Vietnam 2017

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You have to go to Ha Long Bay. Its beautiful. Its UNESCO world-heritage listed. You’ll have to stay on a boat, and you have to hang out with Lindy and Poida.

Intrepid we are not - particularly - on this particular trip. We’re picked up from our sumptuous accomodation, the Sofitel Metropole de l'Opera, in a silly little bus thats doing the rounds of Hanoi, scooping up other non-intrepid travellers bound for the same destination.

Lindy and Poida from the Mornington Peninsula embark a few hotels after us. They’re typical grey-nomads; middle-aged, overweight, she’s ‘la-di-dah’ and he’s the wallet. They announce to the rest of the bus that they’re from Australia and set about roosting in their seats as we shuttle-off towards the ring-road.

The journey to Ha Long Bay passes countryside of rice paddies, water-buffalo, duck-resorts, Samsung factories, banh-mi stalls, plastic stool shops, motorbike spare-part shops, houses one room wide and six stories tall, the odd Louis XIV mansionette, dragon-shaped topiary, electricity towers, other types of towers with people perched atop doing maintenance boasting a complete absence of safety equipment and towns built around enormous smoke-stacks coughing out grey clouds. The road we’re on hosts every mode of transport you’d hope to see in South East Asia; trucks, cars, scooters, busses, busses and more busses, all defying-death, a parade of madness fanning out in every direction.

The four-hour trip is broken only by one stop at an outlandishly garish marble shop / souvenir warehouse / needlework sweatshop / toilet stop. We barrel through the tacky awfulness to the comestibles where we load up on all the ridiculous things you hanker for when held as a captive audience on a prison hulk; chips, gummy bears, pistachios and the like. Little did we know that the enterprising Vietnamese have a solution even for this…

Arriving at Ha Long, the bus continues onto a little island toward the busy port, where more oddities await the gawking tourist. There’s oddly juxtaposed structures in every phase of completion; hotels, resorts and private luxury houses. Operational hotels sit hard-up against shells with squatters inhabiting exposed, unfinished floors, tent-cities mushroom colourfully inside glazed structures adjacent deserted post-apocalyptic carnival rides, while over the road are Mediterranean-themed beer and wine bars touting for business.

We drive for quite a way through this schizophrenic built-environment before arriving at the port where the jostle begins in earnest. Escorted into the terminal, we’re reunited with our luggage before being herded towards the tender which will transport us onto our live-aboard Junk.

Lindy is peacock-strutting, expressing incredulity over how things are done, like the entitled white woman that she is. Our minder takes us to where the tenders are moored. Lindy spots one marked clearly with ‘Syrena 02’.

‘Thats it, thats ours!’ She declares.

Lindy knows-it-all. You can’t pull the wool over her eyes. Seasoned traveller is this one, with her patent Louis Vuitton handbag and her linen outfit. She’s been there and done that, and she wants you to know all about it. Peter, waddling about on his tree-stump legs, his role is to be told what to do.

So we’re on the tender, we’re moving out into the bay where the ships are at anchor. Lindy’s anticipating which one’s ours, she needs to be the first to spot it. Ship ahoy! There she is! Or it could be that one…

On board the Syrena, we’re invited up on deck for welcome drinks. Lindy wants an ice-cold beer: she’s informed us of this immediately after alighting from the bus.

After inspecting the balcony in our berth and squashing our luggage into stowage we head back upstairs for lunch. We’re shepherded to a table with an Aussie flag centrepiece where Lindy and Poida are already seated, getting stuck into a couple of cans of 333. Lindy is complaining about the beer not being cold enough.

‘I’ll have to have a word to them about the fridge.’

Lunch is average. Tom has something he’s identified as ‘fried fish’ which looks OK, but looks can be deceiving. I’ve decided to limit my diet to fruit for the foreseeable future.

Lindy is falling over herself telling us about herself. They love food. They’ve been to Laos. They fed the monks. She cooks asian food. They loooove asian food. They used to live in Richmond and she used to shop on Victoria St but now they live on the Mornington and she shops in Springvale which is even better. All their friends are going to Vietnam.

‘I was going to get my shots…’

‘What shots,’ I’m thinking ‘botox?’

‘..and the girl who gave them to me said: “I’ve got to get mine. I’m going in a couple of weeks.”’

‘We’ve been to Bali a number of times’

(Of course you have)

‘I’m a sun-lover.’

