I get into these discussions with Jane about going places and seeing things:

“We’re going to Cha Ben Tanh. It’s about 40 minutes from here. It’s a nice, weird and wonderful market.”

“How far is it in kilometers?”[1]

“Let me look—8.”[2]

“40 minutes?!?”

The other day, I finally realized the issue. When we were living in San Diego, getting in the car and traveling for 40 minutes in pretty much any direction would take us a pretty long way. This is because it was a short jump from the house to the freeway where we were then free to travel at 120kph. Now, though, we are living life at 50kph. And it’s only 50kph on a good day.

Scooter traffic can be pretty horrendous. Add construction or rain to the mix and you can find yourself going barely faster than a good walking pace. As a result, we really don’t consider distance when we decide to travel somewhere. Rather, we consider time.

Even outside urban areas, traffic and road conditions can combine to really slow you down. Can Tho is 180km from Ho Chi Minh City, yet it can easily take 6 hours to get there. That’s an average of 30kph.

Time is a great measure of tasks. When going somewhere, don’t focus so much on how far, rather, focus on how long.

[1] Thankfully, Jane is Canadian, so I don’t have to do distance conversion when having these conversations.

[2] A great tool for measuring distance between two points, even in a city as convoluted as Ho Chi Minh City, is Google Earth.