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Tanned beaches lazing like long sun-bathed legs, Mercedes limos for airport
fetches, luxurious love nests, notorious Tiger Cages and a prisoner cemetery,
Vietnam makes you philosophise over the co-existence of deviance and
paradisal exotica, discovers Devanshi Mody
VIETNAM’s
NewVeneer
SCAPEStravel
H
CMC (Ho Chi Minh City) officially, Saigon
to most, still. The city streaming with
manic motorbikes and multicoloured
helmets bobbing like buoys on a charging
ocean is a pulsation of garish colours,
blaring sounds, and potent odours that can fluctuate
from fragrant pervasions in luxury malls contouring the
historic opera to pungent emanations from soup kitchens
cluttering pavements around Saigon Market. HCMC –
orientally-alluring/Frenchly-demure/wannabe-Bangkok – is
sometimes like a bad cocktail with too many ingredients
muddled the wrong way (not that one ever drinks cocktails,
Cristal Rosé is more sensible by far). But bad cocktails
make for giddy highs, feel thronging tourists and expats
and Chinese businessmen whose bulging wallets get
bleached into high-end designer boutiques….
Though HCMC has hastened, time lolls in the
magnificent French architecture, quaint, quiet streets and
striated history of Hanoi. Between heaving HCMC and the
colonial romance of the capital slither conterminous blue
and white snakes of sea and sand patterned with spruce
new resorts that have lately made of Vietnam an en-vogue,
elite beach destination.
Some Americans still resist Vietnam – they think the
war rages on. And yet, few visitors today would suspect
the luxuriously evolved destination was war-ravaged,
brutalised by a long and especially cruel colonialism. The
Vietnamese, in fervid impatience to erase the past and
lure tourists, are coating bullet-pocked, blood-splashed
walls with posh veneer. Tourists mustn’t suspect that the
Vietnamese have endured, that Vietnam is a ‘third world
country’, I’m often told.
The ‘Third-World’ doesn’t stretch Mercedes limos
for airport fetches as does Sofitel Saigon Plaza. Le
chauffeur presents the music menu. I request ‘classical’.
Madonna vociferates…. Vietnam seems in such accelerated
modernisation mode that ’80s music classifies as ‘classical’.
Vestigial French frivolity lingers, though, in the hotel’s
Boudoir Lounge where the scandalously all-pink teatime
Pink Afternoon Affair unfurls with extravagances befitting
Marie Antoinette. Rose-lipped raspberry éclairs beckon
cooingly, nubile strawberry pâtisseries mince, voluptuous
marshmallows wink, “Pink me up, please.”
Forget Halong Bay frequented by tourists whose
proportions approach those of the immense rock
formations. Find Vietnam’s naughtiest love-nests, instead….
Luxury idyll on Vietnam’s most astoundingly beautiful
island Con Dao. The naturally beautiful require few
adornments: bare minimalism accentuates the Six Senses
Con Dao resort’s natural assets. Tanned beaches laze
like long sun-bathed legs by varnished waters. Dressed
only are hills in veloured verdure cascading towards
Six Senses Con Dao Anantara Hoi An Intercontinental Danang Sun Peninsula
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the resort like emerald mantles. Sublime setting but it’s
from the sublime to the ridiculous when at breakfast I
hear an American mother bellow at her boy, “Put that
muffin down now! You’ve already had a doughnut.” If
only holidaying Indian parents were as severe, our brats
wouldn’t resemble orangutans. Con Dao is better known
as Brangelina’s Vietnamese hideaway than for its historic
significance as the site of French and American prisons,
notably the notorious Tiger Cages that exterminated
20,000 Vietnamese prisoners (at least). I’m oblivious
to these atrocities, enveloped in tranquillity that feels
unimpregnable. Until Nature decides to throw a tantrum.
Then, sheets of sand come at you like a flying carpet,
greedy tongues of water lick the beach with increasing
virility until in an act of uninhibited voracity the ocean
devours the sand, seemingly swallows up your private
pool (the one costing you $1500/night...) and lunges onto
your villa’s white-clad bed waiting like a virgin. Captivated
by wild nature, I replace pre-arranged Prison Tours
with a nature walk. But my butler Phi Anh persists: any
visitor to Con Dao must know of its horrifying history.
Discovering the notorious Tiger Cages and prisoner
cemetery where lotus ponds shimmer in the rain evoking
a Monet painting, leaves those of us who aren’t American
tourists (they traipse through sites of unspeakable tortures
as if in Disneyland) philosophising over the existence
of perversion in paradisal exotica. Almost a jarring
exemplification of the parabolic Garden of Eden with its
concomitant Evil.
Celebrity designer Bill Bensley declared, “I can
make something that pleases everyone. But I’d rather
make a statement.” He makes one worth a stupendous
$200 million. Bensley’s Harvard mind flaunts in searing
decorative wit and soaring fancy. Russians whizz in for
Michelin-starred French Chef Michel Roux’s $120/head
Chef’s Table at La Maison 1888 whose private dining
spaces Bensley turns into bedrooms for the ‘house’s’ three
children. ‘Voyager’ son’s ‘room’ explores the travel theme,
‘accountant’ son’s room is accountably designed. Their
sister’s room is a ravishingly red boudoir with bustiers,
and an antique bed from which mademoiselle’s bare
(mannequin) legs dangle impudently. The Intercontinental
Danang Sun Peninsula resort is about destination spa
and drama. There’s fairytale too. The 37-year-old French
GM Arnaud is Prince Charmant. But clowning staff surely
belong in a circus and not a fairytale?
