EPISODE 6
June 9, 2021
Asia-Pacific Travel & Lifestyle writer, Samantha Coomber, talks about working in Vietnam and Indonesia for the past 19 years and living the “Anthony Bourdain experience from a woman’s perspective.” Samantha left London in 1998, since then she’s been based in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and Bali. She is a prolific and accomplished travel writer, having contributed and updated travel guidebooks such as Frommer’s, Fodors, Rough Guides and Insight Guides, mainly on Vietnam. Her work has been published in countless international publications and in-flight airline magazines. She is author of the first edition of Insight Guides: Hanoi and Northern Vietnam Pocket Guide and co-author of the first edition Inside Guides: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City Smart Guide. And she contributed to the travel focus, compilation books: To Vietnam with Love; To Asia with Love; and Travelers Tales from Heaven and Hell.
Samantha’s blog is The Jaded Empress Chronicles
TRANSCRIPT:
Louise: Hello, welcome to Women Who Walk. I’m Louise Ross writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, Intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom. You can find show notes to each episode and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:45] Hello Listeners and welcome to Episode 6 of Women Who Walk. My guest today is Samantha Coomber. Samantha left London, where she’s from, in 1998, since then she’s been a full-time freelance travel and lifestyle writer, based in Asia Pacific, including three years in Sydney, Australia followed by five years in Hanoi and five years in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, eight years in Bali, Indonesia, relocating back to Ho Chi Minh City in 2018 where she’s currently based.
[00:01:19] Before leaving London, she was a travel industry professional, starting out with seasonal work in Europe, where we met when we both worked for a British ski company in Courcheval, in the French Alps. Samantha went on to work another couple of ski seasons in France and Italy and four summer seasons in Spain and Greece.
[00:01:40] With birthdays a day apart, and one year between us and a friendship that has spanned several decades, over the years, we kept in touch first via handwritten letters, then email and more recently, I’ve been tracking Samantha’s Asian adventures on LinkedIn, where she posts links to her blog, The Jaded Empress Chronicles.
[00:02:03] Samantha has contributed and updated travel guidebooks such as Frommer’s, Fodors, Rough Guides and Insight Guides, mainly on Vietnam. Her work has been published in countless international publications and the list is so extensive, I’ll just mention a few here: Wall Street Journal Asia, National Geographic Traveler, Conde Nast Traveler UK and India, Tatler UK and Indonesia, Australia Gourmet Traveler. Plus, in-flight magazines for airlines, such as Qantas, Singapore, Thai, and Cathay Pacific.
[00:02:39] She is author of the first edition of Insight Guides: Hanoi and Northern Vietnam Pocket Guide and co-author of the first edition Inside Guides: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City Smart Guide. She was selected to contribute articles to the following travel focus, compilation books: To Vietnam with Love; To Asia with Love; and Travelers Tales from Heaven and Hell.
[00:03:03] In 2001, she was headhunted by the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism or VNAT for short, to help launch and then jointly-run their English-language tourist magazine, Vietnam Discovery. Based in Hanoi, and working with an all Vietnamese team on this pioneering monthly publication, she became the first foreigner employed full time by the VNAT.
[00:03:31] Fast-forward to 2018, she landed a contract as Senior Marketing Content Writer and Editor for Trails of Indochina, an upscale boutique tour operator, at their global head office in Ho Chi Minh City. Since then, she has been working from home in Vietnam, a country that has been remarkably successful in containing COVID-19, working on various writing projects while assessing the next step.
[00:03:58] I’m so glad Samantha agreed to be interviewed for the podcast as I know her stories and adventures are exemplary of a woman who walks.
[00:04:21] Hi Samantha! Thanks for being available to talk with me this evening.
[00:04:25] Samantha: Hi Louise. It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:04:29] Louise: There’s about a six-hour time difference between us and you’re six hours ahead. Tell us where you are. Give listeners a sense of your neighborhood.
[00:04:38] Samantha: Okay. I’m in District Three of Ho Chi Minh City which is probably the oldest neighborhood in the city, and it’s voted by time-out London as one of the world’s top 50 neighborhoods. It’s very buzzy, very noisy, ah, neighborhood, but it is an authentic slice of Ho Chi Minh City. I’m on a third floor apartment. I’m very lucky because I have floor-to-ceiling windows and a balcony, and when I look outside, I’ve got a broad canal, which ebbs and flows out to the Saigon river a few miles down.
