I’m a big fan of reviews. I use them to inform my decisions on where to spend my hard-earned money. I write reviews on hotel booking sites. I write café and restaurant reviews on Google (Level 5 Local Guide babeh!). I’ve got book and movie reviews that I wrote but never published.
If I like you, I’ll even happily write you a review of all my favourite places in a city I’ve lived in if you’re planning to visit/move there. As I’m writing this, I’m already visualising which HCMC haunts would make it onto my HCMC list.
So yes, I like reviews. I think they’re immensely useful. And I like the human element in it. Yes, humans = bias, but there’s something nice about getting a peek into the subjective experience of another.
All this preamble is to say that it goes strongly against my nature to go to a place I like and then not write about it. It’s deeply unnatural. It’s like trying to walk on 10-inch heels while balancing a 12kg kettlebell on your head.
Last December, my partner and I spent a couple of days in a resort just over an hour outside HCMC. And we loved it. The place exceeded our expectations in every which way.
We went hoping for a nice, quiet retreat in a leafy resort. We got a nice, quiet retreat in an exquisitely beautiful resort. I don’t think I’ve been to a place with superior landscaping. The grounds were just breathtaking, down to the tiniest details.
There were lakes, canals, bridges, rows of trees, flowers, animals roaming in fenced off areas so large it could hardly count as captivity. We came back to our room after breakfast1 to find peacocks on our balcony. There was a pétanque court, a table tennis… table, a volleyball court, and of course a pool.
The place was a dream. The kind of dream you never want to wake up from.
The resort was so nice that my partner and I agreed to only tell people we really like about it. Because we don’t want it to get overcrowded.2 We don’t want it to get discovered. We want it to stay our little secret so we can always go back and enjoy it all for ourselves.
Agoda (where we booked the resort from) emailed me persistently for a week asking for a review of the resort. I politely ignored the emails. Potentially for the first time, I’m not eagerly opening the request email and promptly leaving my carefully crafted detailed review, something I normally take so much pleasure in.
Have you ever been somewhere so nice that you want to keep it a secret? Have you ever felt the dilemma of wanting to declare to the world how nice something is while hoping no one’s listening? Did you realise that I’ve effectively used this newsletter to write an anonymous “review” of the resort?
What’s the best kept secret you wouldn’t mind sharing with me? (Mum’s the word.)
Leave a comment, send a reply—I’d love to hear from you. And share this with someone who you think might know which heaven on earth I’m talking about.
Until next Friday… Stay cool, stay safe, stay thoughtful,
Val
The food, oh the food. I ate so much every meal I thought I might burst.
According to the resort website, the owners are quite wealthy so we think there’s no danger of the resort going out of business as a result of our vow of silence.