3 months ago
20
November 12, 2025 — 5:00am
I can’t remember a single thing I learned during my last years of high school. These days, calculators do my maths, lawyers do my legal studies, and my career in drama started and ended with a terrible cameo on Packed to the Rafters. Nothing I crammed into my brain lasted a moment after my pen went down. But everything I learned after landing in Vietnam has stuck with me forever.
It wasn’t my plan to go to Vietnam. I had intended to spend the summer waiting tables and playing video games, before my mum pointed out how immensely boring this was. She explained that this time off was a luxury I might never have again, and it was far better to spend it doing something worthwhile, as opposed to doing the same old thing I always did.
Something in her words must have penetrated the narrow corridors of my adolescent mind because not long after, I found myself on a plane hurtling towards Hanoi, where I would spend a summer teaching English to blind kids.
From the moment I landed, the bubble Australia wrapped around me burst. There were so many simple things that I had been taking for granted my whole life. Things like everyone speaking English, our glorious tap water, and the ability to shower without absolutely saturating my last roll of much-needed toilet paper, all gone in the blink of an eye.
Even something as simple as crossing the road was an ordeal, one that I was confronted with when my taxi dropped me off on the wrong side of the road from my guest house. I stood there with my backpack over my shoulders, watching as an endless procession of motorbikes came roaring past. I nearly burst into tears, wondering how the hell I was ever going to get to the other side.
The trick was not to hesitate. Step out confidently and walk at a slow, even pace, and the river of motorbikes will flow around you. It was a fitting metaphor for my first solo trip overseas. Even though crossing this road was hard, each subsequent road I crossed became that little bit easier.
Travel has a way of teaching you the intangible things that you will never find in a textbook or learn in a classroom. It teaches you to be open-minded, like when you’re taken out for a meal that involves an animal with four legs, a tail, and a snout (hint: it’s not a pig).
It gives you critical thinking skills, like you need when you’re being sold a trip to Hạ Long Bay that sounds a little bit too good to be true. It teaches you about independence, like when you miss your flight from Nha Trang to Ho Chi Minh and you don’t have anyone to blame except the bartender who gave you all those free mojitos (and yourself).
It’s not about seeing how the “other half” lives so that you can feel grateful about what you have. It’s about understanding that people all over the world are essentially the same, and for everything that makes us different, we’re all united by our collective hopes, dreams, and love of banh mi.
If there is any downside to giving your kids a nudge out the door, it’s that they might be a touch insufferable when they return. They’ll string Tibetan prayer flags around the house and endlessly correct your pronunciation of things like pho. But this is a small price to pay when compared to the overwhelming value of those formative trips overseas, which show you that there is so much more to life than you’ll ever cram into your final exams.
Yes, very rarely things can go badly wrong. But the worst they are most likely to endure will be a few bad hangovers, maybe a bout of gastro. At best, it’s a chance for them to be free of the eventual golden handcuffs. No one cares what school you went to. They’re not interested if you’re from Sydney or Melbourne. All that matters is the content of your character. In our adolescent quests for self-determination, it’s moments like these that teach us who we really are.
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