Earlier this month, drinking a freshly brewed iced Vietnamese coffee, I took in the sounds of Hanoi and marveled at the traffic that I’ve heard about so many times. Another sip and I noticed 3 people neatly and confidently arranged on a single motorbike, weaving in and out of traffic. Just like I read about. The caffeine starts hitting, and I’m marveling at this city while my boyfriend is next to me on the couch, playing video games. I take another sip of super sweet caffeine and watch the city from the confines of quarantine. This is armchair travel: want to visit Vietnam today?

Armchair travel is make-believe. It’s traveling through a book, a movie or a very well told story. You aren’t boarding a plane, but you’re setting off to someplace new, through someone else’s adventure. It is, in a nutshell, living vicariously through someone else’s travels.

After canceling all of my trips for 2020 because of covid19, I dove into armchair travel. It started simply enough with written travel memoirs, but has now become a multimedia free-for-all and a bit of a science. I’ve paired food and drinks with books and movies, making the illusion just a bit more real.

So, want to visit Vietnam today? Here’s how to do it without leaving home.

Read:

If you were to Google “Vietnam travel memoirs”, you would be met almost exclusively with American-Vietnam War stories. I certainly won’t discredit those memoirs; I’ve read several, and they are impactful and important. But there’s more to Vietnam – or any country- than a painful past. I had to search high and low, and eventually found two beautiful books that dive into a more recent Vietnam. 

• Catfish and Mandala is part home-going tale, part travel-memoir, and follows the author’s experience and expectations while he navigates the country that his family fled during the Vietnam war many years before. It is a beautiful, sometimes painful, look at identity, expectations, hopes and disappointments in both family history and travel.
• Shifting gears entirely, So Happiness to Meet You follows an American family’s move to Vietnam after the collapse of the American economy in the 2000s. What I love most about this memoir is that the author acknowledges her mistakes and misconceptions, and writes about Vietnam in a truly respectful tone. She’s not a disdainful expat, but a guest in a host culture, and she makes you fall in love with her Vietnamese neighbors that become family.

Watch:

• Kara and Nate (YouTube Travel Vloggers) Vietnam Series. I genuinely love this YouTube channel and these full time travelers cover two different experiences in Vietnam, years apart from each other. Their first experience in Vietnam is very early into their travels, so you really feel like you’re discovering travel with them. The second time around, they’re already in love with the country, and their enthusiasm is contagious.  

• Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown: I love all of Anthony Bourdain’s travel series, but Parts Unknown is my favorite. And the episode in Hanoi, Vietnam is one of the absolute best, with its thoughtful, open take on a country that gets overlooked in favor of shiny neighbors. (Heads up; the episode is not available on any main streaming services, so you’ll either need the CNN Go! Subscription, or pay a few dollars to watch on Amazon Prime or iTunes.)

Eat and Drink:

Food is such a huge part of travel for me that cooking helps make my “travels” a little more real. There’s SO much good Vietnamese food, but a lot of it calls for ingredients that I don’t really keep on hand, or for a level of skill that I do not possess. 

Enter: Vietnamese coffee. I ordered a Vietnamese coffee kit from Nguyen Coffee Supply, and have been playing with Vietnamese coffee recipes ever since. Some are easy (coffee, sweetened condensed milk, ice) while others call for coconut milk, or are super interesting and call for an egg. These recipes have kept me entertained while I have nothing but time on my hands, and have also taken my armchair travel to a whole other level. 

(If you don’t want to go to the trouble of buying an entire kit, try making a small, REALLY strong cup of iced coffee and adding coconut milk, a bit of sweetened condensed milk, and ice. It’s not exactly the authentic thing, but we’re armchair traveling here, so don’t stress. This is an easy, quick riff on actual Vietnamese coconut iced coffee.)

Books and shows will never replace travel for me (or anyone else.) But travel is quite literally impossible right now, and so I’m making do with what I have.  I’m learning about a culture, and hearing new perspectives that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I may not be seeing something new with my own eyes, or sitting at a tiny plastic table on the sidewalk in Hanoi, eating Vietnamese pho that a grandma has been perfecting for decades, but this is the level of discovery I can manage, and it’s not too bad.

If you have any must-reads, list them in the comments! And be sure to subscribe for upcoming Armchair Travel Guides- India’s next!