Vietnam

Vietnam is one of the last bastions of communism on earth and before I got here I was daunted by a preconceived prospect of austerity and totalitarian police dogging my every step. Traveler's opinions didn't help either. A large majority of journey men and women seemed to agree that the country is beautiful but the constant hassle of avoiding being ripped off by the Vietnamese community is so dreadful that it ruins the trip.

The way I've experienced it, reality is very different.

As soon as we crossed the border and got in town, we had the very pleasant surprise to hit the jackpot at the ATM and became instant millionaires (in Dong though). I wonder if the inflated currency thing is part of Communist countries' propaganda across the world to make their subjects feel rich.

That said, if anything is pervasive in this country, it's the concern of the Vietnamese for your well being. Let me share with you a soundbite of what you get as soon as you cross the border:

"Yo!...Yo! Motorbike, Yo?!"

"Yo! Wanna buy some postcards Yo?!"

"Yo!..... Yo!..... want boum-boum with Vietnamese woman, Yo?!"

"Yo! boring day today. Please open your heart... and your wallet !"

They have an acute sense of humor and challenge you at all times. If you stay cool, play the game and have fun with them, they just love it. You don't need to buy anything, just crack a few jokes and they might invite you over for some drinks at theirs, which is not recommended for both children and recovering alcoholics (I'll have a few words on that later).

Ana, Luis and I stayed a few days in the Mekong Delta, which is a wonderful area.People are remarkably friendly and welcoming. They shake hands with you, greet you warmly, smile, touch your arms and face and sometimes even ask for permission to take a photograph of you, as if you were some superstar (or more likely some weird alien).

In Vietnam, wherever there's a river, there are boats; and wherever there are boats, there are river tours. The three of us boarded a private long tail boat for a 10 hour day trip through floating markets, rice fields and mangroves bordering the Mekong. The sights were awesome. Afterwards, our next stop on the map was quite logically…

Saigon

Saigon, oops sorry, I mean Ho Chi Minh City, is worlds apart from any city in Vietnam, big brash and noisy. As soon as we arrived, our bus was flanked by hotel touts and cabbies, a sure sign of incipient greed. Taxi drivers are notorious for their "sticky fingers" when it comes to returning change as the one we picked made us discover. We had gotten in town at around midnight, a time at which finding shelter proves to be a tedious affair. Just as we were about to immolate ourselves on the street out of desperation, Luis found us a place for just $10 a night in a clean guest house downtown.


Ana and Luis

Saigon has reasserted itself as the materialistic den of vice that it once was during the so called "American War". As an indication of what this place is like, the waitresses in all the bars wear short skirts and tight tops. Librarians around here have diverted and are in the business of selling weed and other sorts of recreational pharmaceuticals smuggled in their books. Everybody is making a quick buck while the going is good.

Westerners believing they can "get lucky" with a Vietnamese woman hitting on them in a bar for a quick free one night stand are fooling themselves. The chances of the smiling lady not being a "taxi-girl" are just as slim as the odds for Sadam to be asked by W. to please have a shave, go back to his country and clean up the mess there.

I sure as hell got stuck in "Ho" way much longer than I intended to. The reason being that during my visit to the waterfalls near Bokor in Cambodia weeks earlier, I had to deal with a fairly horrible setback. The straps of my camera case snapped without warning and sent them tumbling down on rocks five meters down!




It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the warranty doesn't cover damage caused by the device accidentally crashing down from a cliff so I sucked it in and brought them to a dodgy repair shop in Saigon. While my digital homies were undergoing surgery at the Nikon intensive care center, I kicked around town without any specific goal.

The city is not nearly as dangerous as it once was and the idea of living on the edge is more or less a product of the traveler's imagination. Traffic however, is somewhat nerve wrecking. Road rules in Vietnam seem to break down into a simple concept: "small yields to big". Period.

In such ecosystem, pedestrians are quite logically considered the lowest species in the traffic food chain. I found out about that whilst crossing the street one morning, literately swarmed by thousands of moppets. A bastard rider, probably craving for some seaweed breakfast, zoomed straight towards me. My life flashed before my eyes as it became clear he wouldn't let me get away unharmed for the supreme arrogance of my being on his "line". In a desperate attempt to survive, I decided that the best policy was to arch my back matador style. I felt him blow past less than an inch away from my shirt. Ole!

