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comVERVE
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
SCAPES TRAVEL
H
CMC (Ho Chi Minh City) ocially, 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 uctuate
from fragrant pervasions in luxury malls contouring the
historic opera to pungent emanations from soup kitchens
clutering 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 Ros 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
magnicent 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 paterned 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 mustnt suspect that the
Vietnamese have endured, that Vietnam is a third world
country, Im ofen told.
The Third-World doesnt stretch Mercedes limos
for airport fetches as does Sotel Saigon Plaza. Le
chaueur presents the music menu. I request classical.
Madonna vociferates. Vietnam seems in such accelerated
modernisation mode that 80s music classies as classical.
Vestigial French frivolity lingers, though, in the hotels
Boudoir Lounge where the scandalously all-pink teatime
Pink Afernoon Aair unfurls with extravagances beting
Marie Antoinete. Rose-lipped raspberry clairs beckon
cooingly, nubile strawberry ptisseries mince, voluptuous
marshmallows wink, Pink me up, please.
Forget Halong Bay frequented by tourists whose
proportions approach those of the immense rock
formations. Find Vietnams naughtiest love-nests, instead.
Luxury idyll on Vietnams most astoundingly beautiful
island Con Dao. The naturally beautiful require few
adornments: bare minimalism accentuates the Six Senses
Con Dao resorts 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 seting but its
from the sublime to the ridiculous when at breakfast I
hear an American mother bellow at her boy, Put that
mun down now! Youve already had a doughnut. If
only holidaying Indian parents were as severe, our brats
wouldnt resemble orangutans. Con Dao is beter known
as Brangelinas Vietnamese hideaway than for its historic
signicance as the site of French and American prisons,
notably the notorious Tiger Cages that exterminated
20,000 Vietnamese prisoners (at least). Im 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 ying 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 villas 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 arent 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
exemplication of the parabolic Garden of Eden with its
concomitant Evil.
Celebrity designer Bill Bensley declared, I can
make something that pleases everyone. But Id rather
make a statement. He makes one worth a stupendous
$200 million. Bensleys Harvard mind aunts in searing
decorative wit and soaring fancy. Russians whizz in for
Michelin-starred French Chef Michel Rouxs $120/head
Chefs Table at La Maison 1888 whose private dining
spaces Bensley turns into bedrooms for the houses three
children. Voyager sons room explores the travel theme,
accountant sons room is accountably designed. Their
sisters room is a ravishingly red boudoir with bustiers,
and an antique bed from which mademoiselles bare
(mannequin) legs dangle impudently. The Intercontinental
Danang Sun Peninsula resort is about destination spa
and drama. Theres fairytale too. The 37-year-old French
GM Arnaud is Prince Charmant. But clowning sta surely
belong in a circus and not a fairytale?
Where the groomed and the gorgeous go are to Nam
Hais villas in dark wood and stark white that have free-
ow 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. Superuous 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
batered plants. A live spectacle is the least one can
expect at exclusive abodes nowadays. Missing only are
the sound eects. Alas, stormed-out young F&B Manager
Dominic cant furnish Wagners sombre Tristan and Isolde,
or Mussorgskys Night on a Bare Mountain.
Heritage, iconic, perhaps Vietnams grandest address
is Sotel Legend Metropole. Resident of the opulent
Opera quarter with its haute-luxe boutiques; receptor of
royals (just recently Britains Prince Andrew), lm stars,
literary gures and ambassadors galore; receiver of ever
multiplying awards.A staff member reveals, When I joined
four months back, wed won 18 awards this year. Now we
have 30! Naturellement, when your airport transfer is a
BMW stocking can-rival-Ladure macarons. And youve 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.
Mines a glamorised newer suite, full of nery and nesse,
marbled bathrooms with ornate stand-alone tubs and
Herms toiletries.
Im 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 Scotish rather
than Vietnamese variety), its ickering lights like gleaming
dragons 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 jety 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 Shakespeares Green eyed monster, but benign. The
serenity is maybe monkish. Afer 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 Ans is no destination spa, Im warned.
Yet their four-hand Vietnamese massage, with ngers in
a urried and fervent dance of synchronised rhythmic
movements and elbows piroueting on pressure points, is
unchallenged. One neednt be a branded spa to brand
ones excellence on a troubled back. Nor does one need
an expat chef to awe a demanding palate. Vietnamese
Chef Viens Vietnamese noodle soup pho is pho-nomenal.
And Im returning for their Vietnamese iced coee, the
nest 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. Its about
creativity and colour. Stunning exhibits include a white
plate checkered with shocking-pink beetroot squares
sliced to a nanometer on which cubed almond pat
presides or vibrant avocado sherbert reeled in screaming
yellow lemon peel. Chef Dungs sof-as-seduction
Vietnamese coee mousse he cunningly dispatched for
clandestine in-villa consumption, lest anyone descry the
indelicate demolitions.
La Rsidences GM Mr Minh, the sole Vietnamese GM
I encounter, runs Vietnams most ecient hotel (UNESCO
World Heritage Hue), discrediting expats who asseverate
Vietnam requires foreigners to manage it. Mr Minh
feeds me Hues fabled culinary heritage, elucidating that
Nguyen Emperor Minh Manh had 300 concubines (and
142 children). Satisfying all his harem regularly daunted
even the Nguyen Dynastys mightiest emperor, for whose
aections the ladies combated ferociously. It was resolved
that concubines would prepare desserts and she who
produced the nest would have the emperor for a midnight
feast, as it were. La Rsidence serves Minh Manh wine ice
cream. Is this royal food Im 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 bears claws and
elephant.... I leave that to your imagination. V
Nam Hai Sotel Saigon Plaza Six Senses Ninh Van Bay
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