If it was up to me, I probably wouldn't go anywhere. I tend to get involved in what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, and my life is pretty full of activity, most of which I enjoy or am committed to. But my wife loves to travel, and she drags me along, for which I am grateful, because once I'm on my way, I'm happy.
Tonight we're leaving Israel for two weeks in Vietnam, the place, as I have joked when telling my friends about our planned trip, where I wanted least in the world to go back in the late sixties, when I was in my early twenties - and the US government was willing to send me there for free!
I've never been in the Far East. Judith was once invited to a women's conference in Manilla, and on the way back she made a trip to Thailand. That was quite a while ago. Since then we have been in Central Asia, which is pretty adventurous, and in Peru, and, of course, we live in the Middle East, far from where we were born and expected to live out our lives when we were young.
I've only done a little reading about the country, and we saw a couple of DVDs about it, but I expect to be surprised.
I just looked at the CIA World Factbook on Vietnam and was astonished to see that it's the 14th most populous country in the world, between Ethiopia and Egypt, with more than ninety million inhabitants. If you had asked me to guess, I would have put the population about 1/3 of that, so great is my ignorance. That was already one surprise, and I haven't left home yet.
We're going to be traveling like wealthy Westerners, with a guide, and, where needed, a car, but we didn't think we could manage using local transportation and finding our way on our own.
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