The edge of the world is an acceptably hyperbolic description of Halong Bay, a surreal seascape of conical limestone islets and dreamy emerald waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. It is one of Vietnam's biggest tourist attractions, pulling in many thousands of overseas visitors each year – I'm talking pre-Covid
times, obviously – on package deals from Hanoi.
To escape the crowds, I had booked a boat that sailed off the beaten track among the Bai Tu Long islands, to the east of the most popular parts of Halong Bay. After a visit to a cave and a swim, I decided to take a kayak out to circle one of the cone islets. One of the crew, a young guy called Duong, came along with me.
No other boats were in sight and, as we paddled along, it felt as if we had the entire South China Sea to ourselves. "Hey Mister Nigel!" – Duong had laid his paddle across the kayak and wanted to talk. He proceeded to quiz me on my marital status, my parents and the details of any siblings and children I might have – all done with such charming guilelessness that I was not in the least offended, even though I was startled by the personal nature of the questions.
This encounter, set amid such beautiful surroundings, summed up the charisma of a country that manages to be both thrillingly strange and immediately approachable. It also provided real insight into Vietnamese culture, which is rooted firmly in family and forebears. On another trip to Vietnam, this obsession with family and ancestry took me to another extraordinary place, this time one barely visited by tourists.
We were a few miles south of the former imperial city of Hue when my guide twisted round in the front passenger seat of the car and asked if I wanted to see the City of Ghosts. When I looked puzzled – I had not heard of the place, and it did not feature in guidebooks – he talked about the importance of ancestor worship in the lives of Vietnamese families and explained that the cemetery known as the City of Ghosts was where this idea reached its most extreme expression.
Our visit, which involved a detour to the coastal plain between Hue and Danang, took us into a bizarre nether world. The City of Ghosts was a sprawling necropolis of extravagantly decorated mausoleums that seemed to get more and more outrageous the further we ventured into it. Costing far more than many houses for the living, these tomb-houses were paid for largely by the Viet Kieu – the Vietnamese diaspora, many of whom were the "boat people" of the 1970s and 1980s who fled Vietnam in leaky boats from this very place, or the white sand beaches behind it.
