Hoi An

Here’s a definition of travel that I like (and just made up):  “to move in such a way that your life intersects with other lives and is shaped by the encounter.”  For me, a vital component of relationships formed on the road is the goodbye, nicely demonstrated in this photograph from Vietnam.  Chau and her friend have just spent part of the day with me in Hoi An.  As the river ferry that will take them home pulls away from the dock, they wave goodbye.   It’s a small and ordinary thing, yes, but imagine a world in which nobody ever said goodbye.

Recently, while chatting online with a friend in Shanghai named Michelle, I was reminded of something I’d nearly forgotten.  I had first met Michelle in Kathmandu, and two months later we met again in India.  Michelle recalled the morning in Rishikesh when she and her traveling partner checked out of the hotel to catch a bus to Delhi.  The night before, knowing they would be leaving in the morning, I had asked that they wake me before setting off so that we could say goodbye.  But because for two days I had had a blazing fever and sore throat, Michelle decided they’d slip away quietly from their adjacent room so that I could rest.  When I awoke and discovered their vacant room, however, I rushed to the receptionist -- he said they had left 10 minutes earlier -- and then, mostly clothed and in flip-flops, tore off down the small street paralleling the Ganges.  Michelle remembered the surprise and happiness she felt when she saw me wheezing and disheveled, having finally caught up with them to say goodbye.

(Incidentally, I remembered something else I'd almost forgotten: two days later, while on a night bus to Pushkar and enveloped by cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes, I was so weak that when I tried to ask someone to tell the driver I needed to go immediately to the hospital, I couldn’t lift my head to speak, nor move my mouth to say the words.  In all my travels, this was the only night in which I thought I might be dead by morning, and it's partly attributable, I think, to that sprint along the Ganges.)

Perhaps “goodbye” isn’t worth dying for, but a life void of the custom would be missing something.  And I’m not the only one who thinks this; so does the young character Pi Patel in Yann Martel’s backpacker favorite Life of Pi.  Along with a tiger named Richard Parker, Pi is lost at sea for several months, and when finally he and the tiger come ashore the tiger ups and walks away, never to return.  And Pi says:

I was weeping because Richard Parker had left me so unceremoniously.  What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.

I’ll always be grateful to a hotel receptionist named Chau, who one day offered to get me out of Hoi An and into the homes of people in the surrounding countryside.  From the back of her motorbike I watched the landscape whiz by as she drove us several miles to the west.  We passed rice and corn fields, a kid on the back of a water buffalo, trucks that threatened to flatten us.  We passed a phalanx of teenage girls who, in their conical hats and white ao dais, sat atop their bicycles with such perfect poise that one wondered if bicycling were a form of ballet.

Among the places Chau took me was the home of a friend, where we had lunch and then rested through the worst of the midday heat.  As I lay with my eyes closed on a mat in one corner, digesting my meal and listening to the sounds of Vietnamese bouncing off the concrete floor, I appreciated the unintelligibleness of it all.  Because I couldn’t understand the words, I could focus exclusively on what was beyond them: friendship.  Here were people relaxed and enlivened by one another.  There was nothing formal about the interaction, no sign of pretense, no austerity in how they laughed or even reclined.  They were completely comfortable together.

The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing 167 years before two of Chau's friends rested on a bed, one with her feet propped up on the other's legs, had this to say about friendship:

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.  Before him, I may think aloud.  I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thoughts, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

I haven't had much time to post the past few days and won't for a few days still (I'm spending the week exploring the Panama Canal).  But perhaps in busy periods like this I'll start a tradition of posting a humorous photo with little commentary.  (Speaking of which, I wish I had taken a picture of diners at the Coca-Cola Cafe here in Panama City last night -- almost everyone was drinking Pepsi.)

As for the photo above, I took it while visiting a string of villages outside the Vietnamese town of Hoi An in July 2007.  This woman thought I might be interested in some Wall Street Whisky.  I surely wasn't, especially in such midday heat.  But looking at the photo now I think she'd do a booming business if her shop was located in lower Manhattan rather than rural Vietnam.  Wall Street could no doubt use a sip these days.