Itinerant reading: "A Short Ride in the Jungle" by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

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. 

What this means is that Ants' enterprise involved navigating thousands of kilometres of remote dirt tracks and jungle paths, and this on an ageing 90cc Honda C90 scooter. The mode of transport, though obviously unsuitable, is not as mad as it might seem. In the region, corrupt government officials and foreign aid officials apart, everyone uses mopeds, often ridiculously overloaded, for pretty much all their transport needs. This means not only that Ants' mode of transport seems unremarkable to the locals, but also that, if need be - and need was - parts are available and someone local will be able to fix it.

Did I say that our heroine Ants is a deeply admirable person? Well, she is. I admire her gumption, her old-fashioned pluck and her more contemporary determination to stick to her self-set goals. I also admire her honesty about herself and her weaknesses, her frankness with her readers and her dedicated attachment to the post-hardship gin-and-tonic. I like her terribly English self-deprecation and habitual understatement. More than all that though, I envy her. As so often when reading traveller's tales, the pleasure of a tale well told is shot through with a melancholic sense of loss. I wish that it were me on that scooter traipsing through unknown jungles in darkest Laos dicing with rickety bamboo bridges, all-engulfing mud, bug infested brothel-hotel bedrooms and shocking quantities of fifty year old unexploded ordinance (UXO in the jargon), but my life won't let me. Or maybe I won't let my life let me? Whatever, I'm not there and someone else was. 

Ants writes simply and straightforwardly. This not a book of flights of poetic description, but one which, with disarming simplicity and a personal perspective, tells you what it was like to traverse these unlikely and relatively unexplored areas. Of danger there is surprisingly little. At one point, notwithstanding the ardours of the road and the omnipresence of UXO, Ants reflects that the greatest danger seems to come in the form of other people. Some other people. But it is a danger that does not materialise in this account. A young woman alone on the road, in places where she is clearly highly vulnerable, might have expected more in the way of unwanted attention, but, at least in the telling, it never seems to progress beyond the occasional annoyance, fended off without becoming excessively threatening. In the event, the one episode of real, yes mortal, danger is attributable to the physical conditions of the road, with the trusty C90 defeated by deep unnavigable mud, leaving its rider miles from the nearest hope of help with no water, no food and diminishing quantities of hope.

Ants on the road in "new headgear" - apparently
not the best as it turned out

All in all, this is a modern adventure story which is hard to put down. Along the way, we learn a lot about a war, which though recent and present in the daily lives of people in the region, remains unknown in many of its aspects, but also about contemporary destruction, the seemingly unstoppable rape of the forest and its natural resources for the benefit of a corrupt few and to the detriment of everyone else. On this, there is real passion in the telling, but also slim hope of anything happen to stop the criminal wantonness. 

If I have any criticism of the book, it is in its lack of good illustration. I pined for pictures. Even those that are present, inside the covers, are too small to really work. The story deserves better illustration. Fortunately, though only later, I discovered the Facebook page and the website/blog, where, if you scout, you can find those missing pictures. 

So check out the online resources, but, if you yearn for adventure, if you're interested in the history or if you like vicariously to travel to far-flung places, do yourself a favour and read the book too. You'll like the author and you'll like her book.