Top Stories
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Hoi An, in Christian Lacroix
Hội An doesn’t walk. She struts. Like a Christian Lacroix creation gone rogue from the runway, saturated in color and piled high with fabric, she shifts guises from one sidewalk to the next. All allure in the Chinese Assembly Halls—radiant with gold and incense—she turns reserved, almost brooding, beneath the timber frames of the ancient…
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Hội An in her dressing gown
Up for hours, she slips in slippers between the silhouettes, lights up a stove, pushes a bicycle, still muttering about yesterday’s market gossip. It’s a theater of shadows in this hour stolen from the dawn. At this time, Hội An is not yet that washed-out postcard that clusters of selfie sticks will come to trample…
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Whale Island: a long memory
Twenty years now that Whale Island has been breathing its salty breath down my neck. First as a myth, overheard at a bar counter in Hanoi. Then as an unattainable dream. Finally, as daily life. We tamed each other. We parted ways. I watched it from afar for years, carrying the strange feeling that it…
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Villa Louise: Hué washed up on the sand
Vietnam’s coastline has turned into one vast concrete competition facing the sea. Cloned resorts, swimming pools overflowing with vanity and boredom, tropical luxury mass-produced as if Da Nang, Nha Trang and Phu Quoc had all signed some global pact of standardisation. If not with the devil. And then there is Villa Louise. A place that…
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Hue wears everything. Even its contradictions.
Hue can wear almost anything without ever betraying itself: the imperial grandeur of tombs and palaces, the weathered wounds of colonial neoclassicism, the insolence of Art Deco, the tropical modernist concrete of the 1960s and 70s, decaying villas, austere pagodas, anonymous houses eaten alive by moss. Elsewhere, it would feel like an urban accident. Here,…
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Street food doesn’t feed Hanoi. It governs it.
In Hanoi, real power doesn’t sit inside ministries or behind fading colonial façades. It rules at asphalt level, perched on plastic stools barely tall enough to humble your spine. Four inches off the ground, somewhere between the fumes, the shouting and the choreography of near-collisions, the Vietnamese pact of conviviality gets signed every single day.…
The Travel Kitchen
My blog is a slow, soulful distillation of movement. Every place, every encounter, every detour is not an end in itself but an ingredient: raw, sometimes rugged, sometimes delicate, always chosen with intent.
I gather a fragment of history, peel back a culture, sear a few motorcycle escapes over high heat, and press landscapes until they yield every drop of their essence. Then, I let it all simmer in my own subjectivity. Writing doesn’t explain: it seasons, it binds, it reveals.
This is a table set far from the reach of tourist literature—a succession of dishes, scents, textures, and faces. Here, the “elsewhere” is savored slowly, without a manual, but with a sovereign freedom of tone.
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