For some reason, I had always wanted to visit Vietnam. As we planned our trip, it was number 1 on my list. I’m not sure why. I knew I would like the food having sampled some of the incredible restaurants around Dalston in London and JLT in Dubai. Lots of movies serve as brutal history lessons of the wars that ravaged the country in the 20th century.

Some contemporary artworks gave some impression of the country we would find. A standout artwork at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018/19 was a video installation by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba in which Vietnamese fishermen pedal a rickshaw across the sea floor, occasionally coming up for air. Screened in a flooded room, viewers had to remove their shoes and wade shin-deep in water.

Zoe Butt’s curated exhibition which formed part of Sharjah Biennial 14 had a strong focus on artists from Indochina including several Vietnamese artists. One work that particularly resonated was Phan Thảo Nguyên’s Mute Grain, which took as its subject a famine which happened in the Red Delta region in 1945. Introduced first to the landscape and its people through a series of 24 small paintings on paper hung as if floating, the main part of the project was a moving three-channel video including interview footage of survivors of the famine and children.

Amazed to discover it was a country of nearly 97 million, with a geography hugging the coastline spanning over 2,000 km from north to south. For our trip, which we gave 3 weeks, we traveled south to north (most people we met were traveling the other way!) flying into Ho Chi Min City, taking a night train up to Dri Tri, then a day train to Da Trang and a flight to Hanoi.