Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I'd like to talk about Pu Luong, a nature reserve in Thanh Hoa province, about four hours' drive south-west of Hanoi. I went there last June with two friends, right after we'd all finished a brutal set of exams. We stayed in a wooden stilt house run by a Thai family in a small village halfway up a valley. It cost a hundred and fifty thousand dong a night each, and the bed was a thin mattress under a mosquito net, but the view more than made up for it: rice terraces dropping away below us in every shade of green, with limestone mountains behind. We didn't do anything ambitious. On the first morning we walked about eight kilometres along a dirt track to see some huge bamboo water wheels, and on the way back we got caught in a downpour and sheltered in a stranger's kitchen, where the grandmother handed us boiled corn without saying a word. In the afternoons we swam under a small waterfall and at night we just lay on the veranda listening to frogs. What I loved about it was the absence of things. There was hardly any phone signal, no karaoke, no traffic, and by the second day I noticed I'd stopped reaching for my pocket every five minutes. My friend Duc, who usually can't sit still, said, 'I think my brain has finally shut up,' and that was exactly how it felt. I came back to Hanoi with muddy trainers and about forty mosquito bites, but calmer than I'd been all year, and I've already promised myself I'll go back at harvest time, when the terraces turn gold.