Holy crap, I’m in Australia!

It was while sitting on a riverside restaurant on the Mekong Delta in the Vietnamese town of Chau Doc, which borders Cambodia. The resto floats on metal drums and bobs gently with the wash from passing boats.

You can see slender ladies with conical hats rowing their canoes across the river to visit a friend in a floating home, who might be washing her hair while crouching on her front porch.

That’s when it happened. “Holy crap,” I thought, “I’m really in Asia! Holy crap, I’m really traveling!”

A danger of extended travel is that it can become routine if you let it. You find yourself in another cheap hotel in another town. You get used to communicating with your hands and haggling over prices on a calculator. Exotic landscapes quickly become familiar as you adapt progressively quicker to alien environments.

You spend much of your time running practical errands, like changing money, and seeking reliable information. Yet the world is slowly becoming alike, and everything is getting easier. An ATM or internet cafe is seldom more than a few minutes away.

Worse still is the ubiquity of free or cheap wifi, giving you an easy refuge to the familiar, where you can forget that you’re in a shockingly different place.

And so I relish the little unexpected moments that slam you back to Earth, that remind you where you are and how lucky you are to be there.

I wish I had the discipline to wake up every morning and offer thanks to whatever force has allowed me to be wherever I am. Instead, I can thank an ageless brown river for spanking some gratitude into me.

What were some of your ‘Holy crap’ moments?

Other ones I had included:

In Solo, Central Java Indonesia, while sitting in a wedang, a food and drink cart that turns sidewalks into lounges with straw mats, iced teas and fritters. The sight of steam rising from food stalls under the pale yellow light from street lamps felt intensely Asian.

Watching a buffalo get sacrificed before my eyes in Toraja, South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Hoisting a mosquito net over a bamboo and straw bed in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, where malaria is endemic.

Seeing the Sydney Opera House for the first time.

Feeling the slight discomfort and utter fascination of talking to a drunken Aboriginal woman in the streets of Alice Spring at 1 am.

Grilling green-lipped mussels that I picked myself at the Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand.