Month: February 2026

Part travelogue, part meditation, this journey through Portland’s streets and flavors captures a city that thrives on creativity, community, and a restless search for authenticity.

The Seattle to Portland bicycle race, or STP, ends in downtown Portland’s Holladay Park. It is a thrill to watch swarms of cyclists glide into the finish line, their bodies tilting like schools of whales. After forty-eight hours of heat and asphalt—temperatures spiking to 114 degrees—they arrive transformed. The six thousand riders who began in a cool Seattle parking lot are no longer the same. They carry the wisdom of the road.

Portland greets them with its own energy: liberal, progressive, and open-hearted. Later, my friend Nancy, a lifelong Portlander, quips:

“…everyone is trying to be someone else.”

Her words nudge me toward a more curious lens: not comparison, but immersion.

Our artful downtown hotel offers another glimpse of Portland life. From our window, overlooking a parking lot, we watch midnight exchanges—cars pulling in, brief conversations, money and substances changing hands.

“I wonder about the unseen stories, the heartache hiding in plain sight.”

We wander together through the Portland Japanese Garden. Set above the city in Washington Park, it is considered the most authentic Japanese garden outside Japan. Groundskeepers sweep each square foot with miniature brooms, rake stones, and trim moss-covered roofs with monastic care. A plaque by the bonsai pines reads: This Perfect Moment. From an overlook, Mt. Hood rises solitary and luminous.

Being with Nancy makes me breathe more deeply. We talk about writing and why we do it. She says simply, “I write for myself.” She seeks no recognition, just the joy of words, music, family. Her clarity startles me.

Later, I spend time with my daughter Priyanka and her husband Chris at Powell’s, the world’s largest independent bookstore. Nine floors of shelves buzz with serious readers. I lose myself in artists’ memoirs and leave with Kusama’s autobiography, a Japanese novel on solitude, and Pico Iyer’s Aflame, on silence. Portland, I realize, is as much about ideas as it is about food.

Still, food leads us next to Voodoo Doughnut, a neon pink circus of irreverence. Since its founding in 2003, Voodoo has grown into a cultural icon, marrying playfulness with indulgence. Flavors range from the Shark Bite to the Bacon Maple Bar, but I choose the Diablos Rex: a devil’s food doughnut adorned with sprinkles and a frosted pentagram. Absurd and delicious, it lives up to the tagline: The Magic Is in the Hole.

On our way to the airport, we end with a Sri Lankan feast at Mirisata, a worker-owned cooperative. Vegetable roti, deviled potatoes, cucumber sambol, yellow rice, pickled eggplant—all vegan, all nourishing.

“Mirisata’s logo is the Sri Lankan jungle fowl, a bird that refuses domestication. Like Portland itself, it insists on living free.”

Thirty-six hours in Portland leave me both grounded and inspired. From the cyclists to the gardeners, the doughnut-makers to the bookstore browsers, this city pulses with imagination, resilience, and authenticity.

Saigon is the liberal counterpoint to Hanoi’s bureaucratic conservatism. Removed from the political center, it seems to breathe more freely. Public walls are alive with color, covered in bold, socially-slanted messages that brighten the streets. Diversity feels more visible here: beyond the primarily Indochinese population, one notices Europeans, Americans, and travelers from across the world. This cosmopolitan energy is reflected in the city’s younger generation, who appear focused on better opportunities, economic security, and higher living standards. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one might say, is alive in Saigon’s aspirations.

From the southern edge of the Mekong Delta, where our boat leaves us, we drive two hours north toward the city. Along the way, miles of rubber trees stretch endlessly—Vietnam’s “white gold.” The name comes from the milky latex tapped from the trees, a resource that fueled prosperity, especially during the colonial era. In 1925, the Michelin Tire Company established vast plantations near Saigon, creating the country’s largest estate. Even today, Vietnam is the world’s third-largest supplier of natural rubber, after Thailand and Indonesia.

As we near the city, traffic jolts into motion every time the lights turn green. There is no yellow here, no pause—only the urgent roar of motorbikes and the crush of humanity. Crossing the street feels like an existential gamble, as though we must call upon the laws of reincarnation just to reach the other side.

Before the 17th century, Ho Chi Minh City was a Khmer port called Prey Nokor, part of Cambodia until it was annexed by Vietnam. Later, it became the capital of French Indochina, then of South Vietnam, until its fall to the North in 1975. A unified Vietnam emerged under Ho Chi Minh the following year. The transition was turbulent, and though the official name is Ho Chi Minh City, the older name—Saigon—still lingers affectionately in memory. Today, with a population of over 14 million, it is Vietnam’s financial heart, contributing a quarter of the national GDP. Its airport is the largest, its seaport the busiest, and its industries—from finance to medical tourism—have made it a regional force on the world stage.

We orient ourselves by visiting its architectural gems: Reunification Hall, once the seat of the South Vietnamese government; the 19th-century Central Post Office designed by Gustave Eiffel; and the Notre Dame Cathedral, undergoing massive restoration until 2027. Then, we steel ourselves for a more sobering destination: the Củ Chi Tunnels.

It takes more than two hours by bus, weaving through crowded streets and overflowing markets, to reach them. What we find is a subterranean world of astonishing complexity: more than 250 kilometers of underground passages first dug by the Viet Minh in 1948.

The Viet Minh—formally the League for the Independence of Vietnam—was a nationalist movement founded by Ho Chi Minh during World War II. They fought against Japanese occupation and later against French colonial rule, laying the groundwork for Vietnam’s struggle for independence.

In the 1960s, their successors, the Viet Cong (officially the National Liberation Front), expanded the tunnels dramatically.

…the tunnels became not only hiding places but lifelines.

The Viet Cong were a communist-led guerrilla force in South Vietnam, supported by the North. Using ambushes, sabotage, and relentless guerrilla tactics, they sought to undermine the South Vietnamese government and its American allies.

At its height, the network stretched from the outskirts of Saigon to the Cambodian border. It contained everything—living quarters, hospitals, kitchens, workshops, storage rooms, even schools and makeshift cemeteries. Life underground was brutal. Air, food, and water were scarce. Soldiers lived among snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and rats. Malaria killed almost as many as battle wounds.

The tunnels gave the Viet Cong a decisive advantage.

…the tunnels were hiding places, supply routes, communication centers, and staging grounds for guerrilla attacks.

U.S. forces launched massive campaigns—Operation Crimp in 1966 and Operation Cedar Falls in 1967—bombing the jungle into a moonscape.

Today, portions of the tunnels are preserved as a war memorial. Crawling inside, one feels a hollowed-out sadness—the kind that remembers suffering but cannot quite move beyond it.

Crawling inside, one feels a hollowed-out sadness.

The tunnels are a symbol of revolutionary heroism, yes, but they are also a reminder of war’s futility.