[00:05:17] I can see tugboats, long-tail boats, speed boats going along the river. It’s a canal that’s actually been widened and redeveloped. It’s called the Nhieu Loc –Thi Nghe canal. It’s one of Ho Chi Minh City’s biggest urban renewal development projects. It’s got trees along it, bougainvillea, hibiscus, frangipanis and a pedestrian walkway running along the canal, which runs for about six miles, 10 kilometers. I can do my exercise along there. It’s full of locals and beautiful little cafes and ancient pagodas.
[00:05:56] Louise: Sounds gorgeous! Now you said Ho Chi Minh City, but you didn’t tell us what country.
[00:06:02] Samantha: It’s Vietnam and for your listeners, Ho Chi Minh City was formally Saigon and it’s the biggest city in Vietnam in the south. The population is about 9 million and it’s one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. That’s why I’m a bit excited about where I live, because normally when you have an apartment in Saigon, you look out on a brick wall or a concrete wall or a building site, but I’m quite lucky. I’ve got a lot of greenery and trees and the beautiful little eating places. So it’s quite fortunate to live in this location. Like a lot of my life, I found it by accident.
[00:06:42] Louise: Okay, we’ll talk a bit about that. Thanks for describing your neighborhood. I mentioned in the introduction to this episode, that you’re originally a London girl and that we met when we were in our early twenties when we were both working in France, but it was another 15 years before you left London. What was the driving force behind you leaving the UK?
[00:07:03] Samantha: There’s quite a lot of things going on before I left. Now, I met you at the start of my seasonal work in Europe. I went on to do two more winters in the Italian and French Alps. And then I did three summers in Spain and one in Greece, which I really enjoyed. It’s a wonderful life, but you can’t do it forever. It’s something that you get burnt out doing. So in my late twenties, I went back to London and I fell into the travel industry. Because I’d love that lifestyle so much, I wanted to keep in that industry. I worked for various Australasian, upscale travel companies and tour operators, sort of office bound.
[00:07:43] However, in the travel industry, you get a lot of longer holidays and perks and freebies. So while I was living in London for about a decade, I also did a lot of traveling around the world, particularly Southeast Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, America. The reason I’m saying all that is because it really fired up my wanderlust.
[00:08:06] The more you travel, the more you want to do this. And I started doing some writing of all my travels as a hobby on the side, but I was doing jobs in sales and marketing. While I was based in London, I did have a very steady partner. In about 1997, my long-term partner and I broke up. It was the catalyst of me pursuing this dream of just taking off. Like the strings of a hydrogen balloon, helium, sorry, helium balloon being cut. I could just go off because I didn’t have any ties.
[00:08:42] I was 37, footloose and fancy free. I thought, you can either settle down and get a mortgage, which is the norm, and stay in London, or I could just be totally crazy and pack up everything and go on a one-way ticket. I love London. I had a good job. I had good friends, lovely little apartment. So it wasn’t an easy decision, but I thought you should really take this opportunity.
[00:09:05] My remaining family is in Australia. I’m British, but I have an Australian passport and I thought, why not take a one-way ticket to Australia. On the way go via Vietnam, I’d never been there before, and also go via Indonesia. As soon as I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, I thought this is great. I did three and a half months, which was life-changing. Extraordinary trip. I traveled the length and breadth of Vietnam. It’s very liberating for a woman. You can go where you want. People were wonderful. I got treated like an Empress when I was there. I traveled all over the place. I had wonderful adventures.
[00:09:40] Louise: Why do you think that you didn’t encounter any harassment or hassles as a petite young woman at the time, traveling solo?
[00:09:51] Samantha: I’d backpacked through Thailand, Hong Kong, Bali by myself. We’re talking about the ’90s here. I generally found it very safe. Vietnam really was liberating. It was just opening up to tourism, still predominantly Buddhist. I pushed one month into two months, three months, three and a half months, because I found I could go anywhere, obviously using common sense, but I’d go off on a boat trip with just a captain by myself in the back of beyond. I did a lot of motor biking trips up in North Vietnam. And what would happen is these guides would take me around the wilds and mountains or we’d go in the countryside somewhere. I’d go trekking for hours with strange men. They were very respectful and at the end of the trip, they might say, ‘ Could I ask you out for coffee?’
[00:10:36] I found it very safe. And that was something which really pushed me to explore further. One of the trips I did, I went to these villages up in the very remote Northern mountains, near the Chinese border with my guides, sometimes with another foreigner I’d met, but very often on my own, where these ethnic minority groups looked generally shocked to see a female foreigner. It was that sort of liberation that I felt I could explore even more.
