Sometimes the longest journey begins with great patience. When Jon Bowermaster proposed an 800-mile kayak expedition along Vietnam's northern coastline, the country's government initially responded, "That will be quite impossible." Negotiation saved the day, and Jon Bowermaster and his team of five—including a Vietnamese-American woman who had fled Saigon as a child on the final day of war in 1975—completed an unprecedented voyage, seeing Vietnam and its people in a brand new light.
