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It’s eight a.m. and our car is winding it’s way uphill through a cold, grey drizzle. In the damp of the morning, we’ve passed silently through a strange landscape that shifts unexpectedly from the impossible green of the coffee plantations, to the deep, terracotta orange of the soil that provides the raw material for the
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The arrival of the train from Saigon seems to have brought the small white station in Hoi An to life. In the bright glare of the morning sunshine, everything is a messy blur of chatter and business as people disembark in one confused mass of bags, boxes and bodies. Everyone seems to know where they
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Is there anything better than waiting to take a train in a new and unfamiliar land? There’s a distinct buzz about it that doesn’t come with air travel. Airplanes take us from A to B. They suck us up in one place and spit us out in another. Any sense of having moved across continents
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Guerrilla. Spanish for little war. A strange word. After all can war ever be a “diminutive” thing? Here in the Cu Chi Tunnels, the idea that war, as it is practiced by the outgunned and outnumbered, can ever be anything less than a determined, coordinated and concerted effort, certainly seems ridiculous and improbable. “Little war”
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The guide from the Sinh Balo tour operator is waiting at the reception desk and I am still not ready. I want to linger over breakfast and coffee. But this trip is a short one so there’s no time for relaxing, there are places to go, people to see. Over breakfast I had looked down
