My mental association with Vietnam started in School some 50 odd years ago. The geography of Indo- China was one of the topics for my School leaving exams. I learnt that Vietnam bordered Laos & Cambodia to the West and China to the North; that the French occupied it first and then the Americans: and that there was a war going on between South and North Vietnam. I could relate to the towns likes Da Nang, Hue, Hanoi, Haiphong, Bien Hoa and of course Saigon; all of which I could plot on a sketch of this area. I could also mark the course of the mighty Mekong River which I learnt provided a livelihood to millions on its course from China to the South China sea. The Mekong was also cited as an example of a delta as opposed to an estuary likes the Narmada and Tapti in India!

When I was in college in the early seventies I was exposed to a lot of American media, movies and music inspired by the Vietnam war – Photographs from the LIFE magazine portrayed an ugly face of the war while American movies mostly showed a happier side and then with the war over Vietnam seemed to have faded off the news and my mind. It came back again during my military tenure where The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was prescribed as compulsory reading for my promotion exams! There were military lessons to be drawn from the victory of an ill equipped primitive “guerilla army” over a well equipped modern military force;

Though many years went by my interest in Vietnam continued and I followed keenly any news of Vietnam in the media.The outstanding success of Vietnamese economy particularly when compared with that of India was a subject which I avidly followed. Later on I studied the dispute over the Paracel Islands in quite some detail. And in my private sector avatar as a Telecom Infrastructure provider I even studied the Vietnamese business climate especially the telecom sector looking for investment opportunities .

This autumn I was visiting my son in Hong Kong .This was my third visit to Hong Kong and there was no tourist angle to the trip. However some research of airline schedules and prices revealed that I could add one more Far East destination to my program without any major increase in the fare. As an aside this is particularly true on journeys between India and the Far East as opposed to Europe where the fare increase is substantial if you add on one more destination . And so with out any hesitation I jumped at the idea of Ho Chi Minh City as a stopover on my return journey.

How much to cover on this visit? As always It is a trade off between staying longer in one location versus hopping from place to place. My military colleagues very forcefully insisted that I must visit Dien Bien Phu. I had to disappoint them (and myself) as Dien Bien Phu was too far north in the mountains near Laos. This time Malati and I chose to spend all our time only in Ho Chi Minh City for a one week stay.As we drove from the airport to the Caravelle Hotel I was quite impressed with a well developed city with beautiful buildings of the past mingled with modernity of a prosperous city – Choosing the Right Hotel – Ho Chi Minh City. More about my trip in subsequent posts.