I wake up before sunrise, as I always do. In that quiet moment before the world begins to move, my mind drifts back to the places that have shaped me.
Travel has always been part of my life. My father, a teacher with a deep understanding of the world, and my mother, working in travel, made sure of that. I thought I’d follow them both, first spending three seasons as a tour guide, then returning home to become «real» teacher. Those three seasons turned into thirty-two. And I never went back.
Instead, I kept moving from the beaches of Spain, Turkey, and Greece to guiding Nile cruises in Egypt, trekking through the rainforests of Borneo, and spending years in West Africa. I’ve met presidents, royalty, even Bob Marley’s children in Jamaica, and at one point I led two trips all the way around the world.
But if there’s one place that always comes back to me, it’s Vietnam. It’s the energy, the rhythm of the streets, the endless flow of motorbikes that somehow never collide. It’s the early mornings that suit me perfectly: sitting down to breakfast soup at 4:30 am while the city slowly wakes up. I first lived there in 2005 and kept returning over the years, right up to my latest trip in 2026. Each visit felt like stepping back into a story that never really ends.
Some moments from there still play out vividly.
I remember when helmets suddenly became mandatory everywhere. Along the highways, people would stand with helmets ready for rent just before police checkpoints. You’d stop, grab whatever was available – sometimes a proper helmet, sometimes a pot, a pan, even a carved watermelon and ride through without a problem. A few kilometres later, someone else would collect it. It was chaotic, creative, and somehow perfectly organised at the same time.
Then there was the day a colleague and I unknowingly became part of a karaoke music video. We were asked to casually walk behind a well-dressed couple pretending to sing, and only weeks later realised we had become background characters on a DVD. Suddenly people recognised us in the streets an entirely accidental claim to fame that probably still exists somewhere.
But the moment that stayed with me most happened in a quiet hotel lobby in Nha Trang. A sales manager asked where I was from. When I said Denmark, she surprised me by asking for my exact hometown and then told me she knew it. Her brother had fled Vietnam in the 80s and ended up there, learning Danish from a local teacher who helped refugees settle into daily life.
What she didn’t know was that the teacher sometimes brought his son along to those classes, a boy who sat in the back reading comics. That boy was me. And the teacher was my father.
When she called her brother and he confirmed his name, the world suddenly felt very small. Moments like that remind me what travel really is: not just places, but connections you never expect to find.
