Sick of Being a Tourist
(An Open Letter to Vietnam)
— — — June, 2023 — — —
Xin Chào Vietnam,
I hope you’re doing well. It was great meeting you this spring! I admit, I wasn’t my best self during our month together, and this isn’t going to be quite the love letter you deserve. Nevertheless, I write to you to thank you for our time together and to apologize for the way I behaved. I hope you will accept my words with an open heart.
For months, I was excited about visiting you. On my first morning in Bangkok three months before you and I met, I learned that many backpackers consider you their favorite country in Southeast Asia (SEA). Apparently, they’d come to you with only two weeks to spare in their trip, and they’d leave wishing y’all could’ve spent more time together. From this idea alone, I knew I’d try to take full advantage of my 30-day visa with you (when the time was right, of course).
Over the next few months, I only grew more excited. The mountains, the caves, the scooter tours and cheap banh mi—my list of recommendations kept growing… as it always does. Don’t get me wrong, I fully enjoyed my time in Thailand (11 weeks, baby!) and I was in no rush to leave… But I was optimistic about you as well.
Unfortunately, my reality turned out a little differently.
Something you may not know about me is that before I arrived in Southeast Asia in February of this year, I had been backpacking throughout other parts of the world since the fall of 2021. By the time I made it to you in May, I’d been living out of my backpack for over 18 months (almost, but not completely, uninterrupted), and I think my 10-day Airbnb stay in Bangkok must’ve been the longest amount of time I’d slept in the same bed in the latter 8 months. All this to say that by the time I made it to you, I was feeling. the. burnout.
Which is why—as I sat in my lower bunk of Luna’s House Hostel on Cát Bà Island, dreading the idea of having one more small talk conversation with another backpacker who might, at any moment, stroll into the room and plop their belongings onto the bed across from mine—I finally decided to retire from the “backpacker” title.
To show you what I mean, here’s a little excerpt that I wrote to you from Tam Cốc, when I was about ⅔ of the way through my visit:
“I’m here, on day 18 of 25, and I can honestly confirm that my highlights of our time together will have been the cheap prices of the food and the time I spent vegging in my air-conditioned private room of Tam Cốc with my mini-fridge and flat-screen TV.
It has nothing to do with you. I can confidently say that you are GORGEOUS, and there is still so much on my to-do list for getting to know you. But… as I have been telling friends for over a month, I am so over the feeling of being a tourist. (Yes, I know how spoiled that makes me sound. I’m sorry.)
I am tired of everyone I pass on the street trying to sell me something—with no interest in talking to me otherwise.
I’m tired of going on wild goose chases (led by Google Maps) in search for ATMs that don’t actually exist.
I’m tired of weighing how much I value staying somewhere with a ‘social atmosphere’ versus staying somewhere with a comfortable bed and clean towel — because yes, these factors are often mutually exclusive in hostels.
And I’m tired of that social atmosphere consisting of the same superficial small-talk conversations with strangers, and then the same tedious dialogue about how tired we all are of those same superficial small-talk conversations.
I know, I am so so so lucky that these are my problems. My intention with this letter is not to complain about my traveling lifestyle, whatsoever. I promise, I am eternally grateful to be here.
I’m just exhausted.”
As I acknowledged above, there really is so much about you — and the weeks I had the privilege of spending with you — that I do appreciate. For instance, I really admired Sapa and Halong Bay. The family dinners at my homestay in Sapa were pretty fun, and Sapa’s hills of rice fields were different from anything I’d ever seen. I also enjoyed my boat tour from Cát Bà, where I made a few pretty cool friends, with whom I got to kayak among the stunning limestone cliffs of Halong Bay.
The views on the famous Ha Giang loop motorbike tour were also some of the most stunning landscapes I’d ever seen in my life. Looking back at these photos now, I’m still in awe that I had the privilege to see them in real life. You absolutely deserve recognition for that.
Unfortunately, I’m having trouble separating my memories of the breathtaking scenery in this last experience from the icky feeling I got from the tour itself. I regrettably chose the most popular tour company (after many recommendations), where both my smaller group (except for a few homies) and the overall company itself turned out to suck, big time. (Long story short, it turns out tour companies this large apparently have no regard for customer satisfaction or accommodating our personal needs. Who knew? On a separate note, apparently “mean girls” exist even within the backpacker community… I guess I should consider myself lucky to have discovered this only years into backpacking?)
Lessons learned.
After Ha Giang and Cát Bà, I planned to spend a week visiting Phong Nha, Hue, and Danang, having heard nothing but wonderful things. Unfortunately, I ended up skipping these places because I just didn’t feel capable of fully enjoying them. Even though I recognized how lucky I was to have the chance to be there, I was no longer in a headspace where I lit up at the novelty of it all. Rather, I was longing for some semblance of groundedness (if this isn’t a word I’m making it one) and deeper connection to my surroundings.
Unable to resist the opportunity to get custom-made clothes, I did decide to travel straight from Cát Bà to Hôi An before returning to Hanoi (from which I would eventually fly back to the States). Of course, by the time I’d taken the overnight bus halfway down the coast and was standing on the main designer street of the “Tailoring Capital of the World,” admiring the wonderfully adorned mannequins around me, I suddenly felt as disconnected from the jumpsuit I’d been fantasizing about as I’d been feeling from anything else over the past few weeks.
Here I was, in Vietnam, and I longed to do nothing more with my last week in SEA than hang out in a private room and binge Netflix all day. It turns out rushing through such an enchanting country with so much to see on a 30-day time restriction at the tail-end of so much travel was my breaking point.
So, even though I’d stupidly booked and paid in advance for five nights in my hostel in Hôi An, I decided after my first night to book a cheap same-day plane ticket back to Hanoi, where I instead spent my last six nights doing exactly that. (I’d been pretty spot-on in my prediction back in Tam Cốc: the highlight of my time with you did turn out to be my private rooms with flat-screens, as well as the cheap food + delivery.* Now, Grab drivers are someone(s) to whom I could indeed write a love letter.)
*On a more serious note, I've recently begun to wonder about the ethics of staying in “cheap” Airbnbs and ordering from particular western restaurants in certain cities/countries, in terms of their potential roles in gentrification. But that’s another topic for another time.
Honestly, as I write this, I’m so relieved to be back in the U.S. Now that I don’t have any visas restricting me, I’m taking this opportunity to rent a room in Seattle for a FULL MONTH (after the year I’ve had, such a “long” stay feels like heaven).
I promise, I will do my best to come back and see you again someday — with a travel buddy — and I’ll appreciate you for what you are. But don’t wait around for me :)
Sincerely,
It’s not you, it’s the burnout.
