it be? Let’s just say, after we walked in on a group of naked 20-year-olds in the shared bathroom, we decided it would be our first and LAST hostel of the trip. 

All-in-all, the kids did fantastic during the long and exhausting four days of travel. One that I’ll be happy not to repeat, ever again. But speaking of repeats…I’m already dreaming about how we can get back to Vietnam. Who wants to join us?