“The monsoon rains come down suddenly and ferociously over our small boat as we chug down the Mekong River in Vietnam. ‘Untie the curtain!’ Sian yells and we all push our bags out of the way and our respective tarp "curtains" across the boat. We look around at each other, laughing: two Danes, two Brits, two Irish and an American--all of us soaked. And just as suddenly the rain stops, and the sun comes out. We return to the scenery on the shore, the rural Vietnamese world coming back to life: water buffalo cooling themselves in the water, workers in conical straw hats bending over in the rice fields, kids fishing from the shoreline. In some ways, nothing has changed for them in thousands of years...”