sv evi

Oh, what a marvelous time!

Tomu (12), Jade (10) and Luz (almost 8) are so easy to travel with right now. They rarely complain about anything. They are easy-going and adaptable. “How long is our train ride? Where are we going next? What are we doing tomorrow?” They ask and just accept the answers. They are pretty independent. Often Ma and I would go out for coffee in the morning before they were all awake. They could text us via the Ipad if needed; they were happy to play Santorini on the Ipad or watch an episode of How to Train Your Dragon. The kids loved to rough-house on king-size beds — on evi there isn’t much space for rough-housing.

The kids would say “I like it” about dumpy hotels. They also get along well with each other! Tomu is always reading…even while hiking in North Vietnam. Jade and Luz are thick as thieves. They often play their imaginary game, Aina Amelia, talking to each other about characters and events that the rest of us don’t understand. Often things we do wind their way into their play. Jade, a young environmental activist, collects and re-uses straws, so she is always telling every place we go “No straws!”. She carries the purse she made around everywhere, full of straws and plastic spoons.

Ma is easy-going and generally lets me make all the decisions about where to eat. Haha! We agree that coffee is more important than food in the morning.

My kids learned to play bridge properly on this trip. At every meal before sitting down, we would call out numbers between 1 and 10. The two highest numbers play together, and sit opposite each other, and likewise the two lowest numbers. Ma and I would play on a team together, because they all wanted to play on their own. They still ask, how many points to I need to bid x? basically every hand, but they are getting it! 🙂 I’m so proud!

Tomu discovered something: board game cafes! Morten from Germany took Tomu to his first board game cafe, and in every city afterwards we looked for them. I think it literally changed Tomu’s life. He was more excited about playing Terraforming Mars with Morten again than going ziplining in the canopy and looking for gibbons on the Gibbon Experience.

We stayed in a combination of hotels and Airbnbs, opting for the cheaper end of the spectrum on accommodation. This meant we never knew what we were going to get! Once Ma, Tomu, and I had to share a king bed — with me in the middle, while the girls had to share a twin bed. Once a cockroach dropped from the ceiling into the room, so we abandoned that room completely. Often the kids were in one room, and Ma and I in another. This was nice because we had some kid-free time to relax.

We took many modes of transportation: overnight train, 6 hour bus, slow boat, private car, tuk tuk, back of pick up trucks with two benches on each side, airplanes. We visited Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, and kept coming through Bangkok as it was cheaper to fly from there. We crossed borders by land, paying for our visas with crisp USD, still groggy from the night train.

We had some mishaps, too: Ma cut her shin with a sickle while harvesting rice and it promptly got infected; we got bedbugs from the treehouse on the Gibbon Experience; Luz had some epic falls from her bike in Tam Coc, Vietnam. But we all survived.

While on the trip I had some circle of life moments with Ma, just trying to take good care of her. She lost three crowns while on the trip, so she couldn’t chew very well. When we visited Huangsi Waterfalls in Laos, I brought whole apples for snacks. So for Ma, I bit off small chunks of apple and fed them to her. While we hiked down the steps from the Pak Ou Caves on the Mekong River, I braced her arm with mine and synchronized my steps with hers to make sure she didn’t fall. How lucky am I to have this time with my Mama and my kids?! So damn lucky.

We read some history books during down time for home school: What Was the Vietnam War? by Jim O’Connor, the Lonely Planet History section for Cambodia and Laos, and part of A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich. It’s heavy to travel in countries where our country has a left a terrible legacy, and it feels important to know that history.

At the end of our trip in Hanoi, Jade asked each of us what we wanted to do that day.

Luz: Go to a park!

Ma: Go shopping!

Me: Eat street food!

Tomu: Go to a board game cafe!

Jade: Get our nails painted!

So we did. It took us two days to do it all though.

The kids’ independence really showed when we returned to Phuket after five weeks of traveling. Riki and I had to be on evi at 7 am because Mal was coming to deliver our full-enclosure for the cockpit, and Rolly Tasker was putting the mast back on. The kids took a Bolt (ride-share app) by themselves to their favorite breakfast place in Old Town Phuket! Then they took another Bolt back to our Airbnb.

More posts to follow with details on some experiences. 🙂

While we were gallivanting around, Riki was busting his butt working on evi. He worked long hours, often until midnight, only to start at 6:30 am the next morning. He only turned on the stove to re-heat food and make quesadillas. He rented a scooter for the month. He hired a marine engineer, Jeff Pang, to work with him. They did so much…lots of things I don’t know the proper terminology for, so maybe he will write a blog post. I am super grateful to him for taking care of our home while we traveled around.