(Of course you are)

Lindy’s relentlessness is broken by the afternoon cave tour, after which there’s time to relax. Tom takes a nap and I head up on deck for Happy Hour: two-for-one 007 Martinis. The list says they’re ‘dry’ but they’re made using Rosso Antico, a sweet vermouth. They come garnished with three green pimentos olives, a most peculiar melange of sweet and salty.

I’m on the rear deck, its peaceful and the afternoon is sublime. Still hot, the waters are calm, the islands dramatic and the clouds hold the promise of thunderstorms, all three in perfect tension as the day fades and the boats around us set ablaze with electric lights, hundreds of floating lanterns.

I’m on my third martini when Tom emerges. On the upper deck there’s a rice paper-rolling class, but it would be criminal to waste this unparalleled evening on anything other than enjoying it. The sun setting behind dark voluminous clouds is directly lifted from a Michaelangelo painting. Had he accompanied Marco Polo on his voyage East and seen this landscape, the superlative artist would have struggled to further dramatise this semi-submerged dragon’s lair. Martinis aside, I’m high with happiness at beholding this place, its quietly my favourite moment of the three days that we spent onboard the Syrena at Ha Long Bay.

All this perfection is about to draw to an abrupt close once we sit down to dinner with Lindy and Poida, our little Aussie flag on the table betraying things about us that we’d rather not declare.

But Tom’s devised a plan. Earlier in the day we noticed Lindy bonding with the Saffa couple from the bus, so Tom goes and asks whether they’d like to dine with our Australian friends rather than sitting on their own.

Tom pulls-off the old swticharoo, the Aussie flag is lowered, the waitresses are a bit confused but the buddha-bartender mixing our 007 Martinis gives us a wink and a sly smile. We got to enjoy dinner by ourselves and a bit of peace and quiet, before popping some night time Mersyndal and falling into bed.

Then at some ungodly hour the storm broke. It was the loudest thunderstorm I've ever heard in my life. In fact I’m reasonably certain it was in the room with us. Or maybe that was the MSG our bodies were processing. Either way, next morning we were both zombies and unable to snap out of it, to the point that we capitulated to breakfast with Lindy and Poida, suffered through her passive-aggressive whining, how they know everything about boats because they’re ‘boating-types’, how the tea was awful, blah blah blah.

Post-breakfast, we’re shunted onto the tender at 8am where we’re transferred onto a day boat at Ti-Top island on which we’ll spend the rest of the day. Due to heavy rain, we didn’t leave Ti-Top until 10am. It was excruciating, and would have been more so had we not been slipping in and out of consciousness due to boredom, sleepiness and MSG poisoning.

There were plenty of Aussies and Limeys on board. One particularly annoying fellow - an Englishman - was droning on and on.

‘My legs are very strong. I can move surprisingly fast for a big guy. I train every year before I go away. Its the product of sitting behind a computer for 17-hours a day. When I start training, I lose about 15kg, its incredible! I’m an architect…’

And as if on cue, the Aussies have to chime-in. Aussies are desperate to put their two-cent’s in, and its done in a forced laid-back manner. Its a pointless, banal story-telling competition.

‘Back in Australia….’ Precedes a series of tired, predictable tales about crocodiles, spiders and poisonous snakes… Its what we used to dislike Americans for; boasting about your country of origin as though its the greatest thing in the whole wide world.

‘They breed ‘em tough in Australia!’

We’re walking out of a huge cave complex on one of the karstic limestone islands. I hear Lindy behind me, talking to one of the guides.

‘Excuse me, you said something too fast for me, I did not understand.’

I had to get away from the parochialism. I start running down the slippery stairs as safely as possible. In front of me, Tom has stopped at a vine hanging down in the middle of the path. His guide has remarked on the size of Tom’s feet, and Tom starts doing high-kicks - in thongs - to show off his sizeable clod-hoppers.

‘THEY BREED ‘EM TOUGH IN AUSTRALIA!’

I hear Lindy insisting behind me, as I see Tom tip backwards, a thonged-foot sliding up and out from under him. The guide grabs his arm and saves him from landing squarely, ludicrously and painfully onto his coccyx.

The day boat from Ti-Top island involves a great deal of stuffing about, as theres a few groups of people off various different boats all being ferried around to different activities. The backpackers go off to do a cave tour with monkeys. Monkeys? We weren’t offered monkeys with our cave tour. Apparently you pay peanuts, you don’t get monkeys.

