First published August 2024 | Words and photos by Vietnam Coracle

Tom Divers is the founder and creator of Vietnam Coracle. He’s lived, travelled and worked in Vietnam since 2005. Born in London, he travelled from an early age, visiting over 40 countries (he first visited Vietnam in 1999). Now, whenever he has the opportunity to make a trip, he rarely looks beyond Vietnam’s borders and his trusty motorbike, Stavros. Read more about Tom on the About Page, Vietnam Times and ASE Podcast.

In August, 1999, I visited Vietnam for the first time. I was 16 years old, travelling with my parents and our friend, Charlie. For my mum and I it was a holiday, but for my dad and Charlie it was a work trip during which they had to find locations to shoot photos for a calendar that would be published the following year. Charlie was the photographer, my dad was the art director. The hook for choosing Vietnam as the location for the calendar was that the next year (2000) would mark 25 years since the end of the ‘Vietnam War’. The calendar would present photos of Vietnam ‘today’, a generation after the war.

Now, it is 25 years since we took that trip to Vietnam. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but this was the beginning of a relationship with a country that has now been my home for almost half my life. So, to mark 25 years since I first visited Vietnam, I’ve written a recollection of that initial trip, based on the few memories that I and my parents can recall.

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VIETNAM IN 1999

Marking 25 Years Since I First Visited Vietnam Aged 16

The 1999 trip was a long time ago and, although the memories remain vivid, they are only fragments from a three-week-long journey that took place a quarter of a century ago. Back then, of course, we didn’t have smartphones, so the experience was not documented in the way that holidays are today. Therefore, I only have a handful of old photographs to go by, which I have supplemented in this article with recent photos I’ve taken of some of the locations as they appear today. Indeed, even the photographs that we shot for the calendar are difficult to find. I remember our itinerary clearly: We flew into Saigon, travelled overland to the Mekong Delta, basing ourselves in Bến Tre, then flew up to Hải Phòng, took the boat to Cát Bà Island and ended the journey in Hanoi. I also remember the soundtrack: the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Californication, which had just been released that summer and which I played on repeat throughout the long journeys by bus, boat and plane on my Sony Discman.

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CONTENTS:

Trip Map

Saigon→Mỹ Tho→Bến Tre

Hải Phòng→Cát Bà Island→Hanoi

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MAP:

Vietnam Trip August 1999

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Saigon→Mỹ Tho→Bến Tre

It was rainy season in Saigon. We arrived during the afternoon rush hour, our taxi parting a sea of students on bicycles as we negotiated the swells of two-wheeled traffic from Tân Sơn Nhất Airport to our hotel on Trần Hưng Đạo Street, District 1. Always visible through the car window, the sinister silver spire of the Saigon Trade Center, the tallest building in Vietnam and the city’s defining landmark, poked into the sky. Not long after we had checked-in, the skies opened and a heavy rain fell on the busy streets. As we watched the deluge from our balcony – trying to catch a breath in the heavy, humid air – we noticed that the dramatic change in weather conditions had no impact on the activities of the city below us: rush hour continued, outdoor business carried on as usual, food was hawked on the sidewalks; people simply put on a raincoat, opened an umbrella, pulled over a tarp and got on with it. Saigon was as live then as it is today, and perhaps always has been.

Family graves floated above the rice paddy – so green that each blade appeared to be charged with an electric current – as we watched the landscape shift indiscernibly from urban to industrial to rural through the windows of a minivan to Mỹ Tho, the first city in the Mekong Delta southwest of Saigon. There were no bridges across the main branches of the Mekong River back then, so all traffic bottlenecked at the banks of the muddy waterway, coming to a standstill while waiting for the car ferry to drift back with the current from the opposite bank. The journey from Saigon to Bến Tre felt long and arduous – it may even have taken us two days to get there – and this in turn made Bến Tre feel remote and inaccessible. Today, it’s a 90-minute bus ride from central Saigon.

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Our hotel overlooked Trúc Giang Lake, whose water was almost as green as the rice paddies. At night, we drew the nets over our beds and enjoyed the romance of sleeping beneath mosquito nets for the first time. Walking around Bến Tre Market the next morning, the density, variety and colour of produce was extraordinary, but we all struggled with the smell of the poultry section. This convinced me to become vegetarian for the second time in my life (the first time was between ages 10-12), which lasted for the next two years. On the riverfront, we met Liêm, a Vietnamese-Khmer man who lived with his family in one of the many wood-and-corrugated-iron huts over the water (they are all gone now, cleared to make way for Bến Tre’s riverside promenade). Liêm had a narrow motorized wooden canoe that he agreed to take us out on over the next few days while we scouted for good locations to shoot photographs for the calendar.

