Scott POWELL LEDGER STAFF WRITER A bag filled with Trung Nguyen coffee is sitting on my work desk waiting for me to feel a sense of adventure and actually open it.

I’man avid coffee drinker dating back to my high school years and rarely begin a morning without a cup of coffee. I normally drink the common grocery store coffee blends, sparked by an occasional expresso shot if I’m facing a long day at the office.

My parents gave me Vietnamese coffee after returning last Monday from a 3-week biking vacation in Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. I never expected anyone I knew to ever go for a vacation in these three countries.

My memory is perhaps colored by themany Vietnam War movies, history textbooks and other reading I have done about an unpopular war in American history.

My interest in learning more about Vietnam was further piqued when I read the book “Upcountry” by Nelson DeMille several years ago.

DeMille served as a U.S. Army lieutenant during the Vietnam War. He returned with two friends to Vietnam for several weeks in 1998 where they traveled down memory lane while revisiting places from their military service time in Vietnam.

He wove his wartime and vacation experiences together with some fictional invention.

The result was a thriller about a military policeman who finds himself looking for a murderer in that changed land. He is aided by a female CIA operative who speaks Vietnamese and is knowledgeable about the culture. She has figured out a way to at least partially control him with her womanly charms, but eventually finds herself on his side against the authoritarian officials left from the previous decades and some equally unethical U.S. Government ones.

While the book was an interesting read, it did not necessarily giveme any real desire to visit Vietnam beyond a passing thought about seeing some of the old battle sites.

My parents describe their trip as an exciting adventure that ranks among the most memorable vacations they have experienced in what I have taken to calling their “world retirement tour.” They encountered villages where people are still living much like their ancestors did thousands of years ago, making their living off the land by fishing and harvesting crops such as rice.

Major clues to being in the present century are the cell phones everywhere, television in the most remote villages, and the small motors that power motorbikes and boats.

These motor bikes are major air polluters, filling major population areas with concentrations of smog. Many wear masks, not that they help much.

In spite of the strong efforts of communists to minimalize the impact of religion, Buddhist temples are everywhere. They are on large grounds and are richly decorated with young men evident as priests.

Most of the lettering on the Trung Nguyen coffee sitting onmy desk is Vietnamese. Along with the coffee, I was given a small stainless steel strainer designed to sit on a coffee cup. The words on the box are written in English so I have a starting point.

Apparently, all I have to do is take a teaspoon of coffee and place it above the coffee cup. It’s then a matter of pouring hot water and dropping in a stainless steel lid. The coffee is Robusta, a variety different from the Arabica coffee we usually drink. Robusta grows better in the warm climate of the Vietnam mountains. The flavor is said to be a bit different, adding to the adventure.

Many Asians now prefer coffee to tea. Maybe I can find out why.

Since I enjoy complex tastes in food and drink, I am sure drinking my first cup of Vietnamese coffee will be another unique experience. It’s just one more example of how our world is shrinking, and how traditional cultural barriers are erased with the passage of time.