The Moment It Became Real
We booked a one-way ticket to Vietnam with no real plan. This is the moment it stopped being an idea and became real.
The Email
The email came on an ordinary day, which felt both appropriate and slightly anticlimactic. I was at home, doing nothing in particular, when my phone lit up with the kind of notification that should probably feel bigger than it does in the moment. Vietnam approved, three months, and just like that something that had existed only as a possibility became something official and real. I sat with it quietly for a few seconds, and then the anxiety arrived. Not the sharp, panicked kind, but the slow, creeping kind that rolls in when something that has lived comfortably in the future suddenly crosses into the present tense. This is really happening. Not someday. Not when the time is right. Not when we feel ready. Now.
What made it more layered is that Gelli had already received her approval a week earlier. She’s Filipino, and I wanted to be sure she got her three months confirmed before I submitted my own application. Watching her approval come through first, seeing her face when it landed, and then waiting on mine for another week gave the whole thing an unusual rhythm, with Gelli’s excitement already in full swing while I was still holding my breath. When mine finally came, she was even more excited than when her own had arrived. Her reaction was the same as it always is when something big happens: pure, uncomplicated joy. The kind that doesn’t pause to interrogate itself or run through worst case scenarios. She has been ready for this longer than I have, or at least she wears it differently. Where I instinctively reach for structure and contingency, she reaches straight for the adventure itself, and I’ve come to think of that as one of the most valuable things she brings to us as a team.
The Shape of a Plan
We do have something resembling a plan for the first stretch. Twenty days of accommodation booked, a rough shape of cities sketched out, one-way tickets sitting in our inbox. That twenty-day structure gave me something real to hold onto when the anxiety threatened to become too loud, a way to steady myself while everything beyond it stays open and unknown. After those first three weeks, we genuinely don’t know. We’re going to move through Vietnam slowly, pay attention to what pulls at us, and let things surface rather than forcing a structure onto something that probably shouldn’t have one yet. Maybe a place holds us longer than expected. Maybe something entirely unplanned presents itself. After the three months are up, the question mark gets even bigger, and our honest answer to what comes next is that we’ll figure it out from there.
The two stops I find myself most curious about in those first twenty days are Buon Ma Thuot and Da Lat. Neither of them are the obvious tourist landmarks, they don’t appear on the Instagram reels the way Hanoi or Hoi An do, and I think that’s precisely why they interest me most. Buon Ma Thuot is the coffee capital of Vietnam, sitting in the Central Highlands surrounded by plantation country, and Da Lat is this cooler, greener, almost incongruously European feeling city tucked into the mountains. Both feel like places where you might actually get a sense of how people live rather than how people visit, which is increasingly what I’m looking for. When I close my eyes and picture Vietnam, it isn’t the chaos of a busy city intersection that comes to me. It’s green. Lush, layered, unhurried landscape. A slower rhythm. The kind of place where mornings feel like they belong to you.
How We Actually Got Here
To understand why this trip carries the weight it does, you have to understand what daily life looks like right now in Cheshire, and what the months leading up to this have actually involved. There is nothing dramatic about our current routine. Gelli and I are both working, trying to stay on top of things, and quietly dismantling the infrastructure of a life we’ve built here, i.e., selling furniture, clearing belongings, closing contracts, and trying to reduce or eliminate as much debt as possible before we leave. It is, in the most honest terms, pretty boring and quite stressful, with an underlying current of anticipation that makes it hard to fully settle into any given day.
The honest version of how we got here starts with a visa renewal deadline and a financial reality check. Gelli’s UK spouse visa was due to expire at the beginning of June, and renewing it would have cost close to six thousand pounds when you factor in legal fees. For most couples in stable dual-income situations, that might be manageable. For us, having recently stepped away from the salary that came with my corporate career, it simply didn’t make financial sense. Add to that the reality that if we were to grow our family at any point, Gelli would need to step back from work, and the prospect of running a household in the UK on a single contract income felt genuinely precarious. The UK cost of living crisis is not an abstract headline in our household. It is a real and present weight, and the decision to leave wasn’t made purely out of wanderlust. It was made because staying, on those terms, didn’t add up.
So we started talking seriously about moving abroad, without any clear destination in mind at first, just a shared acknowledgement that the UK under those conditions wasn’t the obvious choice. Southeast Asia kept surfacing. Vietnam kept rising to the top of that conversation for reasons I’ll come back to.
The Moment It Became Real
The conversation that changed everything happened at my sister’s house over Christmas. We were talking through the options, circling around Vietnam as the most compelling combination of affordability, food, quality of life, and sheer appeal. My sister mentioned that you can pay for flights in instalments, so there was no real reason not to just book the ticket. It was the kind of practical, slightly impatient nudge that shifts a conversation from hypothetical to real. We got home that evening and booked the one-way ticket. There is no going back now, and we both know it.
A Dream I Kept Deferring
What I find harder to articulate, but feel the need to try, is that Southeast Asia has been sitting in the back of my mind since long before I ever put on a suit. Before the corporate career, before the progression and the titles and the compliance frameworks and the years split across London and the Middle East, there was a younger version of me who wanted to do exactly this, to move slowly through Southeast Asia, to eat well and travel without a fixed itinerary, to actually experience a part of the world that felt genuinely foreign and alive. Vietnam was always at the top of that list. The food alone, fresh, intensely flavoured, rooted in ingredients rather than process, felt like something worth crossing the world for. The landscapes. The pace. The sense that daily life there operates on a frequency entirely different from anything I grew up around.
I made choices instead. Good ones, on balance, though the balance is complicated. In my previous piece, The Prison I Built Myself, I wrote honestly about what that decade in corporate life actually cost, i.e., the time, the identity, the particular kind of freedom that is very hard to hold onto once you start climbing. My career gave me a great deal of experience, financial grounding, a professional identity I’m genuinely proud of. It also cost me things I’m only now properly naming, and Vietnam was one of them. It just sat there, patient, waiting for me to eventually catch up. Now I’m catching up, and that feels like something worth saying out loud.
The Weight of Leaving
There is one thing that sits heavily in a way I want to be honest about rather than gloss over. Leaving family and friends behind is hard. Not complicated-hard or philosophically-hard but just genuinely, simply hard in the way that most real things are. The people I love are rooted in fixed places, and choosing to be somewhere else on the other side of the world is a real cost, not a footnote to be tucked away at the end of a paragraph about adventure. I think about it more than I let on. At the same time, staying out of comfort or inertia, staying because the uncertainty of leaving feels too loud, carries its own cost, and that cost compounds quietly over time.
What We’re Actually Building
Teaching English is sitting in the background as a possible supplementary income stream, though I’ll be honest that it’s more practical contingency than genuine calling. My contracting work is the primary income plan, and Chartless is the longer game, the brand, the content, the thing we’re actually building toward. YouTube will take years before it generates anything meaningful, if it ever does, and I’m clear-eyed enough about that not to romanticise the timeline. The English teaching option is simply there in case something doesn’t go to plan, which feels appropriate given that not going entirely to plan is the general theme of this whole endeavour.
No Plan. That’s the Point.
We have a visa. We have a one-way ticket. We have twenty days of hotels and a rough shape of cities and two specific places in the highlands and mountains that I can’t stop thinking about. What we don’t have is a plan beyond that, and I’ve spent enough time sitting with that fact now to have moved through the anxiety and arrived somewhere that feels more like acceptance, or maybe something closer to anticipation. Leaving without knowing exactly what comes next, moving without a long-term plan, finding out what the right direction is by actually going, that’s not a gap in our preparation. That’s the whole idea. Increasingly, I think that’s exactly as it should be.
Go Chartless.
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