Ethnic ‘Flower Hmong’ girl and Samantha. Bac Ha, Northern Vietnam, 1998
[00:11:04] I was a sales and marketing girl in London and sales manager, marketing executive, but after those travels in Vietnam, I felt, I want to be a full-time travel writer and I hadn’t dared want to do that before. But Vietnam so inspired me, the culture, the smells, the history, the war legacy, the colonial buildings, the countryside, I just could not stop writing about it, which even now I can’t stop taking photos and writing. And that’s what spurred me.
[00:11:40] Louise: In Episode 3, I talked with another travel writer, Carolyn McCarthy, who like you has dedicated herself to writing and documenting life in a particular area. For Carolyn it’s Latin America. And for you, it’s been Asia and like you, Carolyn went traveling in the area and fell into writing about it. What interests me is the idea of being drawn to an area of the world, and as you’ve said, a couple of times, falling into, and it was writing, so falling into something far from your home country, that then becomes your life. And you’re still there. You’re still in Vietnam. Do you think that there was something fated about you finding your way to Asia and then living there?
[00:12:26] Samantha: Oh, definitely. I’m quite fatalistic and believe in destiny and that’s probably because I’ve lived in Southeast Asia for 19 successive years and that’s how they think. When I left England, I was only supposed to do one month in Vietnam and two months in Indonesia, but the day I was supposed to fly into Jakarta a revolution started. People were very worried thinking that I was going to arrive in Indonesia when all this is going on. And actually I was having such a wonderful time in Vietnam, I canceled Indonesia. Vietnam was a hot place at that time. A lot of backpackers were going there and it did change my life.
[00:13:02] When I lived in Sydney for three years, I kept going back and forth to Vietnam. To basically fuel my freelance writing. I wasn’t really writing about Australia, or other countries. And then I consequently lived in Vietnam for 10 years. I do believe that it was all supposed to happen.
[00:13:20] Louise: I think it was because you have done an extraordinary amount of writing about Vietnam and Asia. You’ve updated so many books, you’ve done so many articles for various publications and airline magazines and independent publications. And so on. Can you tell a little about how that all evolved?
[00:13:44] Samantha: I think a lot of writers will say this: you’ve got to be good at marketing. You’ve got to have a little bit of swagger, because you’ve really got to sell yourself. So I arrived in Sydney with no job and no real contacts and supposed to be doing a marketing job and I want to be a travel writer and this is what I want to do. So I just started writing to a lot of people. I was writing to editors, CEOs of guidebooks. And the reason that the first guidebook I got was Rough Guides, this is an example: I wrote to the top dog and I said to him, I’ve just backpacked through Vietnam for three and a half months. I absolutely love it. Can I do some of your guidebooks? He wrote back and said, if you can prove you can do it, we’re actually going to be having to update our Vietnam book. So I had this sort of interview by writing a mock chapter and they liked it. Soon after I got sent back to Vietnam to update the Rough Guide to Vietnam book.
[00:14:36] Once you’ve done one, it does lead on to other things. And the more experience you get, then other editors will say, oh, you’ve done this. Or you’ve written a book. I ended up writing my first guidebook when I was living in Hanoi, which was the Inside Pocket Guide: Hanoi and Northern Vietnam. That was a lifetime dream to actually write my own guidebook. I was the author of that, an absolute joy to do, because it was all my contributions. When I was down in Saigon, I wrote my second guide book, which is a Smart Guide and I wrote the Ho Chi Minh City section and another writer wrote the Hanoi section. So that was my second guide book.
[00:15:17] Louise: In addition to all of the guides and the books that you’ve updated or solo written, you were also headhunted by the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism. I mentioned this in the introduction as well, to launch and then jointly run their English-language tourist magazine, Vietnam Discovery. You were the first foreigner employed full-time by that organization. And as the first foreigner, then you would have been the first female. Already you’ve got quite a bit of work under your belt, so you’ve got respect in the industry, but did you encounter any challenges as a foreign woman working for VNAT?
[00:16:00] Samantha: I did have challenges, but not like that. Vietnam is a matriarch society. Women are very respected. I’d say under the surface, they run the country and the person who headhunted me was a woman who is quite high up in the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, which is the government department of the tourism authority. She was highly respected. When I worked in Hanoi, I worked for that other tourism department for about two and a half years. Most of the employees were women. My immediate boss, the managing director was male. His boss was female. And then her boss was a very big wig in the VNAT.