As you travel across the country it becomes clear that the motorcycle is the backbone of the Vietnamese economy. I spent a full day on a terrace just enjoying the absurdity of the street life show. I'll just list a few of my favorite motorcycle carriages:

• A full size American fridge (held upwards),
• A 15 meter pole precariously balancing in the passengers hands,
• An entire family of six,
• A full load of about 60 chicken hanging all around the driver (lotsof beaks scratching the road),
• A huge tree strapped to the front of the bike and another one to theback of it with a driver trying to peek trough the leaves (my personal hero)

This is a very entertaining way to kill time, but unfortunately I couldn't freeze the moment. After five days of hanging out there, Doctor Nikon gave me the grim look of a man who could not perform the job. Shit!

I decided to lift camp and bought a bus ticket from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi with stops in Mui Ne, Nah Trang, Hoi An, Hue, Hanoi. This ride covers about 3000 kilometers and set me back a whopping 18$...You can imagine this put a serious dent in my budget.

The bus is called the open tour; you couldn't get around Nam cheaper by walking. The bus operates at loss. Their profit comes from kickbacks they get from a network of hotels and restaurants along the way. In all fairness, it's a bit dreadful. "This is the lunch place; we're stopping here for twenty minutes, you can buy marble handicrafts and watch the sea, everybody off". Yuk, vomit. This isn't traveling; this is what you do when you're sixty. A few hours later: "Thirty minutes to visit the museum, everybody off!" Screw that, I'm off to the bar.

Mui Ne

Being the only person of a packed bus to get of at the Mui Ne beach resort, I grew a bit suspicious about the quality of the place. It was late at night, the shots were called, no way to flake out of it.

Mui Ne is indeed a long stretch of white sand beach with coconut trees bent down towards the sea as I'd seen on the pictures. However, I've never been to such a boring place in my life. Nothing there to kill time with while I was waiting for the first bus to Nah Trang.

Well these statements aren't completely true. First, it's much better to just sit here sipping watermellon shakes on the beach then getting your arms twisted by some fired up Head of Procurement atone of your customers in Europe; second, there is always a television around featuring a Holliwood blockbuster. The problems with the latter in Vietnam is that for budget reasons, voice-overs are performed by a single person, male or female.
You can imagine that seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme with a female Vietnamese voice is quite funny (even though the guy is already a clown when he's natural).

Nha Trang

Nha Trang is Vietnam's only serious attempt at a seaside resort. It's a sizable place, with a large sweep of sandy beach, lined with restaurants and bars. However, for most of the time I was there, it was so windy you couldn't even walk on the beach without risking transforming yourself into a human kite. As we all know, seaside resorts with crap climate are no fun at all. I whiled away some time reading a book in a beach bar where the food was mediocre and the service sucked. The little quality of my time there was ruined by the constant flow of vagrants begging around the tables.

I camped out in the cafe all day, socializing with some new faces. I met Claire and Kelly, from Connecticut, and we planned our escape together. We were pretty much on the same page as far as the Open Bus Tour was considered. We decided to skip the terrible journey and made plans to travel independently to Hoi An, something that doesn't reallysit well with the government.


Claire

We called upon the services of a bunch of blokes referring to themselves as the "easy riders". These guys independently run a semi-legal operation cashing in on tourists eager to break away from the beaten track. Their command of English is good enough to last a few days and their knowledge of the country's back roads is second to none. The 500 kilometer ride however takes three full days on the back of a 100cc moppet. Sore butt upon arrival is not even optional, it is guaranteed.

These three chaps were a great company and wonderful guides taking us into authentic Vietnam. The fact that they faced torture in case any harm would happen to us during this not so legal adventure must have played a part in their patronizing. They took care of everything. We felt like kids traveling with our parents again.

They were a good laugh too. I soon found out at the expense my aspirin supply that Vietnamese men take their drinking very seriously. "Want to go beers, Rem?"

Sure!

There was no way I could've known that the invitation meant they'd order a full case of 24 beers for me to drench my thirst and get tanked. Toasting every minute or less, the tempo was solid. "To a happy future…. Chuk Mung! … Hips!.... Chuk Mung Hoi An"

(Just for the record, I bailed out after a third of the crate)

Next day, we cruised to My Lai

My Lai, a small village on the way, saw one of the worst atrocities of the war, and is a very moving place. It was a small village which the US suspected of harboring Viet Cong guerrillas, so in March 1968 they sent in three companies of soldiers to identify the VC and eliminate them. Thus began one of the most brutal episodes in the war. Under thecommand of Lieutenant Calley, the soldiers began rounding up villagers from their huts, which they then burned to the ground. That day they shot 504 villagers in cold blood, then burned their crops and burned the bodies to try and cover their tracks.