After dropping the monkey-cave group off, we go to pick up the kayaks. Its bucketing down with rain. We’re told to change into our bathers and to make sure we have dry clothes to change into. We return to pick up the monkey-cave group, who are now cling-wrapped in flimsy ponchos. They’re drenched through and look thoroughly miserable.

Mercifully the rain had eased by this stage. We’re faced with fine misty rain and it wasn’t at all cold. Tom and I, sharing a kayak, were first cab off the rank, and we broke away from the mothership with a surprising burst of speed. It was delightful to be away from everybody finally after a morning of ‘get up, do this, do that, get in the tender, move into the dayboat’ etc. We were free to explore the caves and karst islands, just don’t go out into the shipping lane.

We paddled around for an hour before our numb arses courtesy of rudimentary kayak seating proved too much, and we headed back to the mothership for lunch, which was rather delicious and better than anything we had on the Syrena; whole sea bass and 333’s.

With deep relief we retire for the day and over a few 007’s we discuss how to avoid the Lindy and Poida final night extravaganza. The Saffas appear to be gone and there’s a whole heap of new people on board; a Dutch fellow and his wife and daughter, an Irish couple and of course, heaps of Italians.

 Tom goes to order more Martinis and calls me inside. The jolly buddha-bartender has gone to the trouble of setting us a table for two on the opposite side of the room to Lindy and Poida. Anticipating the needs of the guest: a true hospitality professional.

Dinner is terrible, but we get drunk so its tolerable.

Afterwards we get comfortable on bean-bags to watch Top-Gear Vietnam whilst drinking more 333's with the Irish travellers, before heading off to bed, happy knowing that we’re checking out of the Good Ship Lollipop in the morning.

We’ve arrived at the uber-luxe chapter in our travels to Vietnam: two nights at the Banyan Tree Resort Lang Co. As with everything else on the trip so far, its not what we were expecting. Travelling by car 60km North of Da Nang, we come to a checkpoint manned by uniformed guards. The resort, located remotely, appears to be a gated community. Having been enticed to this country largely on the reputation of its street-food, I find myself mildly disappointed, aware that the resort will have us confined in a make-believe world of golf-buggies, immaculate landscaping and air-conditioned comfort. I won’t be having another Banh Mi for around 36-hours.

Our driver is permitted through the check-point gate and directed to reception, the short trip revealing that Banyan Tree is only one component in the 280 ha Laguna Lang Co integrated resort, which includes the 229-suite Angsana hotel and an 18-hole golf course. I’ve never stayed in such a place and the foreign-ness of the experience has me anxious. I’m thinking ‘captive audience’ and ‘cruise-ship’ in equal measures. Nothing I read about this place, either in travel articles or on the booking website, indicated the nature of the facility, but I will confess that the booking was performed with a great deal of excitement and a glass of wine in hand.

We’re greeted at reception by Son. At this moment something magical happens. Perhaps Son is the Vietnamese Glinda, Good Witch of the South, but its as though all our concerns no longer exist, or at the very least are frozen in time for us to return to later. Son magics us to our lagoon-villa, via golf-buggy, where she performs her check-in ritual which includes refreshing herbal tea and two fresh lotus flowers. She coyly asks if we are honeymooning. Its a fair question, given that we’ve booked a very romantic private suite. Witch or not, she isn’t to know that my best friend Thomas is gay. Tom fields her question; ‘Its our pre-honeymoon.’ She giggles, but I’m not sure that she understands.

Formalities aside, Son vanishes into thick air. Under a lazily-rotating fan, reclined on a deep, plush day-bed under our covered porch, we see before us a foreground of decking on which sit two expectant poolside recliners under a huge free-standing umbrella. Beyond the deck, our own private infinity lap-pool, which appears to spill over into a natural jungle lagoon in which fish can be seen swimming and ducks paddling. This ataractic scene is framed by the Truong Son mountain range, resplendent in thick jungle foliage, swaying languid in hot, humid air. The intensity of what’s before and around us is overwhelming; greens are acid, the sky tangential, the heat oppressive and the air-conditioning arctic. I turn behind to the interior of the Villa; Tom is standing in front of the mini-bar, popping a half-bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The Villa is dominated by an enormous expanse of bed, pristine and cloud-like, dotted with fresh yellow flowers. Its a stage, the backdrop a huge lacquer painting of a lotus flower, which conceals the wonderfully well-appointed bathroom; rain-head shower, free-standing ovoid bathtub, walk-in robes and two-person dressing table.

