Ra Đời ~ Birth

First published October 2025 | Words and photos by Vietnam Coracle | Read time 8 minutes

Tom Divers is the founder and creator of Vietnam Coracle. In 2005 he moved from his native London to Vietnam, where he has been living, working and travelling ever since. He pays rent in Ho Chi Minh City but is more often on the road, riding his motorbike a quarter of a million kilometres across Vietnam to research guides to the farthest-flung corners of the nation. When he’s not in the saddle, you’ll find him on a beach with a margarita, in a tent on a mountainside or at a streetside noodle house: in other words, at the ‘office’. Read more about Tom: Q&A, About Page, Vietnam Tourism website.

Celebrating 20 Years in Vietnam!

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Ra Đời ~ Birth

It was a wet, sticky, hot birth – a sultry October afternoon in the aftermath of a monsoon downpour at Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport, Sài Gòn. The plane taxied over the runway, jet engines blowing ripples across puddles on the tarmac. With two tidy rows of tint-glass windows intersected by white concrete pillars, the long terminal building stared at me, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

After 24 hours in the pressurized womb of an airline fuselage and the sterile, hospital-blandness of airports, a series of escalators pulled me through the mist of expensive duty-free perfumes and I was delivered into Thursday afternoon rush hour. My young lungs were sensitive; I hadn’t learned to breathe. The atmosphere – a combination of exhaust fumes, barbecue smoke, cigarettes and steam from the fast-evaporating residue of the rainfall – was dense enough to swallow. I could only gulp, like a dying fish on a display counter in a wet market.

Bus number 51 reluctantly slowed to pick me up before rejoining the choked but flowing arteries of a city that appeared to be suffering from collective attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: nothing and no one stayed still for more than a few seconds. I struggled to keep my balance while counting the number of zeros on bank notes to pay the bus driver 4,000 đồng for the fare and wiping sweat from my forehead. My clothes clung to me like a second skin.

Outside the open door, which my backpack threatened to pull me out of each time the bus took a right turn, the city streamed past in early twilight. Neon lights flickered on above shopfronts, restaurants and on advertising billboards. Motorbikes swarmed around buses and taxis. Traffic swelled at red lights, spilling over onto pavements and porches like water finding the path of least resistance. Buildings were entirely heterogeneous – box-like and narrow, each one a different colour, height, style and angle to the street.

This was my birthday: October 5^th, 2005 – the day I moved to Vietnam. I was 22 years-old.

Saigon, April 2006 — From left to right: Alexis, me & Sam in Sài Gòn (see Photos for details)

About this Post:

The above scene is taken from a number short vignettes that I’ve written over the years, mostly focusing on the early period of my life in Vietnam. I’ve published this one as a way of celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the day I moved to Vietnam.

Although my first visit to Vietnam was in the summer of 1999, it wasn’t until early October, 2005, that I moved to Sài Gòn to live. I had enrolled in a TEFL course that would take place in the city that month. I didn’t know it at the time (although I might have suspected it), but this was a hugely significant event in my adult life.

The TEFL course ended on 5^th November. I spent a month travelling Vietnam on my bicycle before returning to Sài Gòn in December. I moved into a house with friends from my TEFL course and started a teaching job at VUS on New Year’s Eve, 2005. I continued to teach at VUS for over 19 years until June, 2025, when I resigned and started a company to support this website. (For more articles like this, see Related Posts.)

About the Photos:

Back in 2005, most people weren’t carrying camera phones in their pockets, nor were they uploading photos of their lives to social media every day. Despite searching my emails and photo albums, I could only find a couple of photos from my first year in Vietnam to illustrate this article, and neither of them date from my first day, first week or even first month in the country. The two photos on this page (above) were taken within a week of each other in April, 2006, just over 6 months after I arrived in Vietnam.

In the first photo, Sam and I are riding Alexis and her luggage in two cyclos to the airport to catch her late night flight back to the U.S. The three of us met on the TEFL course back in October, 2005, and became good friends. On this, Alexis’ last night in Vietnam, we borrowed two cyclos from two (very trusting) drivers in Phạm Ngũ Lão, Sài Gòn’s notorious nightlife hub, and rode them all the way to Tân Sơn Nhất Airport as a special farewell. Sam and Alexis were two of my closest friends during my first year in Vietnam. The three of us stayed in touch after they both left Vietnam. Today, I remain close to Sam, emotionally at least, as we very rarely see each other in person.

In the second photo, Debi – a friend of a friend who was travelling in Vietnam at the time – and I are sitting outside at Fanny’s, an ice cream parlour and coffee shop housed in a French colonial villa in downtown District 1. Judging from my attire, I must have come straight from work: I’d probably finished teaching a children’s class at the VUS Chinatown campus on An Dương Vương Street at 9pm, then rode across the city to meet Debi for a catchup. Fanny’s, which to the best of my knowledge is no longer there, was a popular hangout for my friends in the post-TEFL period. Most of our teaching hours were in the evenings, so during the days we’d meet at Fanny’s and talk for hours, fueled by glasses of potent, Vietnamese robusta iced coffee, riding the sugar-high of ice creams and having caffeinated discussions about everything and anything. Robusta has a higher caffeine content than the arabica coffee that most of us were used to drinking back in our home countries. I remember times when we’d all become slightly delirious from the effects: fits of laughter, excessive, rapid speech, shaky hands and dizziness. (For more articles like this, see Related Posts below.)

If you enjoyed this article, please support my website by signing up for Patreon membership. Alternatively, support Vietnam Coracle with a donation or purchase one of my Offline Guides & Maps. This website relies on reader support to maintain its independence & quality. Thank you, Tom