Celestial Maneuvers in Mui Ne

As the earth completed another arbitrary orbit of our star, I spent the time reflecting on 47 years of sentience. The older one gets the more meaningless everything becomes, to the point of laughable absurdity. Life certainly seems to be a cosmic joke. Extended periods of suffering punctuated by moments of joy. The universe exercising its dualistic nature, happiness can't exist without pain. Light without dark. Once basic needs are met, the best one can hope for is contentment, whereby both bliss and suffering are attenuated, and a vanilla state of being is achieved. The middle way as Buddhists might say.

That's the kind of shit I think about as I walk 6km along a tropical beach each day at sunrise. It's difficult to articulate my thoughts in writing. I never seem to be able to convey the precise nuanced meaning I'm after.

A perfect example of what I'm trying to say is the last 5 months of my life. It's been pretty grim. Exhausting 50 hour work weeks in a soulless-magnolia-cave in the heart of a depressing megalopolis. I get a front row view of the rat race. And a name badge. Suffering. After 20 weeks I was allowed a week by a beach. Joy.

A country should never be judged by its largest conurbations. They provide skewed metrics. London, Bangkok and HoChiMinh are prime examples. If one never left these dystopian shitholes you'd never experience the nation's natural beauty and the warmness of more relaxed rural folk. What a joy it was to simply not be in HoChiMinh.

I stayed in a guesthouse with beautiful gardens. Listening to the birds, frogs and crickets each night. I enjoyed gazing at the stars. Especially on those tropical evenings where there's not a breath of wind - not a leave rustling - completely still. Lovely.

The room cost 1.6M VND. The bus there and back was 0.3M. A further 1.6M on food and drinks brings the total to 3.5M VND or exactly $150 USD. Not bad for a week in paradise.

Things to note about MuiNe. There's a lot of Ruskies here. Locals fish from little round bath tubs. There's a brilliant sunset viewing area at the southern end catering more to locals. I loved sitting there with a Cafe Sua and walking home in the dark. There's a breakwater built with tetrahedra-shaped rocks - an excellent choice for dissipating a wave's energy. All in all it was a fantastic week and I really didn't want to go back to HoChiMing.

I was actually here in April 2007 but don't remember much about it. - that was back in my twatpacking days.

Was on the dog-n-bone to me brother when he mentioned a few lads we went to school with have died. Drug overdoses and suicides. All blokes. C'est terrible.

I don't regret leaving England 15 years ago. Nothing seems to matter there. Nationalism is a dirty word. Aimless indigenous young men from deprived areas. Affirmative action for everyone but them. Invariably succumbing to drugs, welfare and crime. No purpose, religion, nation, kin, community. The feminists have even nuked families. All destroyed for the neoliberal-globalists. Mass immigration foisted on them. Division, disharmony and a lowering of wages. Brexit and Trump the death spasms of the west. A once great civilisation. Shame. RIP.

I digress. This is the quietest area within a 10km radius of where I live. You can still hear noise from building sites and the whine of distant scooters but it's pretty good. I simply sit on the curb and drink water for an hour. There's no traffic as they've sealed the road off - I jump over the barriers. I have no idea how naughty this is? However, nowhere is far from the omnipotent, all seeing Eye-of-Vin.

A few pics from work. I get to sit in a corridoor for 45mins at lunch.

But there's a coffee machine.

I'm lucky to have a great bunch of colleagues. Schools can be very hit and miss on this.

And finally, the cute coffee girl.

Two years off the piss and tabs! Yeah!