The Boy and The Coconut Tree

I visited Vietnam in February 2011 and took a train from Saigon (HCMC) to Hue. The journey was 20 hours and I shared a berth with 3 locals. One of them was Dang Ngoc Hieu a 24 year old shopkeeper from Tuyen Quang. Only one person in the berth could speak English so using my phrase book and drawings, we chatted. For 20 hours I was overwhelmed by a sense of being the centre of attention in the most innocent way. This boy from Tuyen Quang had never met a foreigner; he lives in a small village, an 8 hour drive north of Hanoi, closer to China than Hanoi.  He asked for my phone number and in rough English asked me to visit Tuyen Quang province if I ever returned to Hanoi.  A totally innocent experience that felt like my first ever crush and so hard to put into words.  Our lives are very different.  And the coconut tree? Hieu was delivering it to his village from relatives in Saigon. He carried it almost 2000km by the time he reached his home in Thuong Lam village....

There are good sanctions, ok sanctions and then there is bloody mindedness. Take Cuba as an example. As most of you know, I’ve been to many countries including one that is communist and had a rather bad war with the USA that cost millions of lives (mainly local, Vietnamese civilians) and it is an easy place to get to and buy American goods and it is possible to use American owned websites to arrange that holiday. So this gets me to the subject of Cuba.   I was trying to help a friend book a trip to Cuba and as the local travel agent had quoted him a price of over E2000 for 8 days I suggested we hit the internet to find a better deal. Seems sensible, the internet was supposed to encourage competition. Wrong. Not when it comes to Cuba! First I went to   Kayak.com   – Cuba doesn’t exist in their databases, it has been wiped off the map. Next I went to   Expedia . com   (and I even tried the Spanish and British sites), again, Cuba doesn’t exist. ...

As soon as I settled in Hanoi I began to explore the area close to Hanoi and further afield. One of my first visits was to the Perfume Pagoda  a day trip from Hanoi.  I joined a group of 10 people on the coach, we were from Germany, Australia, Malaysia and Russia. Thankfully all of us had a grasp of English enough to talk in the coach and on the climb up to the pagoda in the mountain. The trip involves a boat ride along the river. The woman rowers are fierce. They are able to row and sell you crappy trinkets at the same time. One of them asked me to marry her. I had to decline, I cannot imagine me being a house husband in the  My Duc  District of Vietnam.  The pagoda and the mountain are wonderful, despite the huge tourist shops and hawkers at the bottom of the mountain.  The Pagoda and the mountain Part of the Pagoda complex The path up is not steep but hidden in the trees were chained monkeys, and quite aggressive they are too, I discov...

Waking up in Hanoi for the first time can be quite confusing. It is a noisy place and even in the middle of town you hear the call of the rooster at sunrise and trying to out-do the rooster are the government announcements, broadcast from loudspeakers hoisted up on lamp-posts. The messages tell the locals that they must keep the city clean etc though with my limited knowledge of Vietnamese, they sounded intimidating and something I am happy to say we do not have in England . I’ve lived in many cities around the world, 8 cities, 5 countries and Hanoi is the most foreign, the poorest and dirtiest and one of the most exciting places I’ve had the good fortune to reside in. The combination of noises, smells and sights cannot be replicated.  A cup of hot vietnamese coffee A typical day involved strong coffee drank on my balcony overlooking the centre of the city, the old quarter, known as Hoan Kiem. My apartment was on the 4th floor of a residential building full of local ...

I visited Vietnam in February 2011 and took a train from Saigon (HCMC) to Hue. The journey was 20 hours and I shared a berth with 3 locals. One of them was Dang Ngoc Hieu a 24 year old shopkeeper from Tuyen Quang. Only one person in the berth could speak English so using my phrase book and drawings, we chatted. For 20 hours I was overwhelmed by a sense of being the centre of attention in the most innocent way. This boy from Tuyen Quang had never met a foreigner; he lives in a small village, an 8 hour drive north of Hanoi, closer to China than Hanoi.  He asked for my phone number and in rough English asked me to visit Tuyen Quang province if I ever returned to Hanoi.  A totally innocent experience that felt like my first ever crush and so hard to put into words.  Our lives are very different.  And the coconut tree? Hieu was delivering it to his village from relatives in Saigon. He carried it almost 2000km by the time he reached his home in Thuong Lam village....