Thoughts on Leaving South East Asia

In the last few days in a place it always feels as though we should be rushing around, cramming more in and then finishing on some sort of fanfare. In reality by the time we get to the last few days we have run out of money and out of things we want to see and do, having got the various t shirts already. And a fanfare, if it happens, is accidental, the evening with P in Vietnam, for example, the surprisingly dancey last night in Langkawi or the usefully timed Tropfest finale in Georgetown. 

And there's a lot of admin to do. There are presents to be bought, cards to be written to thank hosts, clothes to be weeded out where they've given up, arrangements to be made for the next place, research to be done on what to do there, new hosts to be contacted, trip advisor reviews to be written, supplies to be bought if we can get them cheaper here than the next place, banks to be contacted if they have, for the millionth time, forgotten to note that we are travelling etc. etc.

As a result I tend not to have incredible adventures to report and resort to lists and trivialities.

Of which this is one. Our flight, on Tuesday, will mark our departure from South East Asian countries and our re-entry into the Western world. Both Australia and New Zealand will speak our language, serve familiar food and have deceptively similar looking cultures. 

And as I have mentioned, what I have found as we travelled is that everyone has something deeply beautiful and wise, and also everywhere has its blind spots. The blind spots, probably only identifiable as such because of our own culture, tend to make us thankful for things about England which we have never really given much thought to previously. In fact I have noticed my attitude to my home country changing over this time in South East Asia. When we began I was saying 'England yes, you'd never have something that nice in England, in England this would just be covered in drunk pukets, in England it just drizzles. All the time....' Now I am thinking about green countryside and happy animals and friendly policemen. And traffic laws.

But equally, where South East Asia is beautiful, it really, really is. If we could just, as I know I keep saying, take a bit of the good from everywhere, we could create Paradise.

The Beauty of South East Asia

- Vietnam's free exercise parks - and the fact that people use them

- the sheer number of good intentions and the swell of hope in Cambodia, despite what often seems like myriads of reasons to be hopeless

- Smiles. Everywhere. Regardless.

- Openness. To anything. Anybody can have a go at anything and anything is possible. You can set up your home as a cooking school, just like that. You can start 3 separate businesses the same day you have the idea for them. You can build your own house if you want. You can sleep in your trishaw.

- Food that really cares about its flavour and a diet which is naturally healthy, assuming you don't eat too much Terang Bulan.

- The cheap and welcoming coffee shops in Ho Chi Minh city, allowing you to base the office there for that new business you set up yesterday.

- Art. People really do make art and its a respectable way to make a living. It doesn't have airs or graces, it's just something you do.

- Harmony. There are many different religions and many factions within them. There is no problem perceived with this. Why should there be? People are surprised that I ask.

- Street stalls - why don't we have this so much in the West? People trawling small trolleys on which are ingenious hobs or pans or even refrigerators and cooking up their speciality right in front of you, for tiny prices, even by South East Asian standards.

- Free range animals. Dogs, chickens, roosters, cats - all live wild here, and whilst there is an element if cruelty in the overpopulation, there is much that is beautiful in seeing hens fussing around their brood on the road side and dogs living in packs amount and around them.

The Things It Makes Me Appreciate About England

- Rules against animal cruelty. There are laws that can imprison people who abandon puppies in the forest because they are not the right sex or their domesticated cat because they didn't spay her and so she had kittens. There is always a place you can take a suffering or abandoned animal. There are less strays having fun, admittedly, but there are also less suffering creatures which have been hurt or rejected, too domesticated or too young to look after themselves.

- Laws which you can't break. In England if there is a law, particularly one for your own protection, you can't just break it anyway and pay a fine. Yes that makes for less freedom, but there are some things we simply shouldn't be free to do.

- Traffic. Traffic laws being one of those things you should not be free to break, fine or no fine , England's roads feel safe and, relatively speaking, a bit more predictable. You can cross them and cars will be stationary while you do so. They are largely cars so are quieter than motorbikes, and create a lot less obnoxious noise pollution.

- Seasons. You get to notice them changing, and look forward to the next one. Colours change and so do temperatures and the clouds produce different substances. Yes they bleed together into non stop drizzle in some years, but there is respite. Usually.

- Corruption in favour of the rich....does happen. Admittedly. In relation to tax evasion in particular. But it isn't quite so endemic and it is frowned upon rather than written into the system. 

- Mosquitoes. The lack thereof. In fact all our insects are relatively harmless. We seem to still be unreasonably scared of them. But they can't actually kill us. Not many can even make us itch.

- Prices. Written on stuff. And if you come back another day the price is the same. If you look rich, the price is the same. If you don't want to ask for the price and risk the hard sell you don't have to. It's written on it.

- The hard sell. It's rare, in England, to be followed around the store closely, by a shop assistant who relentlessly hands you things and tells you to buy them, until you feel so cornered you have forgotten what you actually went in for and seem to have come out with three rubber chickens. (OK I didn't really, but they genuinely were everywhere. Who buys them?)

- Free speech. Both in terms of government and the mafia.

- Environmental awareness. To be fair parts of the South East Asia we have been visiting do have this. But it's new enough to be only just catching on. In England there are not such a proliferation of piles of rubbish, we have been charging for plastic bags for a while and the concept of separating plastics from food waste has been in place long enough to have a mortgage.

Take note, England. It seems you are alright after all. But if you could just knit in a few of those South East Asian nuggets and get rid of UKIP and/or Yateses, you'll be laughing...