Initial reservations about the accomodation have been dispensed with, thanks to comprehensive professionalism, thoroughness, thoughtfulness…and the Champagne. Excitement takes over as we consider the extensive activities program available to us over the coming days. Suddenly we’ve signed-up for a number of things to-do, our chilled-out resort stay has turned rather hectic, and in our heightened state we head-off for a late lunch of ‘Caviar and Prosecco’ at Azure restaurant, which consists of a tower of seafood topped by blini, a tin of Oscietra caviar and a tiny pearl serving-spoon. Lunch over, we retire to the Villa with a 6-pack of Biere La Rue for a swim, before heading to Watergrill restaurant for dinner, where cocktails are consumed and food is fabulous. Another 6-pack accompanies us home for an enchanted after-dinner swim under a starry sky, then all the beers in the mini-bar magically disappear at some indeterminate time before bed.

The alarm goes off at 7am. Cruelly, I find myself in the most comfortable cot in the entire world, and I have to get up because of something I signed-up for in a fit of euphoria. I’m not sure that Thomas is even still alive. What have we done? The introduction to a familiar song starts pumping out of the Villa’s bluetooth stereo; Cher commences wailing ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’.

We are up and scrambling to get ready for the day’s first appointment. In a blur, we arrive at the hotel lobby and bundle into a Toyota Land Cruiser with a female member of staff and another volunteer - 16 year-old Korean girl named Rachel. We stop again at Check-point Charlie, where we pick up another woman, who introduces herself as Linda from CSR - Laguna Co’s Centre for Social Responsibility. Its all too much for Tom and I; we’re both wishing we were dead. The Land Cruiser heads off into the hinter-landscape and we drive for about half an hour, before turning off the main road. Crossing a railway line, Linda points out the local church. Dated 1897, its a peculiar squat, pink building with a spire - the only feature that defines it as a place of worship. Anyway, its clear that we have come to a village, and before long we arrive at the local school.

‘The children are currently on their Summer Holiday, but they make the time each day to return to school to attend our English Language Program. Its helpful for them to have English-speaking people come and assist teaching the program, because they get used to hearing many different accents from people all over the world. We also bring them to the hotel and teach them how to swim in the hotel pool.’ Explains Linda helpfully, before we leave the air-conditioned luxury of the Land Cruiser. In a moment, we’re standing in the school grounds and the two women who run the program are being mobbed by small children. Rachel, Thomas and I stand watching, bemused and bewildered.

The two women direct everybody into the classroom where introductions are held. Classrooms are rudimentary concrete cubes with openings for windows and doors. There’s an open corridor running the length of the single-story building at the front; this provides shelter. A couple of wall-mounted fans provide climate-control. The furniture consists of old-school school-desks, the teacher stands on a raised platform before a chalk-board. Conditions are challenging for two white kids with hangovers.

We head outside to play a game. In teams, one child mimes the behaviour of an animal, and their colleagues shout out the animal’s name in English. We attempt to play the same game with musical instruments, but the children’s knowledge in this department is limited. The animal game was wildly successful, the musical game lost us. The heat is merciless and I note with dismay that my t-shirt is drenched with perspiration; I’m guessing that I can wring pure alcohol out of it. From the get-go, the girls have been boisterous, loud and confident, while the boys appear more reserved, with the exception of one gawky, skinny young fellow wearing a baseball cap, who seems to be cautiously emerging from the shadow of shyness and has bonded with Tom.

Mercifully, the program leaders decide to head back into the refuge of the classroom interior. The boys voluntarily sit to one side of the room, the girls on the other. We continue with charades, only this time Tom and I take the stage and the children call out our actions in English; making the bed, combing your hair, riding a bike, watching TV. Tom is very good at this game and doesn’t resist the opportunity to drop a queer reference; putting on makeup. The kids, like Son, might not know what to make of this tall, peculiar young Leonardo Di Caprio-lookalike, but its clear they think he’s funny. We wrap the game up and we’re completely spent. Tom is white. He excuses himself and asks Linda where the toilets are. She explains, adding by way of apology ‘They’re not 5-star facilities’. I can see Tom thinking ‘What I’m about to do is not 5-star’.