[00:16:43] The challenge was being the first foreigner to work for that tourism department. This was 2002. They were still a bit nervous, I’d say, about foreigners coming in to work in that sort of position. I did find that maybe they didn’t quite know how to handle me in terms of the contract, the paperwork as such. My job description was a bit vague because this was a pioneering, English- language, monthly magazine. The team I worked with were very experienced in magazine production, but this was a new magazine. We had less than a month to set it up and launch it. Everything was very new and there was a lot of in-house politics.
[00:17:24] So that the female thing, no, not at all. I found I had a lot of respect within my team as a foreign writer and I was the editor or consultant in terms of what should go in. What’s the best thing that foreigners would like; what’s interesting content. And of course I had to sub-edit and proofread.
[00:17:45] Louise: Who was it written for?
[00:17:47] Samantha: It was written for tourists, traveling through Vietnam. You could get it in cafes, restaurants, tourism outlets. It was a lovely, friendly sort of glossy magazine. I wrote most of it. If the Vietnamese wrote articles about culture, which I wasn’t qualified for that, I’d edit it. And I did a lot of editing, but a lot of the content was mine and it was things like, where to travel. They did a restaurant or a feature about a certain destination. There was always bits on culture, but as I said, the Vietnamese reporters tend to write about that. There was a big expat community in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang, and they told me they really loved reading it because they knew that a foreigner was behind the text. So it was for tourists and expats.
[00:18:42] Louise: You mentioned glossy magazine. Now, when you mentioned that it just reminded me of another series of adventures that you had in Bali. Were you doing spa coverage for some glossy magazines?
[00:18:55] Samantha: Yes, something great coming out of something bad. I was quite happy in Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam, 2006 to 2010, I had lots of work. And then, Hey, the world financial crash came along in 2008. I had to make a decision about what do I do? My workload is going down. A lot of editors in the States, Canada, Europe, Asia, saying, no, we haven’t got any work, our budget’s cut, we’re reducing staff, etcetera, etcetera, and I had to make this very rash decision.
[00:19:29] Now by coincidence, I’d been traveling backwards and forwards to Bali on these quite amazing working holidays. Yeah. Working holidays. Quite a lot on the beach. Quite a lot of partying. And a little bit of work. But from 2008 to 2010, I’d been going back and forth to Bali. Yes, I had a fabulous time on the beach and enjoying myself, but I did quite a lot of networking and I realized there’s a lot of local magazines and the island was booming. 2010 onwards it was just an absolutely brilliant time to be there. Building a lot of boutique luxury resorts, world-class spas, beach clubs. It was moving away from the backpacking days. It was getting very sophisticated, very luxury.
[00:20:16] Within six weeks, I decided to move over to Bali and take a risk as I’d been living there quite a lot on working holidays while based in Ho Chi Minh City. I found that when I got to Bali the financial crash wasn’t effecting Bali, there was so much going on and I had all these contacts with international editors and they were calling the shots about what I should be covering. Bali’s got all this wonderful Hindu culture. It’s the island of wonderful temples. All they wanted me to write about was luxury spas, luxury resorts, hotels, the new up-and-coming beach clubs, the parties, the gourmet restaurants. That was what I was told to do.
Luxury spa assignment, AYANA Resort Spa on the Rocks, Bali, Indonesia
[00:21:01] I spent my time traveling around Bali sampling all the wonderful hotels, having spa treatments, trying all the food. I was a restaurant critic. I’d get assignments, they’d say, could you go and sample all the rooftop cocktail bars or the new beach clubs. I did a lot of luxury travel writing when I was living in Ho Chi Minh City, but this was all I was doing. If someone said to me, what’s your dream job, it’s reviewing luxury hotels and spas and that’s what I was doing.
[00:21:29] I did things like Condé Nast Spa Guides and Tatler and all these sort of up-market magazines, but that is what they wanted because Bali was really transitioning to this very sophisticated luxury place. A lot of international well-known brands were opening there. And in order to write a good review, you have to stay there and sample everything. It was a wonderful life doing that.
[00:21:54] Louise: And then you went back to Vietnam.
[00:21:56] Samantha: Yes. It’s funny that all the changes, all the movements I’m doing is not because I’m a lost soul with no direction. Everywhere I’ve moved has been for a reason. And I loved living in Bali. It really was a dream life. I lived within seven minutes walk of the beach. I had a wonderful social life. I had all this luxury travel writing and it was wonderful, but the media industry was changing quite a bit. There was a lot more competition for me. I’m quite a bit of an old-school writer, a lot of, uh, bloggers Instagrammers, social media coming out. There was less work, a lot more competition. And I decided that I just love living on Bali, but I had to find more security in terms of a job where I’d be writing, but I’d have an actual paid salary. And I think a lot of writers will relate to that.