We spent hours on the waterways aboard Liêm’s boat: ploughing a course across the wide branches and sweeping meanders of the Mekong, shuttling down arrow-straight canals, and slinking through a network of narrow channels – the alleyways of the Delta – between tiny hamlets amongst dense groves of coconut palms, mangrove and nypa palm. The tight backwaters were the most interesting places, with thatched huts hidden in the foliage, each home connected to the next via a muddy stream down which children visited their friends by punting dugout canoes through the overgrown aquatic passages. On the stretches of open river, the noise and shuddering of Liêm’s motor-canoe was relentless and tiring – I couldn’t even hear the Chili Peppers tracks on my Discman above the engine. I remember seeing a wood-fired riverside crematorium with smoke billowing into the big Mekong sky and mingling with the monsoon rain clouds. When the clouds burst – which they did each afternoon – we helped Liêm to tie a tarp canopy over the boat and huddled beneath it while the rain poured above us and then passed on.

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Hải Phòng→Cát Bà Island→Hanoi

During the flight from Saigon to the north, whenever we looked out of the plane windows we saw mile after mile of long, white beach sliding into the sea. There appeared to be little or no development on them. It was apparent then that the country had huge potential for beach tourism. Indeed, today most of Vietnam’s tourism revenue comes from beach destinations, such as Đà Nẵng, Nha Trang, Quy Nhơn and Mũi Né.

In our hotel in Hải Phòng, rats scuttled across the lobby floor and into the restaurant’s kitchen. I don’t recall much about the food from our 1999 trip – I had not discovered my adventurous palate yet – but I do remember a dining experience in Hải Phòng on an evening when thunder rumbled constantly above the city, the streets were damp, and lightning leapt from cloud to cloud illuminating the night sky. The restaurant consisted of a series of private rooms off a corridor. Each room was assigned a waiter who came in and out via a sliding door. In between several power cuts when the restaurant went pitch-black, we flipped through the menu. It was the size of a small book and every page was laminated. All the items were in Vietnamese, but there was a black silhouette of an animal on each page indicating the main ingredient of the dishes listed. We turned from page to page, trying to identify the animal silhouettes in order to decode the menu – chicken, pig, cow, fish, rabbit, frog, sparrow, snake, crocodile, lizard, rat….. We decided to stop flipping before we discovered the full extent of the menu.

Mr. Bean played throughout the boat journey from Hải Phòng to Cát Bà Island. This was the first time I realized its universal appeal: slapstick comedy with a narrative that could be followed and understood around the world without the need for language or sub-titles. Cát Bà town featured a line of a dozen or so skinny, six-storey hotels along the harbourfront, each one vying for the best views of the bay, which was full of floating fish farms, wooden fishing vessels and woven sampans plying back and forth to the shore. It seemed as though most of Cát Bà’s population was out on the bay rather than on land. We hired a vehicle and drove into the steamy interior, where jungles coated the limestone hills and a throbbing chorus of frogs – deep, guttural and intense, almost to the point of sounding aggressive – filled the sultry air. Never having heard this tropical chorus before, we all assumed the noise belonged to a much larger animal, probably wild boar snouting around on the jungle floor.

As we had done in Bến Tre, we walked along the harbourfront and found ‘James’, a young Vietnamese man with a wooden boat which he agreed to take us out on, exploring the karst-studded seas surrounding Cát Bà Island, Lan Hạ Bay and Hạ Long Bay to look for places to shoot photos for the calendar. We spent a couple of days floating around the archipelagoes of limestone pillars, jumping off the boat for swims, eating picnic lunches on the deck, stopping off at floating fish and pearl farms, and making friends with primates on Monkey Island. The days were very hot so it was a relief to be on the boat with a breeze. At night, strong winds whistled between the tall hotel buildings on the seafront, sometimes reaching a scream. We stood on our balcony watching the lightning over the bay and then listening to the rain thud on the corrugated-iron rooftops through the night. A few days after we left, a typhoon blew through Cát Bà Island, causing much damage, especially to all those sampans clustered in the bay.

In Hanoi, if anything the heat and humidity were more intense than anywhere else we’d been in Vietnam. We tried to find relief at a rooftop bar, but it was no use: the city was in the grip of a late August heatwave. We left Hanoi on a Thai Airways flight to Bangkok. I returned to Vietnam in October, 2005, and have been living here ever since.

*Disclosure: I never receive payment for anything I write: my content is always free and independent. I’ve written this article because I want to: I remember this trip and I want my readers to know about it. For more details, see my Disclosure & Disclaimer statements and my About Page

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