I made my decision quickly; I would do a two-day Mekong tour. One goal I had was not to do the same things I had done before, and I had never seen the Mekong delta. It would get me out of the city, and maybe having a fresh new experience would perk up my spirits.

Of course, the tour was an easy way to go. It was not challenging or adventurous, but I liked the idea of letting someone else do the all the planning and arrangements. So what if I was acting like a fat middle-aged tourist? At least half of it was true, anyway. And if I really liked the delta, I could always come back on my own.

There were about ten people in my group, all of them from hotels around the city, and all of them ‘budget travelers.’ I was the oldest by far. Talking to them on the bus, a reasonably modern vehicle with comfortable seats, almost made me forget how disappointed I was in myself for not being the rough and ready independent traveler of my memories. Well, maybe those memories weren’t all that accurate. Or, maybe I was just getting too used to comfort.

But the people! I had totally forgotten how much fun it was to sit on a bus and talk to strangers, but strangers who liked what I liked: travel. I met a young woman from Poland, blonde and very friendly, and her husband, who was much more taciturn and hardly said a word. We used a good half hour talking about life in Warsaw, life in Los Angeles, and life where we were now. It didn’t matter that we didn’t really know each other, or would never see each other after this tour. We chattered away, and only occasionally did I wonder if I should lay off and leave them alone. But by that time, there was a guy from Switzerland and a woman from Australia to talk to. We livened up in one another’s company as families on motorbikes, locals in conical hats, beat up old trucks, and whole villages passed by outside our windows.

Eventually, I broke off the talk and turned my attention to the scenery outside. That was another thing I liked about travel – looking at things out the window. Rice fields, bright green in the sunlight, lay before me in a kind of magical beauty; I couldn’t quite describe how or why but looking at them soothed my mind and made me forget about the traffic and noise of the city we had just left. I spent a long time that morning looking at rows of rice shoots, junk stores by the roadside, schoolchildren at lunchtime, the trees in the distance, and the baking hot moist blue sky.

We crossed several rivers, ate lunch somewhere, took a boat trip down some little canals, and visited a sugar factory the first day, where I bought a bottle of whiskey with a snake in the bottle. It was all moderately fulfilling. I had no idea why I bought the whiskey; it was a case of successful marketing, getting someone to feel that they absolutely must possess that thing because they might never see it again. Later I saw dozens of the same item, at twenty percent or more less, but who was keeping score?

In the evening, I chose the option of staying with a family at their house instead of at a hotel. That was one of the things you could do on this trip. Actually, I had been looking forward to getting into my own room and freshening up a bit, and having some time alone, but the moment demanded that I do otherwise. Several of the other young people were staying with families, and I was not going to be left out. Yes, I should rough it a little, and maybe that independent spirit would come back to me.

There were six of us altogether who chose this option, and we boarded a small motorboat which cruised up and around some of the canals outside of My Tho, one of the famous delta cities. It was dark by this time, and we could see the lights in the houses, and the occasional headlight of a motorbike riding down a path alongside the river bank, or over a bridge that crossed in front of us, and it seemed like all these things had been placed here just to charm us. I felt so happy that we were being treated to this display of local ambiance on the water.

We finally pulled up at a cement landing, and they had us all get out. They led us into a house right across the pathway from the water, and it dawned on me then that they weren’t going to split us up. We were all going to stay under the same roof. This kind of disappointed me, on the one hand, but it pleased me on the other, because it meant I would be spending more time with some of my new travel mates.

The family came out to greet us, and I felt funny. I couldn’t remember any Vietnamese phrases, and most of them couldn’t speak English. There were people of all generations: an older man and woman, a thirty-ish couple, a teenage girl, and several younger children. We stood there staring at each other, the westerners saying, “Hello,” and wondering what to do next. The older man, about sixty I would say, offered me a cigarette, and I hated to refuse him, but I wasn’t going to start smoking again – I had quit too many times before. The teenage girl was the one out of all of them who spoke some English.

They gave us each a bedroom, and it was just like being in a guesthouse except it was a family home. We had an excellent dinner, and afterwards played volleyball with some balloons. The two younger girls, aged six and nine, joined in, and we took turns holding them up in the air while they it the balloons. They squealed with delight, and of all the things we did that night, I think playing with their children did the most to bring people together. I tried to videotape it on my camera, but it was too dark.

The teenage girl received a lot of attention from our group, since she could speak English. Our women especially were very interested her. What were her plans? To go to college. What was she going to study? Business. Did she have a boyfriend? She giggled. Yes, she had a boyfriend.

“Are you going to get married?” someone asked.

“I think she can decide that in her own time,” someone else said.

The girl was very patient and did her best to answer all our questions. In the morning, she said, she had to go to school; one of her relatives took her on a motorbike. I wondered, and probably the others did, too, exactly what kind of life awaited her out there, once she went off to college. Would she end up being the woman of a house like the one she lived in, with kids of her own and perhaps a business on the side? Or would she move to the city, and work for a company there? The family was well off, but like somebody in our group said, everybody works in the family. Even as we ate dinner, the grandmother sat nearby at a sewing machine, making clothes.

To be continued.