In Xach Ba Lo Len va Di (Take a Backpack and Go), Nguyen Thi Khanh Huyen
describes her “unbelievable” two-year trip through Asia and Africa on a
budget of 700 USD.
Her story was so “unbelievable”
that Vietnamese audiences didn’t believe it. “Applying for visas alone
costs that much. You couldn’t survive on 700 USD. She’s definitely
lying,” one commenter wrote on Facebook.
But the
Hanoi native, who goes by the nickname Huyen Chip, insists she is
telling the truth. At a recent book introduction, she showed dubious
readers her passport and went into painstaking detail about her journey.
“I want to make clear that 700 USD was my initial
budget when I started the trip in 2010,” Huyen said. “I planned 25,000
USD for the trip and asked a company to sponsor me, but I eventually
refused the funding because of the sponsor’s requirements. So I had to
work many different jobs.”
She recounted writing for
websites such as walyou.com, which paid 10 USD or 15 USD per story,
working as an MC at a casino in Tanzania for 150 USD a week and doing
acting gigs in Bollywood for 500 rupees. At times, she survived on only 5
USD a day.
In response to the visa question, she
said it was “so easy” to obtain a visa in countries like Nepal, Zimbabwe
and Tanzania. However, her application was refused in Pakistan and
Africa and she could not get permission to cross into Sudan from Egypt,
so she ended up in Ethiopia.
“I went to 30 countries
with diplomatic passports, but that does not compare to her trip to
Africa. I have to take my hat off to her courage,” Professor Nguyen Lan
Dung wrote in the introduction.
Nguyen Hoang Anh, a
lecturer at the Hanoi Foreign Trade University, checked the truth of
Huyen’s story along with Dung by verifying the stamps on her passport.
“I’ve travelled to 40 countries in the world and I
believe that Huyen is telling the truth. We checked her passport and saw
seals from Thailand, India, Nepal, Bolivia, Zambia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and
Tanzania,” Anh said. “Plus, a good travel story is meant to inspire
readers more than anything. In the end, nobody knows if the story of
Robinson Crusoe is true.”
But a student at the Hanoi
Foreign Trade University pointed out that the Robinson Crusoe story is a
novel, while Huyen’s trip is allegedly a diary.
Questioned by a representative of an online forum, vozforums.com, on how
she was able to get a visa to Israel, Huyen replied that she could not
explain how she did, but stood by her story. “Africa taught me the skill
of acceptance. If you cannot prove that I lied, you should believe me,”
she said.-VNA