(Note: This post was written by Holly who is currently unable to access her Blogger account).
This is a paraphrase of an adage of my friend Anne Tucker, an Atlanta law professor and all around boss whose career and approach to life I greatly admire. (Another Anne Tucker gem - Only wear natural fibers. I am convinced this is why I sweat less than the rest of my family on this trip). In today’s internet enabled DIY culture, it is easy to save a few bucks by endlessly searching and booking your own travel arrangements. While I normally love vacation planning, the realities of working full time and parenting two humans and three furbabies meant that Doannie and I were not making much progress on our trip plans this spring. After gravitating back to the same website when searching “three weeks in Viet Nam” late at night, I sent them an inquiry about hiring one of their travel agents. A brief web intake partnered me with Ashley (whose Vietnamese name is Diep) from Realistic Asia. She is simply amazing. Diep would send me some basic questions about what we liked to do, where we liked to eat, and what kinds of accommodations we preferred. Based on my replies, she would craft an itinerary for me to review. The 11 hour time difference worked in our favor - with Diep sending me a new version at the end of her work day, I woke up each morning with something to comment on, which only took a few minutes. When my parents decided in May to join us for the first week of our trip, she easily added them and then built out additional days in Thailand and Japan suited to their travel style.
Realistic Asia’s philosophy is to immerse travelers into local cultures. Our guides Mai and Do Do (pronounced “Zo Zo”) shared much about themselves as they took us from well known tourist stops to places for “the local people” in Ha Noi and Sa Pa. Mai was more reserved and clearly speaking the party line about Ho Chi Minh and Viet Nam’s history, but she also took us to the Women’s Museum where we learned about the evolving gender dynamics in Viet Nam’s traditional culture.
Do Do, in contrast, was a total firecracker who was living out that evolution and loved to tell us all about it as we scaled up and down the slippery rocks of our waterfall hikes. She grew up farming with her family and carrying crops up and down the mountains of NW Viet Nam at a time when educational opportunities for girls were limited and marriages were still arranged. Now she leads 2-3 day treks up those mountains while her husband works the family farm and is a stay at home dad. When my dad said he admired her independence and strong women everywhere, she laughed and told him to watch out or one of the local women would kidnap him for their own!
Our week in northern Viet Nam planned by Diep was full of seamless transitions - drivers and guides greeting us at every turn holding a sign with our names - literally door to door service, even helping us check in for our flight from Ha Noi to Hue. While this certainly made traveling with my parents and our children easier, it did not afford us much time to practice our Vietnamese or to eat our beloved street food. We chose to plan weeks two and three on our own, and I appreciated Diep even more as we spent hours weighing our choices and booking planes, trains, and automobiles at the height of the local tourist season. Doannie and I hunkered down with our phones while the kids played arcade games at the Hue Cinestar (they even have slot machines for children, a testament to how much the Vietnamese love to gamble). Did we get our preferred lodging or flight every time? No. Was it worth it to relive some of our old backpacking days and our kids’ Amazing Race fantasies and to see Doannie negotiate our way in Vietnamese? Absolutely. Sometimes it pays to pay an expert, and sometimes it's a joy to go it on your own. But always wear natural fibers.
They literally put tags around our necks at the rest stops so our guide could find us, like kindergarteners
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