A US army photographer recorded events for official records, but only handed over one of his four films to the authorities. The other shots found their way into the hands of the press, and thus aroused public outrage at what had happened, a defining moment for the US war effort. The photographs are on display inside the small onsite museum; these pictures are horrifying to look at. It made me both sad and angry; as I'm sure it's intended to do.

Hoi An

Arriving in Hoi An, after three full days on the bikes, my butt was about to fire me so I felt I'd reached the point where I really deserved to kick back, settle in for a few days and simply relax. I felt I'd chosen the right place to do so… Hoi An is a nice Tuscany style town with very nice old buildings, a nice market and a nice river - and therefore too many damn tourists! The "easy riders" hung out with us for another evening. I dodged the invitation to get plastered again and went to bed early.

Because the town was relatively untouched by the American War, it serves as a living museum of Vietnamese history. It contains colonial houses, pagodas, Vietnamese and Chinese temples and tombs (Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese... an indication of who's been hanging around in these parts).
Vietnamese across the country seem to be little concerned with creativity and originality. They've instead focused their efforts on being the supreme leaders at the art of copying. This culture is displayed in all it's living glory across Hoi An, where virtually 200 dressmakers shops tailor-make designer clothes straight from magazines for just about the price of the cloth. A full wardrobe would cost just over 100$. Endless stalls of pirated CD's and DVD's flood the streets.

Virtually 99 percent of what's on display is copied. The government has promised to crack down on the practice, but it's not recommended for infuriated trademark owners to hold their breath waiting, since the word copyright means fuck all around here. I mean when they even copy mineral water labels, what are you going to do?

Vietnamese go to bed early to hold on to their reputation of early risers. The third night I spent in Hoi An was quite thrilling. I got back to the guest house around midnight and I brushed noiselessly past the usual family bunking under their mosquito nets in the hallway, all snoring the night away in order to make it on time for the national 5 O'clock wake-up call.

As I walked into my room and flicked on the light I was transfixed in horror as see a big rat run from under my bed towards the bathroom! It was easily one foot long, no joke!I tried chasing it out of the room by throwing flip-flops at it, hoping it would run for the door, but to no avail. Instead of doing so, it ran across the room to seek refuge under my bed again. When I spotted it a split second later trying to hide behind the bed table, I seized the opportunity and kicked into the furniture so hard that my toes filed for divorce.

The second blow must have been fatal. Spotting no more movement for a few minutes, I peeked behind the table and saw it lying there stiff…dead. It took me about ten minutes amounting sufficient courage to dispose of the corpse myself. I was already deeply committed at that stage and voted against interrupting the local's cozy sleep. I somehow now start to understand how John Rambo became, well hum... Rambo!

I've beefed up my workout schedule, strapped a hunting knife around my ankle and never leave my machine gun unloaded as I get to my room.

I've always been notorious for my rodent phobia. I don't know about you, but I just don't dig rats. Well, the episode of that night, combined with the numerous encounters I've had with the filthy buggers in Vietnam, seems to have cured thefear once and for all. Don't get me wrong, I still consider rats disgusting creatures, but I must concede I did feel sorry for murdering the poor thing cold bloodedly, especially since it was probably the most seniorinmate in the guest house. I spent another couple of nights in Hoi An, hanging out on the beach with Kristine, a very pretty and hilarious girl from Wisconsin, whom I'm traveling with ever since and will probably do so for the coming weeks.

Hue

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Hue has a reputation of creating the best conical hats in the country. The purpose of conical hats had escaped me until I got here. Sure they provided picturesque photo ops in the rice fields, but what else? Well it suddenly struck me that they must have been designed for tall foreigners to cover the ugly bruises gained by banging our heads on those damn low doorframes seven times a day.

Hue is just south of the 17th parallel, the old demarcation between North and South Vietnam. Unfortunately, being so close to the border, it was almost completely destroyed in the Tet offensive of 1968 and subsequent counter-attack by the Americans. Very little remain of the heritage so there's not much to see.

