I stood on the edge of a double lane highway in southern Vietnam, screeching at a Taxi driver who couldn’t care less, in a language he didn’t understand. Iain was inside the taxi, his left elbow swollen to the size of a small melon, his face pale with shock. He abruptly opened the door, to pace desperately beside the taxi.

Just an hour earlier, we’d been devouring Lunch in a large outdoor restaurant in Vinh Long, with all its specialities out on display: fish in tanks, pigeons in cages and coiled snakes in a cement pit. Lunch had arrived piled on platters: pumpkin flowers stuffed with pork, beer-braised chicken and spicy beef salad, washed down with 555 beer. It was far too much food, ordered out of curiosity as much as hunger, and we left happy, to make our way to a home-stay on the Mekong Delta. Backpacks slung from our fronts and backs, we moved through the restaurant’s garden in monsoon drizzle, across a bridge of electric Blue tiles, gleaming in the rain. “Careful,” Iain said, turning to me with his hand resting on a low banister, “It’s slippery.” Just at that moment he slid: down the bridge’s blue slope, down two blue steps at the end, and onto the ground. Loaded with thirty kilograms of luggage, his elbow broke the fall

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