Metro Vancouverite travels the 'flower-child' way to every country in the world
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 21:37:15 +0000
Cosmopolitan by upbringing, Duc Nguyen has spent a lifetime globe-trotting.
Born in North Vietnam, the Hanoi native started trekking when he was 14. Now almost 80, he has spent close to 66 years travelling around the world. And he’s lived in Metro Vancouver for almost half a century.
This past summer, Nguyen completed a major goal: during a month-long trip to Oceania, he finished visiting every recognized country in the world.
Nguyen hasn’t done it the easy way. Whenever possible, he’s avoided flying, preferring to go by land.
“I travel in the ‘flower-child’ way,” he said, referring to the 1960s term for a hippie who wore flowers as a sign of peace and love. “That means with a backpack, overland, with trains, hitchhiking, everything — and avoiding flying when not necessary.”
For many years, he travelled with the woman he calls the love of his life: his wife of 52 years, Marlene Bockmann Nguyen. But because she doesn’t share his travel bug, he’ ha spent the past 15 years travelling by himself.
In addition to speaking English and Spanish, Nguyen has taught school in French and speaks German with his wife.
“We’re cosmopolitan,” he said in his Burnaby home located near Lougheed Mall. “International, you know?”
By the time he was 26, he had been on the road since leaving home a dozen years earlier.
He has been interviewed and written about on his journeys by several publications, including one story in the Irish News and Belfast Morning News on Saturday, Feb. 19, 1996 as he was leaving for Iceland.
“I love Ireland very much,” he’s quoted as saying. “Is it always so cold?”
Duc Nguyen looks through one of the many photo albums that document his world travels.
He says he has visited the 195 countries recognized by the United Nations, as well as other territories and regions such as Palestine and Greenland.
This past summer, he completed his goal by visiting the South Pacific countries of Nauru, Fiji and Tuvalu. Along the way, he stopped in Wallis and Futuna and the Cook Islands.
Nguyen has kept meticulous records of his peripatetic life. As a trained teacher, he has recorded all the schools where he has volunteered and taught, and has dozens of albums with thousands of photographs of himself with fellow travellers and locals. Many are “selfies” before the term was coined.
They show him with his shirt off drinking beer with Ukrainians, standing in front of a temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, riding a horse in Mongolia, standing without a jacket in front of a pile of sea ice in Iceland, being served a lamb’s head in Sana’a, Yemen, and holding a couple of coconuts in Seychelles.
Over six decades of trekking, he said international travel has become increasingly difficult because of bureaucratic requirements for visas and heightened security at airports and border crossings.
He is always on the lookout for what is unique about a city and region. On his recent trip to Nauru, for example, he saw something he had never witnessed before: when the infrequent planes finish landing or taking off from the runway in the tiny country, children use the level flat surface as a soccer field.
Nguyen isn’t giving up completely on travelling, but said his next destination is up to his wife.
“I want to take her on a luxury cruise around the world, anywhere,” he said. “She chooses.”
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