Introduction...

I had wanted to visit Vietnam for over twenty years. I had read a lot about the war, watched most of the “Vietnam war movies” like Apocalypse Now but, more importantly, remembered my mother’s almost legendary stories of an older French cousin who had lived near Hanoi during the French colonial period. Paulette Bossier’s father had been a soldier stationed in French Indochina during the early 1900s and when he left the service he brought his family over to live on a plantation. Paulette was brought up in Vietnam and had gone to Pharmacy school in Hanoi. She and her family left the country during the Japanese occupation during World War II, after her husband was killed. They temporarily lived with my mother’s family in Montreal. Later she moved to Morocco, opened a pharmacy, and stayed there up until the late 1990s. Laura and I were lucky enough to visit Paulette in Nice during our honeymoon in April, 2001.

Paulette did not speak much about her time in Vietnam – it was too painful, we imagine. She seemed intrigued that we would want to visit and did not discourage us from doing so.

Flash forward to the Spring of 2007: Laura and I had accumulated quite a bit of vacation days from our employers, and, more importantly, a lot of American Express rewards points. Laura did some investigating and found out that if we flew before and after the airline “blackout” dates in December and January we could fly for a great discount using these points. After consulting our respective bosses, we bought our tickets to fly into Bangkok (via Hong Kong) on December 13 and fly out from Hong Kong on January 11, 2008. This would give us 28 days to explore not only Vietnam but all of SE Asia (with Hong Kong thrown in for a few days since we would have to fly out from there anyway).

Since most of the computers in the internet cafes we used during our vacation were extremely slow we wrote quickly and uploaded only a few photos at a time. It was only after coming back to the U.S. that we added more text and photos. Unfortunately, this resulted in us not remembering incidents and events quite as they were. Looking over our tickets, receipts, maps, etc. brought back a lot of memories as well as viewing the over 1200 photos (!) Laura took and the 12 hours of video footage I shot.

Hopefully the text and photos of this book will give the reader an idea of the amazing trip we had.

Enjoy!

Charles

PS. Since most of this blog was done in transit (when we really didn't have much time to be on the computer) we are now in the process of adding/changing the text/photos here and there so if you enjoy this blog you might want to subscribe (see panel on right) for updates.