The Revolution
The first dawn of 2024 came on a quiet beach in Phuket, Thailand heralding the year ahead to be one of new experiences and fulfilment of long term plans. Of course life quickly got in the way of that romantic notion and by the end of March this lap of the sun was looking as shitty as the previous dozen. Mid year saw familiar cancellations of various events and nearing Spring just about everything was as far removed from those idealistic new year prophecies as they could be.
There’d been a long held desire to visit Vietnam and Cambodia but for various reasons it had never made the drawing board, however with little to loose and no-one to think about, a plan was quickly hatched, booked and paid for, and in only 4 weeks Fatpap was strutting down the aerobridge on route to Ho Chi Minh City. Travelling solo and away for nearly a month, the adventure would be therapeutically his but as you will learn good reader, it soon became far more than that.
Flying out of Sydney at a more than reasonable hour the trip up to Hanoi was uneventful save a slightly rushed connection through Ho Chi Minh City. Whilst in transit news spread of an impending storm bearing in on the northern regions carrying concern of flight delays and possible cancellations. It wasn’t until circling Hanoi at 15,000 feet did the full extend of the cell show itself with a massive bank of darkened skies frequently lit up with cracks of lightening and gusting winds. Safely on land and disembarked, it was the private transfer driver who advised that all flights after VN218 would be diverted elsewhere. So a lucky start to the holiday it could be said.
The majority of this trip would be as part of a tour undertaken by Intrepid Travel consisting of travelling 10 days through Vietnam in a southbound direction before connecting with a second 8 day leg through Cambodia ending in Bangkok, Thailand.
Best of Vietnam & Cambodia, Intrepid Travel
To most, Vietnam is the stereotyped Hollywood version clogging our VCRs back in the mid 90’s, however the country is ostensibly more diverse and the recent rise in tourism has shown the world what cultural, culinary, geographical and architectural character it holds.
Lying at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia with a land mass of 331,000 square kilometres, its population of 100 million makes Vietnam the world's fifteenth-most populous country. First inhabited in the Paleolithic age during the first millennium BC, it was under Chinese rule until its own dynasty emerged in 939. Successive monarchical dynasties ruled until 1883 before a surrender to France saw integration into French Indochina. During the Second World War Japan ceased the country as their own however in the immediate aftermath of its ending the nationalist coalition Viet Minh, led by the communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh launched the August Revolution and declared Vietnam's independence from the Japanese Empire in 1945.
The pesky French returned to reclaim colonial power in the First Indochina War from which Vietnam emerged victorious in 1954. As a result of treaties signed between the Viet Minh and France, Vietnam was separated into two parts and shortly after The Vietnam War erupted between the communist North, supported by the Soviet Union and China, and the anti-communist South, supported by the United States.
Upon the North Vietnamese victory in 1975 Vietnam reunified as a unitary socialist state under the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1976.