Saigon thought it could destroy me once but I don’t break that easily and now I’m back and I’m going to show Saigon who’s boss. If I was making a film of this trip I would have stepped off the train from Mui Ne, flung my backpack down onto the platform of Saigon station…
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You can’t look out at Ba Be Lake, watch it shimmer and glint in the distance, without wanting to get into it. So we arrange for a man with a boat to take us out for an hour not expecting much more than some fresh air and a glimpse of a few fish. The deafening…
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I’m on the patio of a stilt house in a tiny Tay minority village, close to the shore of Ba Be Lake in Bắc Kạn Province, Northeast Vietnam and this may be the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I’ve been sat here for a few minutes or maybe a few hours, you really can’t…
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Hanoi’s My Dinh Bus Station is not for the faint-hearted. According to the lady who worked at the bus station – who was only snappy with us because she worked in a bus station – the bus we needed to take, the once-a-day local minibus that would take us way up north to Ba Be National…
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At first, being in Hanoi during the Lunar New Year felt a bit like turning up to a party you weren’t invited to but later it felt like the party was being thrown only for you. Hand-written signs started to appear on the doors of cafes, bars, restaurants, museums and shops saying simply, ‘Closed for…
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In Hanoi we took the concept of slow travel to the extreme and ended up staying for three weeks. Once the first week or so in a new city is over you’ve usually exhausted your guide book and followed up on all the recommendations you collected before you arrived; time to go. But it’s only…
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Sitting cross-legged on a cushion, pretending my hips joints aren’t screaming for mercy, I write out postcards – simple prints of old propaganda posters – ready to post off to people I miss from home. I’m in a café called Cong Caphe and I realise as soon as I walk in that this place is…
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I loved Hanoi in all its noisy, congested glory and spent many hours wandering, deftly avoiding death by motorbike, on the streets of the Old Quarter, but after a while I felt like I could do with a bit of tranquility and a history lesson somewhere green. This led me to the Imperial Citadel of Thang…
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