Seeing a Beloved Slice of Southeast Asia Anew on an Oceania Cruise

It’s 10 p.m. and I’m riding pillion on a vintage Vespa through the traffic-choked streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Hair is lashing my face and sweat is pouring off my brow. My baby-faced driver doesn’t speak a lick of English, nor I Vietnamese, but I know my euphoric smile says it all: I’m having the time of my life.

A younger me might have recoiled at the idea of whizzing through this buzzy hornet’s nest of motorbikes on an organized tour, sampling frogs’ legs with fish sauce in one district and wood-fired shrimp crepes in another. Back then I lived out of a 35-liter rucksack, pinballing through dozens of countries as a “digital nomad” a decade before Instagram made the label so loathsome.

The Insignia floats off the coast of Koh Samui

Ulf Svane

Taking in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, from the back of a Vespa

Ulf Svane

Yet here I am: 41, married with a toddler, 80-plus countries under my belt, and more open-minded than ever. Eleven days prior I had boarded Oceania Cruises’ Insignia, an elegant 670-passenger ocean liner refurbished in 2018, for a 15-day, 5-country tour of Southeast Asia that would end in Bangkok, where I had lived in my 30s. To amp up this already-ambitious itinerary, I reached out to cruise expert Mary Jean Tully, founder and CEO of Tully Luxury Travel and one of Traveler‘s longest-running Top Travel Specialists. The Vespa tour in Ho Chi Minh City was her doing—as was the Raffles Singapore, which she recommended for pre-embarkation.

When I land at Singapore’s Changi Airport, I am bowled over by the humidity; somehow it’s always heavier than I remember. The Raffles’s breezy marble colonnades are a welcome respite, as are the rosy pink Singapore slings, invented here at the Long Bar in 1915 by Hainanese bartender Ngiam Tong Boon. Flinging peanut shells onto the tile floor, punkah fans waving lazily overhead, I watch workers shake and strain sling after ginny sling and wonder if they ever get to make anything else.

Soon after, I’m aboard the Insignia, watching as the Lion City shrinks away. Roaming its corridors, I immediately notice the souvenir magnets (Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Dubai) on several stateroom doors. I’m intrigued to discover that only 150 of the 535 guests boarded in Singapore. Most everyone else are world cruisers, a.k.a. WCs, traveling 180 days from San Francisco. They’re like The Real World at sea, with all the cliques and conflicts that suggests. “You learn quickly who the complainers are and how to avoid them,” one WC tells me over fresh sushi and a hand-carved roast. She tells me likes us segmenters, a.k.a. segmentarians, a.k.a. segmentalists, because we bring “fresh blood” to the ship.