Chicken Soup for My Soul

Few trips have gone as disastrously as my ‘holiday’ to South East Asia. I like to play a game called 'Where It All Went Wrong'. Was it the first, or third attempted robbery? The cockroach nest I discovered next to my resting head? The moment when I noticed - to my horror - that there was something wriggling... underneath my skin.
Four weeks in: the temptation to fly home, seeking refuge in my local M&S, was undisguisable. My travelling companion and I could hardly look at each other - our friendship: another casualty of the trip. We had just arrived in Vang Vieng to discover a flash flood has decimated the entire area, and were advised to leave immediately. With morale at an all-time low, Georgie and I (and that-wiggling-worm-that-lived-in-My-Left-Foot: I affectionately called him Daniel) decided to cut through the mountains, and into Vietnam. We must be due some good luck by now, surely.
Cut to: 6am, and onlookers at the Vietnamese border were amused to see two extremely dishevelled young girls, positively sprinting after a minibus, yelling hopelessly into the dust and fumes that were spat and kicked into their enraged little faces… We had been forgotten.
I slumped to the floor, and with intense focus, played with ants and sticks in the sand. Then strangely, the following hours turned into the most memorable of my trip. The sunrise slid slowly up onto our forlorn faces, until it was blasting us with its full, undeniable gorgeousness. I don't think anyone has seen shadows shrink away from sunlight so spectacularly in the history of Instagram. What a place to find yourself lost.
Later we were joined by a Vietnamese tailor. We practiced his English together, from a copy of Chicken Soup For The Soul. And as we sat by the roadside, I let all the weird, mispronounced goodness wash over me. The book's over-quoted sayings, which barely do as inspirational schoolroom poster fodder, felt amazingly profound that morning. They echoed across the Annamite mountains, rather beautifully. “Don't worry about failures” the tailor said, in broken English, “worry about the chances you miss when you don't even try”.
I won't tie this all too neatly for you - I’m sure you can see the lesson I learnt. I think it was about trying, and failing, and taking chances... Or something like that. And I have one more piece of advice of my own: always, no matter how hilarious you find it, seek immediate medical attention when you play host to a parasite. But that’s all I’ll say about that.