Thirty kilometres from the itself remote town of Mai Chau, the road runs out. This blog is also drawing to a close. Well, the name will soon be a misnomer: Tim will no longer be in Vietnam. Our time is up shortly and we are planning the staggered ecologically-responsible release of our staff back into the wild and the return to tidying, washing and cooking (and guarding the house) all by ourselves (we won’t be needing a pool lady, more’s the pity).
For the numerati amongst you, the blog had over 100 entries and over 20 000 hits. It was a lot of fun to write and I think I will enjoy re-reading it, to recapture the feeling of what it was like to get to know Vietnam. During our time here it allowed me to maintain some friendships, to re-ignite others and to establish yet others. Here is where the readership was. Norway and Vietnam at the top of the list followed by the UK & US. Fabrice: give yourself a pat on the back for (possibly single-handedly) dragging France up to 5th, thank you for the votes from the Dublin jury, Nick & Mags; take a bow, Hugh in NZ; thank you Schuttenbelts in Delhi and Mundys in Bangkok; Bjørn and Michelle in the US, and Alec making a late run from Brussels; not nice to end on a sour note, but Anders in Laos, honestly, I had hoped you would have read the blog a bit more: You had a lot to learn from it.
I haven’t determinedly tried to convince readers of anything very much but here’s something you might like to consider following my line on. The sea to the east of Vietnam’s long coast: Call it the Eastern Sea. Not what some regional power might prefer us all to call it.
And here’s a closing thought about humanity as we make our way back to the First World. Whether you want to save their souls, to increase their economic value, to reduce their carbon footprint or to appreciate their cultures, we need to take on board more fully that…
…there are more people living inside this circle than outside it.
OK, now I’ve started thinking big, so here’s another one:
That tiny circle around us in our galaxy is where we have found most of the planets we currently know of with life-maintaining potential. We haven’t managed to really check out other bits yet, perhaps because the Milky Way is 120 000 light years wide. And is one of billions of galaxies out there….
Enough.