[00:22:50] There was also the volcano which erupted on Bali. That distracted my work because editors were saying it’s a bit precarious in Bali at the moment. The Bali market got saturated. There’s a lot of writers writing about Bali. It was a perfect storm. So I reluctantly left, but I moved back to Ho Chi Minh City, which I know very well because I’d already lived there for about five years and I got a job, full-time writer, but a different angle as a senior marketing content writer and editor. And it was writing website content, but still covering Southeast Asia. I got the job because they knew I had four decades of traveling through Southeast Asia and living in Southeast Asia for 19 successive years. And as well as Vietnam, I ended up writing a lot of other destinations.
[00:23:42] Louise: One of the things that strikes me as you talk about this journey of writing and moving is that basically, you’ve been your own agent living your life independently. Can you talk a bit about what it’s been like for you to have this life as a solo adventurer, which isn’t to say that you haven’t had relationships along the way, but that you’ve chosen a life that’s still somewhat unconventional and pretty darn intrepid?
Samantha arriving by seaplane to Moyo Island, Eastern Indonesia 2013
[00:24:11] Samantha: I think a lot of other full-time writers will understand this: you have to be pretty single-minded about everything. And I’m so passionate about travel and writing. It’s been my life. I’m a great believer in fate and destiny, if someone truly worthy came along, then I’d have to drop everything or work around being a writer. But so far that hasn’t happened. I’ve just gone from country-to-country and love what I’ve done. I’ve loved the writing. I’ve loved to travel. I’ve got immersed in the culture. I think that’s kept me captivated.
[00:24:48] People say, have you got a husband? I say, travel is my husband. People say, have you got any children? And I say I’ve got 90 million of them, as in Vietnam. It’s my big baby. To do this, you have to be single-minded. But even in Bali, I was going out and had a great social life, but I’d spend Saturday night researching stuff for my article. You’ve got deadlines. You’ve got to research. You’ve got to do a lot of traveling, moving round. Who knows, maybe a partner couldn’t really handle that.
[00:25:16] Of course I’ve had relationships, but there’s been people that have been left behind because this has been, for me, all consuming. I’m slowing down. I’m open to anything that might change that, but it has been a real tour de force in my life.
[00:25:32] Louise: A few weeks ago, you emailed me a list of some of the highlights of your adventures. And in the limited amount of time that we’ve had here today, you’ve just scratched the surface. I know that you’ve jammed an enormous amount into your life. The places you’ve been; the freedom you’ve had to live out your dreams. What will you do with all these amazing experiences? Is part of the next phase of your life recounting your personal journey somehow?
[00:26:00] Samantha: Funny you should mention that Louise, because it’s always something I wanted to do. And now I’m coming to the end chapter as such, I really want to write this all up in my memoirs: Anthony Bourdain exposé about being a freelance travel writer in Asia Pacific. It’s going to be something very funny and very fast pace. It’s not going to be me finding myself and naval gazing. It’s very much packed with anecdotes and humor. I don’t have any imagination, but I really don’t need it. You couldn’t make this stuff up. I have so many stories and things to pack in. I sometimes think that I attract crazy moments and quirkiness and fun times so I could write a book about 23 years living in Asia Pacific as a travel writer.
[00:26:53] Louise: I’m glad that you mentioned Anthony Bourdain, because that was exactly the person that was coming to my mind. And one of the things that I wanted to briefly touch on is that the Anthony Bourdains of the world get a lot of attention because they’re men doing these crazy fun, extraordinary things, traveling all around the world, but keeping in touch with you all these years, in the early days, it was these long letters that you would write me and then it was email, and then I was following your blog on LinkedIn, your stories to me, they’re the Anthony Bourdain stories from a woman’s perspective. So I really do hope that you write that memoir.
[00:27:34] Samantha: I do hope to write that because it’ll be a good read. I really want to make people laugh.
[00:27:39] Louise: Good on you. And then as we finish up, please tell listeners your LinkedIn address.
[00:27:45] Samantha: Yes, so the best way to find out more about me, my blog site and my writing, just go on LinkedIn under Samantha Coomber. You’ll find all my details there.
[00:27:56] Louise: Thanks so much. And thank you for being available this evening.
[00:27:59] Samantha: Thank you Louise for this opportunity, it’s been great to chat. And thank you for allowing me to share my amazing journey and hopefully it’ll inspire other women to pursue their dreams. Thank you so much.
[00:28:14] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And if you would like to read a transcript of this episode, you can find it in the show notes on my website, LouiseRoss.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser