ADVENTURE CRUISING


Gary Buchanan gets the full flavour of the Orient in the company of Orion Expedition Cruises


Voyage to Vietnam


V


ietnam, the current en vogue destination in the Orient, has fascinated travellers for centuries. Writers from Somerset


Maugham to Graham Greene have tried to capture in words the embarrassment of bewildering beauty that imbues this sequestered strip of land squeezed between mountains and sea. Others have tried to describe it, only to discover the serene landscapes and sensory encounters damage their faith in the adaptability of language. The long flight east was an ideal opportunity to get immersed in Graham Greene’s ‘The Quiet American’ that draws on his experiences as a war correspondent in French Indochina. This story of a fumbling American idealist in cold-war Vietnam eerily prophesies the coming conflagration. His descriptions of the natural tableaux


are as vivid as his sparkling portraits of village folk. As I was to discover during my 10-day sojourn, there’s more than a whiff of determined optimism in the air as this country climbs on board the rapacious tiger of modern tourism.


In a world rapidly becoming homogenised through the proliferation of luxury hotels, mass tourism and satellite communications, fewer and fewer unsimulated adventures remain. Tourism at its best is a kind of rendezvous with your own imagination. The experience of an intoxicating country like Vietnam ultimately depends as much on the creative powers of the visitor as it does on a well-planned itinerary. For a company whose mantra is sailing


‘A Path Less Travelled,’ Orion Expedition Cruises doesn’t short-change on the experience. Their ‘Vietnam Explorer’ cruises aboard Orion II are designed for travellers who seek intellectual and physical stimulation along less-travelled sea lanes. Vietnam is no longer the hermetic nation of a generation ago. Thanks to Orion’s creative schedules, I was able to have close encounters with dissonant Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as well as 900 miles of this slender, elongated country’s eastern coastline along the South China Sea – an ineffable land teetering


Spring 2012 I WORLD OF CRUISING


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