Lessons from Vietnamese basket cases

It looked for all the world like a giant half coconut, marooned on the sand. As I drew closer, I saw that it was, in fact, a large basket made from woven bamboo, though I still could not work out what it was doing on the beach in a remote part of central Vietnam. Then I peered over the rim, finding a couple of fishing nets and an oar stashed inside. It seemed that what I had stumbled across was a basket impersonating a boat.

The aphorism "They do things differently here" is one of the reasons why I love to travel. It allows you to marvel at how boundless human creativity is in addressing our common needs, hopes and dreams. And that is a useful guard against the groupthink that can take hold when people stay in the same place, starting to believe that how things are done there is the best -- or even the only -- way to do them.