The kids and the exercises have done well so far in keeping our minds off our personal misery, but suddenly I’m panicking internally that I too will end up in that dreadfully familiar position. I’m sitting up in the back-row on the girl’s side of the room, when Linda approaches and asks me to prepare a short presentation about Australia. Tom returns, whiter than his t-shirt, and joins me. Tom’s little Vietnamese friend, sitting on the other side of the room, has missed him during his short absence. Young-mate now proceeds, via non-verbal communication, to reconnect. He turns his baseball cap backwards and starts throwing out gangsta signs. He makes a revolver from his ruler and pulls a tough-guy stance. His mates try to jostle in on the action, there’s a ripple of attention on the other side of the room. Bizarre and amusing, it occurs to me that perhaps these little guys have no strong male role-models in the context of the classroom, and the mere presence of Tom is enough to bring them out of their shells. The girls dominate this group, indeed it feels like there are twice as many, but when I do a head count I discover there are only two more girls than boys.

Tom and I give our presentation on Australia, then Rachel gives one about Korea, but we’re all flagging; the energy just isn’t there anymore. Its a big ask to concentrate in a hot classroom for 90 minutes and the kids have done really well - better than us in fact. Class is over and we head outside for group photos. The kids have bonded with us; they want to hold our hands, and walk together with arms around waists. Tom lifts up his little monkey who is giggling wildly. We stop on the school steps for the photos and hold our fingers in a gesture symbolising ‘Its hot!’, then another gesture symbolising I-don’t-know-what. The kids disperse, parents are showing up on scooter and on foot to collect them. One young boy - all of about 7 - is riding around the school grounds on his own motocross bike, others are walking home with grandparents. We greet them with a final show of personal restraint, before gratefully scrambling back into the creature-comforts of the Land Cruiser.

Arriving back at base-camp emotional, its an effort to be polite. We were hanging on by a thread with only the thought of our Villa room and a replenished mini-bar to keep us alive. The ordeal of making it back to our haven was impeded by the confounding door-lock mechanism on the Villa. Tom was so overcome that he jumped fully-clothed into the pool while I wrangled the lock. After peeling off our revoltingly saturated clothes, we were finally supine, enveloped by the cloud. Tom mumbles, ‘Can you cancel waterskiing?’

A couple of hours in the refrigerated Villa was all that was needed to return our core temperatures to normal, at which point we spent the afternoon playing at being James Bond; we water-skied, we jet-skied, then we turned up for drinks with our hosts in cocktail attire. The hotel was hosting management-night, where guests have the opportunity to meet and greet hotel management staff. We meet the fascinating, erudite and well-travelled Hicham Najdi, hotel manager of Angsana, who gives us insight and perspective on the Laguna Resorts Company, as well as his personal views on living and working in Vietnam. Given the shared background in hospitality, its pleasing to connect on a professional level, as well as compare some of the more absurd stories unique to the industry.

We excuse ourselves of Mr Najdi’s company and head off to dinner at Banyan Tree’s signature restaurant Saffron, perched high up in the hills overlooking the East Vietnam Sea. Despite the exquisite beauty in presentation, service, detail and delicacy of food, despite the particularly memorable hand-washing ritual before commencing the meal, the individually hand-painted betel leaf name cards and the most beautiful cocktails, Tom and I are deliriously tired and only bed could satisfy our exhaustion.

The following morning is our day of departure. We are greeted at breakfast by the same loveliness present in all staff at every level during our stay, indefatigable and apparently genuine. I say to Tom: ‘They seem actually happy to see us. Remember how we used to feel working breakfasts? I hated everyone.’

Tom: ‘Thats because we’re so privileged at home. These people are happy to have jobs. They’re genuinely happy to be in a nice environment, in air-conditioning. If they weren’t here doing this, or they didn’t want to be here, someone could easily say to them; “Here’s your piece of cardboard and your fake Ray-Bans, get out on the street and start selling”’.

There’s a brutal truth in his statement. With this in mind, its been quite the experience to have an unexpected dose of social realism served as part of your luxury accomodation. Laguna Resorts policy of social responsibility includes sourcing ingredients and raw material from local market gardens, which can be visited on bike from the resort, and also in providing hospitality training in all areas of business operations - kitchen, front-of-house and management - to young people from local communities, providing them with options not otherwise open to them. From a guest’s perspective, this directive is not front-and-centre, which gives the guest the opportunity to choose to engage, or not, as they wish. Irrespective of guests engagement, the company recognises the importance of local communities, and admirably it seeks to give back to them, as they acknowledge that this approach makes good business sense. Personally speaking, it was a good feeling to get involved, and discovering that ‘social responsibility’ exists as a concept greater than choosing not to wash your hotel towels daily, and that ethical travel can and should be a consideration, is a positive concept indeed.