The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Thrillingly strange yet approachable: Vietnam will keep drawing you back
As restrictions ease for arrivals in this popular south-east Asian idyll, Nigel Richardson reminds us why it’s time to go there again
The edge of the world is an acceptably hyperbolic description of Halong Bay, a surreal seascape of conical limestone islets and dreamy emerald waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. It is one of Vietnam’s biggest tourist attractions, pulling in many thousands of overseas visitors each year – I’m talking pre-Covid times, obviously – on package deals from Hanoi.
To escape the crowds, I had booked a boat that sailed off the beaten track among the Bai Tu Long islands, to the east of the most popular parts of Halong Bay. After a visit to a cave and a swim, I decided to take a kayak out to circle one of the cone islets. One of the crew, a young guy called Duong, came along with me.
No other boats were in sight and, as we paddled along, it felt as if we had the entire South China Sea to ourselves. “Hey Mister Nigel!” – Duong had laid his paddle across the kayak and wanted to talk. He proceeded to quiz me on my marital status, my parents and the details of any siblings and children I might have – all done with such charming guilelessness that I was not in the least offended, even though I was startled by the personal nature of the questions.
This encounter, set amid such beautiful surroundings, summed up the charisma of a country that manages to be both thrillingly strange and immediately approachable to the Western visitor. It also provided real insight into Vietnamese culture, which is rooted firmly in family and forebears. On another trip to Vietnam, this obsession with family and ancestry took me to another extraordinary place, this time one barely visited by tourists.
We were a few miles south of the former imperial city of Hue when my guide twisted round in the front passenger seat of the car and asked if I wanted to see the City of Ghosts. When I looked puzzled – I had not heard of the place, and it did not feature in guidebooks – he talked about the importance of ancestor worship in the lives of Vietnamese families and explained that the cemetery known as the City of Ghosts was where this idea reached its most extreme expression.
Our visit, which involved a detour to
the coastal plain between Hue and Danang, took us into a bizarre nether world. The City of Ghosts was a sprawling necropolis of extravagantly decorated mausoleums that seemed to get more and more outrageous the further we ventured into it. Costing far more than many houses for the living, these tombhouses were paid for largely by the Viet
Kieu – the Vietnamese diaspora, many of whom were the “boat people” of the 1970s and 1980s who fled Vietnam in leaky boats from this very place, or the white sand beaches behind it.
We met a man gloomily contemplating the damage done to his family tomb – a riot of pillars, pagodas and dragons done in brightly-coloured tiles – by a lightning strike just the day before. The man picked up shards of shattered tile and shook his head. It was not the damage that concerned him, but what the damage meant. An ancestor had evidently expressed displeasure by sending down a thunderbolt, and he was trying to work out why.
While, for the Vietnamese, long-term memories stretch back for generations, short-term concerns barely touch on the most traumatic passage in the country’s history, the conflict known in the West as the Vietnam War in which millions of Vietnamese were killed. The war officially ended in 1975, before the majority of the population was born, but its legacy remains evident – from sites that have been “repurposed” as tourist attractions (the Cu Chi tunnels; the prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton” where American PoWs, the former US Republican Senator John McCain among them, were incarcerated) to the lingering suffering caused by the defoliant known as Agent Orange.
However, the people themselves display no apparent rancour towards the West in general or Americans in particular. Instead, they embrace the future as they turn Vietnam into one of the most dynamic economies in southeast Asia. This blending of the old and the new, the mysterious and the thoroughly modern, is what makes the country one of the most congenial destinations for overseas visitors.
One of my fondest memories is of catching the overnight train from Hanoi to Hue in a wooden sleeper carriage, having just that morning been kayaking in Halong Bay. The ambience was reassuringly old-fashioned but there was air-con that worked and the punctuality was a revelation for this veteran of Britain’s rail franchises and their somewhat elastic timetabling.
The train departed Hanoi’s railway station at 7.30pm and, 420 miles later, arrived on time, on the dot of 8.30am, in Hue. A breakfast of French pastries in town was followed by a drive out to view some of the Nguyen Dynasty mausoleums along the Perfume River – Tu Duc’s, in particular, is a positive pleasure dome of palace, lake and pavilions.
The next day, heading south, we drove up the Hai Van Pass, a coastal route that crosses at its high point an ancient dividing line of rival kingdoms. The views of Danang Bay and, inland, of the forested Truong Son mountains, are spectacular. Bristling on this summit are fortifications old and new, including a pillbox left over from the war. As I was taking some pictures and stretching my legs, I noticed a young couple preparing to climb this pillbox. They did so with a step ladder while dressed to the nines – she in a pink dress and a tiara, he in a suit. And once they were safely on the roof, they posed for wedding photographs against that dramatic scenery.
The scene summed up a country that has grown peace and prosperity from the ruins of war – finding new ways of moving forward while staying proudly rooted in its deep history and culture.
His family tomb was a riot of pillars, pagodas and dragons done in brightly coloured tiles