This may sound like a far-flung and generally unattainable destination to my American readers, but when you live in Australia, it's only an eight-hour flight -- and it's only that long because I'm coming from the southeast part of the country.
A few years ago, around the start of the pandemic, my wife took advantage of a deal designed to capture our future -- and really unattainable at that time -- travel impulses. It was at this resort in Vietnam, and it only needed to be used within two years.
The way it turned out, we couldn't use it within two years, and thought at first that we would lose it entirely, which would have sucked. In the end, we got the amount we had already paid as a credit and just had to pay a little bit more to have the same trip.
So now we're doing it, and will be gone for the next ten days. We'll start with two nights in Ho Chi Minh City -- once known as Saigon -- before pampering ourselves at the resort the rest of the time.
Outside it being a tourist destination, or so I have read, Vietnam holds two specific meanings for me:
1) My dad did two tours in the Vietnam War. Fortunately for me, he was never close to any action. He worked in a weapons depot and the most dangerous thing that happened to him, if memory serves, was an explosion about a mile away from where he was stationed. He was smart to enlist rather than waiting to be drafted, and since he was an MIT grad, he was given a job befitting someone of his intelligence.
2) Most of the war movies I've seen are set in Vietnam.
Now, at this point, I may have seen more World War II movies than movies about the Vietnam War, and those movies would not have been set in Vietnam. (Was there even fighting in Vietnam in World War II? I doubt it.)
But before I'd seen as many war movies as I've seen today, the advantage was definitely in favor of Vietnam movies. American filmmakers were really grappling with the after effects of that war in the late 1970s, through the 1980s and into the 1990s, with movies like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam, Casualties of War, and Oliver Stone's trio of Vietnam movies: Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth.
There have continued to be a steady stream of them since this heyday, and Wikipedia lists a total of 76 movies about the Vietnam War, including movies produced in other countries. The first listed in that group is Marshall Thompson's A Yank in Viet-Nam in 1964, the last Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods from 2020.
I've only seen 13 of those films, so not the overwhelming quantity I might have suggested. Of course, that's plenty enough to give me an idea of what I might see over the next ten days in terms of flora ... without quite as many bodies riddled with machine gun bullets or blown apart by landmines.
In fact, I'm told the Vietnamese are very kind to Americans, and not openly resentful about the war, though of course there would be lingering bitterness on some level.
Anyway, it's the first big trip we've taken since the pandemic that didn't involve family obligations, and I can hardly believe it's about to happen.
I'll certainly watch plenty of movies and may write some blog posts. We'll just have to see if I can really set aside my routines for a week ... which is the true measure of the sort of relaxing holiday I want to have.
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