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Writer Ciara Byrne in south east Asia

In April of this year, I made a last minute decision to travel to Southeast Asia with my boyfriend for two months.

It’s a clichéd story. I was being evicted from my house in Dublin, I couldn’t find anywhere affordable to rent, and city living was wearing me down. We planned everything in three weeks — vaccines, flights, our first five nights in Hanoi — and took off on an Etihad jet to Vietnam.