A couple of years ago 2 friends and I bought a camper. Our camper was a camper with attitude. It wasn’t one of those surfer / 60’s campers, it was built in a slightly larger, box shaped Volkswagen transport vehicles. It would have been dead ugly from the outside if it wouldn’t have had a sun screen on the outside that made it resemble a large hat.

We bought this camper with a specific goal in mind: a 3 weeks trip together with my friend. We had the most amazing holidays when we were teenagers, but once grown up we would spend large portions of our evenings together talking about those great holidays instead of having new experiences together. This had to change when we bought the camper.

And so it did. From the first moment in the camper we had a fantastic trip. The camper had been owned for almost 2 decades by the same family and we had bought it fully furnished. So every time we were looking for something we just stopped searching and thought “if it here, what would be the most logical place for this piece?”. Inevitably the part was in the camper and at the most logical place.

We drove the camper south to France, Spain (Extremadura!) and parts of Portugal. We made a sport of finding the best spot in the forest (we pretended it was a 4×4) for our BBQ’s. After several days we developed a very efficient decision making routine: at every crossroad, take the smallest of all roads at your disposal.

I remembered this routine this morning: the setting was different. Instead of together in southern Europe, I found myself alone and semi-lost in the jungle of south Vietnam. Instead of people driving like monkeys, I heard real ones in the trees high above me. It probably was my imagination, but i would swear that there were much bigger animals right beside me. In any case, I’m proud to report that the good old ‘camper technique’ for finding the best spots works here as well.