Where the groomed and the gorgeous go are to Nam
Hai’s villas in dark wood and stark white that have free-
flow platforms bearing the tub by a daybed seeping into
a ‘desk’ appended to the bed that descends into the
‘living room’. By the bed sits a TV. Superfluous when a live
typhoon unleashes outside: palm trees swirl their helpless
arms like windmill blades gone wild, swinging, swaying,
swooning, thrashing irrationally at the grass. Galloping
waves charge towards the beach like concatenated white
steeds as howling winds drown the humble hissing of
battered plants. A live spectacle is the least one can
expect at exclusive abodes nowadays. Missing only are
the sound effects. Alas, stormed-out young F&B Manager
Dominic can’t furnish Wagner’s sombre Tristan and Isolde,
or Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain.
Heritage, iconic, perhaps Vietnam’s grandest address
is Sofitel Legend Metropole. Resident of the opulent
Opera quarter with its haute-luxe boutiques; receptor of
royals (just recently Britain’s Prince Andrew), film stars,
literary figures and ambassadors galore; receiver of ever
multiplying awards. A staff member reveals, “When I joined
four months back, we’d won 18 awards this year. Now we
have 30!” Naturellement, when your airport transfer is a
BMW stocking can-rival-Ladurée macarons. And you’ve a
can-surpass-the-Ritz concierge and can-scorn-Claridges
suites, erstwhile receptacles of Somerset Maugham,
Graham Greene and Charlie Chaplin in the heritage wing.
Mine’s a glamorised newer suite, full of finery and finesse,
marbled bathrooms with ornate stand-alone tubs and
Hermès toiletries.
I’m on a boat, on a bay cloaked in night, cruising to the
rustic retreat whose laze on the rolling rocks makes it seem
embedded on a slumbering dragon (of the Scottish rather
than Vietnamese variety), its flickering lights like gleaming
dragon’s scales. My butler Trang, like Charon of Greek
myth ferrying souls across the river Styx to the world of
eternal repose, plies me between resort jetty and my rock
villa cradled on boulders. Morning unveils the rugged
romance of an almost masculine seascape. No blue-eyed
waters and frilly white waves purring coyly. The bay seems
more Shakespeare’s ‘Green eyed monster’, but benign. The
serenity is maybe monkish. After supper at neighbouring
Anlam Resort, where culinary sophistication is sauced in
sagas of how their guests weep with content, I need a Six
Senses facial back at the Six Senses Ninh Van Bay,
to unhinge clenched jaws and a massage to appease
revulsed shoulders.
Anantara Hoi An’s is no ‘destination’ spa, I’m warned.
Yet their four-hand Vietnamese massage, with fingers in
a flurried and fervent dance of synchronised rhythmic
movements and elbows pirouetting on pressure points, is
unchallenged. One needn’t be a ‘branded’ spa to brand
one’s excellence on a troubled back. Nor does one need
an expat chef to awe a demanding palate. Vietnamese
Chef Vien’s Vietnamese noodle soup pho is pho-nomenal.
And I’m returning for their Vietnamese iced coffee, the
finest in all of Vietnam.
The playful ‘Healing Hotel of the World’, Fusion Maia,
dispenses free spa treatments and ‘fusionistas’ who design
your experience. Their racy new ‘raw food’ touches a
raw nerve, the high-sensitivity epicurean one. It’s about
creativity and colour. Stunning exhibits include a white
plate checkered with shocking-pink beetroot squares
sliced to a nanometer on which cubed almond paté
presides or vibrant avocado sherbert reeled in screaming
yellow lemon peel. Chef Dung’s soft-as-seduction
Vietnamese coffee mousse he cunningly dispatched for
clandestine in-villa consumption, lest anyone descry the
indelicate demolitions.
La Résidence’s GM Mr Minh, the sole Vietnamese GM
I encounter, runs Vietnam’s most efficient hotel (UNESCO
World Heritage Hue), discrediting expats who asseverate
Vietnam requires foreigners to manage it. Mr Minh
feeds me Hue’s fabled culinary heritage, elucidating that
Nguyen Emperor Minh Manh had 300 concubines (and
142 children). Satisfying all his harem regularly daunted
even the Nguyen Dynasty’s mightiest emperor, for whose
affections the ladies combatted ferociously. It was resolved
that concubines would prepare desserts and she who
produced the finest would have the emperor for a midnight
feast, as it were. La Résidence serves Minh Manh wine ice
cream. “Is this royal food I’m having then?” I enquire. “I
leave that to your imagination,” Mr Minh quips. Hope not
– originally the wine (which enabled the emperor to help
himself to six women/night) comprised bear’s claws and
elephant.... I leave that to your imagination. V
Nam Hai Sofitel Saigon Plaza Six Senses Ninh Van Bay
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