Three, perhaps two and a half, degrees of separation lie between Antonia ("Ants") Bolingbroke-Kent and me. Her book, which was lent to me by a friend, contained a dedication addressed to him by the author. "Do you know her?" I asked later, after I had read the book. "Not really", he replied, "I've never met her; she's sort of a friend of a friend, but I was in touch with her during her trip on Facebook, exchanging a few thoughts about Vietnam and so on."
So two and a half degrees is about right.
Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent is, in her own words, a "writer, TV producer, traveller and lover of the curious and quirky". As a TV producer, we discover, she has worked on many BBC travel documentaries which have taken her professionally to - or at least in the direction of - places in which she has subsequently undertaken personal journeys. Such is the case of the subject of this book, a solo exploration of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, previously visited while working on a Top Gear special featuring the nation's favourite three uber-blokes larking around on scooters in Vietnam. You don't have to read too closely between the lines to discern that such programmes are very far from what they seem, with our laddish heroes accompanied by hordes of mechanics to fix the machines they bust and insisting on five-star hotel accommodation to help them recover from their exertions of an evening. No such cosseting for Ants (I shall call her "Ants"; everyone does, it seems, and besides getting us past the aristocratic resonances of the name, Ants is also considerably shorter to type than Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent), for whom the journey was explicitly an exploration of place, history and self.
The idea was indeed, also self confessedly, rather mad. I had been under the impression, admittedly without having really considered the matter, that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was, well, a trail, i.e. a single route linking two places. But no, the Trail is a vast network of often near-impassable trails, threading through the mountains and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. With two seconds thought, this is rather obvious. To commit the entire military supply line to North Vietnamese forces to a single route would have been suicidal. Even the network of small hidden trails running through three countries was intensively, mind-bogglingly so, bombed by the USAF.
