Good Morning to Vietnam
My dream for this year is to wake up and say a...
It seems like I’ve been talking about visiting Vietnam forever. You know how you can get a place into your head and then spend years thinking about it. I’m thinking about Vietnam right now because just the other day someone asked me about my favourite destinations. Not the ones I’ve been to, but rather the ones that I have yet to visit but that would be right up at the top of my must-get-there list. And Vietnam is definitely at the top of that.
I can’t really explain why I haven’t been yet. I know that I was close to going about 15 years ago and then, for one reason or another, it just didn’t happen. Then other trips presented themselves and off I went in other directions. And now I find myself thinking – and reading – a great deal about Vietnam, and planning when to go. Probably by myself but as part of an escorted tour.
The Vietnam obsession started with all those war films. There have been so many, of course, but for me there are two standouts: The Deer Hunter and Platoon. As I write this I have just paused to check the date of The Deer Hunter and I am amazed to discover that it was 1978. Forty years ago! Platoon was 1986.
But the film that really got me hooked on Vietnam was the beautiful Indochine, a French film made in 1992, and starring Catherine Deneuve. Set in what was then French Indochina in the 1930s and 1940s, it is heartbreaking, but visually stunning. When I saw the shots of Halong Bay in that film a quarter of a century ago, I vowed that, one day, I would get there. And before 2018 is out, that is now the plan.
There are other places too, of course, on that must-get-there list. I’ve written here before about how I have always wanted to visit Libya because of my father’s war tales from the desert, and also the fact that he was in Tripoli on the day that victory in Europe was declared.
My husband and I were supposed to go some years ago but the 50 degree heat there at the time meant that we called the trip off and said we’d go another time. We never did, and now dear only knows when a trip to Libya will ever be deemed safe again.
Two other places, though, that are accessible and are on my radar are Cuba and Botswana. Cuba for the atmosphere, the music and the general vibe. I’m not remotely interested, though, in spending any time in a beach resort there. Where I want to be is Havana. Old Havana. Nor have I any desire to stay in the five-star Kempinski hotel there, probably the city’s first proper luxury hotel. I want to stay in one of the old hotels – either the Nacional or the Inglaterra.
Botswana I have been yearning to visit since my friend Conor, a photographer, spent some time there about a decade ago. Extremely well-travelled (he was also a travel writer and contributed to a number of the well-known travel guides), he was completely bowled over by Botswana, saying that it was the most beautiful place he had ever been. When Conor died suddenly four years ago I vowed to myself that I would try to make it to Botswana and I am still determined to do that. He painted such pictures in my head of the wildlife and the beauty of the Okavango Delta – and his own photographs were enough to make you want to book a flight immediately. When I think about Conor nowadays – as I often do – I always picture him in that Botswana setting, wandering the grassy plains of the Okavango river delta, a smile on his face, his camera slung over his shoulder, and totally at peace with the world.
Then there’s India. Now, I’ve been to India before, specifically to Mumbai and that western coastline, but all that really did was give me a taste for more. In short, I loved it. The frenetic life of the city, the volume of people, the heat, the colour, the food, the beauty of the ocean. There was squalor too, and horrendous poverty and while yes, of course that is difficult to process when you are there as a ‘tourist’, it was actually the quiet dignity of the dispossessed that stayed with me long after I returned home. How could they be expected to live like that and remain so courteous and gentle?
For me, when I’m away, first impressions count. In that context I’ll never forget waking up on my first morning in Mumbai, having arrived in from the airport under cover of darkness in the early hours of the morning. I pulled back the curtains in my hotel bedroom and there was the massive Gateway of India monument across the road. It wasn’t really that, though, that triggered my excitement. Instead it was the sheer mass of humanity on the pavement in front of the hotel – wall-to-wall people, coming and going in both directions, the women swathed in brightly coloured saris – orange, cobalt blue, red, yellow, lime green... It’s an image that I’ve never forgotten.
So I want to go back. Not to Mumbai – been there, done that. But I’d like to visit other parts of this fascinating country. I’m not pushed about seeing the Taj Mahal but I would like to visit the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur. My sister, who has long had an India obsession the equivalent of my Vietnam one, says she will come with me. She has a busy summer ahead, what with a ‘significant’ birthday and a house move, so we have pencilled it in for 2019. By which time, of course, I will already have ticked Vietnam off my list.