There’s midlife crisis, quarter-life crisis and what Vox magazine in 2020 termed the 30-something life crisis. The thought of getting away from it all at some point in our adult lives is tempting. But as I passed my 35th birthday, an idea somewhat jokingly expressed at a party became a concrete plan.
With friends and family around me hitting adult milestones (you know the ones--marriage, children, buying a home), I didn’t so much feel left behind than that I wanted to create a milestone of my own.
Southeast Asia is a region that I admittedly knew little of, and it was really the passion of multiple friends--and its budget-friendliness, safety and accessibility for solo travellers--that drew me towards it. I am now firmly in its grip.
“Good grief,” I hear you sigh. “Another woman gone off to Bali to ‘find herself’.” I never did make it to Bali. And instead of looking inward, I wanted to look outward, broaden my horizon and soak it all up. “From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfilment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be,” Anthony Bourdain once said of Southeast Asia.
A brief tour of six countries
Each of the countries I visited is stitched from its own unique fabric. In Chan Nua, a tiny village on the banks of the Mekong in Laos, I was treated to a lunch cooked by the family matriarch, and discussed politics and his hopes for the future with a young potter who is creating new opportunities in this ancient craft for his community.
Hiking in the mountains of north Vietnam, women from the Hmong tribe told the group how they had lived self-sufficiently off the land during the covid-19 pandemic, a feat unthinkable for most of us. They joked about useless husbands, and chuckled at our clumsy steps along narrow, muddy footpaths.
In Malaysia, through friends of friends, I found myself both chanting “99 Luftballons” at the George Town Oktoberfest as well as delving deep into a dazzling technicolour exhibition of Southeast Asian textiles curated by art historian and collector John Ang.
I discovered Singapore largely on foot, meandering away from the famous bay to Chinatown, Little India and Arab Street where you quickly learn that there is no such thing as too much food. And while watching the sun rise over Cambodia’s Angkor Wat is possibly as cliché as it gets, it is a sight to behold.
Southeast Asia isn’t just an idea--a foil for soul-searching backpackers, a land of smiles and lotus flowers. It is a place filled with an abundance and diversity of history, art, culture, food and people to discover.
More than half of the region’s population is under 30, there’s a thriving startup scene, and back in Luxembourg I dream of the super-app Grab, offering anything from ride-hailing to grocery and food deliveries, and digital payments solutions. The modern is as much part of cities, countries and cultures as the ancient, even if it doesn’t meet tourist expectations of the “exotic” and “authentic”.
It is too much to put into words. The kindness and hospitality of strangers, haggling with seasoned market vendors, eating on tiny curbside plastic chairs, rifling through local bookshops, allowing yourself to get lost with no particular destination at all, taking night trains with the most questionable of toilets, chatting with the locals, getting on a motorbike taxi for the first time, the smell of jasmine temple offerings and incense.
In Chiang Mai, Thailand, a group of young monks offered to show me around one of the city’s many “wats” as part of their English homework. Originally from Myanmar and Nepal, they shared how they had left their families at the tender age of eight or nine years old, how they spend their days at the monastery. Just one of many chance encounters, some fleeting and some leading to hopefully long friendships.
Going solo
Solo travel forces you to engage with your surroundings in a different way. There is no-one telling you where to go, what to do, when’s dinner. It is freeing. It also means you do all the work, figuring out the eat, sleep, drink and do, getting from A to B, managing your budget.
Travelling alone is a lesson in getting out of your comfort zone, in confidence. That includes the confidence of saying “no” and knowing that you don’t have to prove anything to yourself. I did not eat the fried spiders at the market in Cambodia or boiled half-hatched eggs in Vietnam. But if you know where to get a bowl of Khao Soi and Kuay Jap or a plate of Nasi Kandar and Lok Lak in Luxembourg, drop me a message.
For many of us work and family obligations make a sabbatical difficult if not impossible. I am all the more grateful that I was able to create this opportunity, for supportive colleagues and managers, for the friends who cheered me on along the way and the family I knew always had my back.
The return to a cold, grey, rainy winter in Luxembourg hasn’t been easy. But I have come back enriched, with new perspectives and experiences, and with Southeast Asia firmly on my travel schedule to continue exploring a place of which I still feel I have barely scratched the surface.