Ironically, the war that destroyed the old city has created its main tourist attraction today. Every day, bus loads of foreigners travel north to the DMZ ("demilitarized-zone", for the non IBMers amongst you), the heavily mined frontier area and location of numerous US firebases which saw some of the most ferocious fighting in the American war. We joined in this tour, not really sure what we were expecting to see.

You do see the occasional rusty American military hardware, set in some scenic landscape but layed out in no context whatsoever.

It actually just looked like a bunch of fields with a few peasants, continuing a bucolic existence. Our guide tried his best to spice things up "American planes dropped over 70,000 tons of defoliant on Vietnam, and that is why to this date you see few trees in this area". Oh really, how interesting.

"This rock pile was an American guard post with heavy artillery. Everyone get off the bus now to take a picture". It looked just like a mountain to me.

"Khe San is where the Americans had a large runway and lots of artillery positions that were besieged for 77 days, but there's nothing left now". Great!

Some enterprising locals equipped with metal detectors were trying to sell various war remnants, including some old US army dog tags. Whether fake or not, it was pretty macabre.

The highlight of the DMZ tour was a trip to the Vinh Moc tunnels, where an entire North Vietnamese village lived underground to escape annihilation from American bombs. It's an amazing achievement, with over 1600m of tunnels. About 3000 people lived their troglodyte life for over four years. "A number of people were even born down here".

At the former Khe Sanh firebase, there is a small museum, which documents how the base was attacked by the NVA. The captions under the photos are quite amusing; "One of the artillery batteries used by the glorious North Vietnamese Army to rain terror and hellfire on the enemy", or "The enemy tries to continue his miserable life under constant attack from the NVA", or "American GIs in panic run for their lives after their pathetic assault".

The museum obviously presents a somewhat one-sided view, but you can't help but admire the resolve of these people in the face of a technologically superior enemy and feel sorry for the enormous human cost of this superpower game that was played out on their soil. Despite all this, most Vietnamese seem to have put the war behind them and I can honestly say they are amongst the friendliest most genuine people I have encountered on my travels.

Hanoi

Hanoi is a wonderful place that just doesn't feel like a capital city. Its architecture is mostly low-rise colonial French villas, which amazingly escaped damage from the vast tonnage of US bombs dropped during the war. The city streets are buzzing with noisy swarms of moppets, market traders and shops.
Each street seems to have its specialty, one for grave stones, and one for motorbike seats, another one for sunglasses (this has to be the street where the cops buy them in case the police force's dark sunglasses aren't government issued).

One of the must-see sights in Hanoi is the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum where you can see 'Uncle Ho' in the flesh. In a tradition set by other famous Communist leaders across the Soviet Union and China and despite his will requesting cremation, Ho Chi Minh's embalmed body is displayed in a somewhat eerie glass sarcophagus. The line of Vietnamese paying respect to their former leader's white beard at this pilgrimage site is quite long and fast moving. The macabre spectacle attracts heaps of people, and is only interrupted three month per year, when the mummy is sent to Russia for maintenance!

From Hanoi, we took the express train, which is not at all fast by Western standards. The term 'express' is relative. It means it goes faster than the local trains (which average 20kmh), but not much. It's a long 10 hour journey, so we opted for the sleeper. It was quite comfortable, and attendants bring round beers and other drinks, so it was also very enjoyable way to travel north to
Sapa



Sapa is a hill tribe village close to the border with China. It reminds me of a place called Riederalp in Switzerland with thedifference that in this place, the 'O puffing locals wear colorful garments and greet the day with a stiff hit on a home rolled cheroot or a waterpipe before they proceed with their daily routine of selling crafts on the market.





Sapa hilltribe woman

Kristine and I got here yesterday morning and are seeking refuge from the stinging cold mountain weather in this little dank internet café overlooking the hills.

Just as we thought we'd escaped them once and for all in this remote village, we came to realize there's a Karaoke bar right next door. Damn!Karaoke has taken over Asia and to most Westerners it is just as appealing as fried rat on a stick with red chili sauce. The locals love karaoke just as much as their beers. Usually the bars feature top notch sound systems. No matter how good the equipment, it will only sound as good as the singer's ability which, apart from occasional exceptions, is truly awful.

Once we're done hanging out here another couple of days, our visas will get close to expiration date. Our last spot in Vietnam will be Halong Bay and then we'll cruise off to the Yunnan province in southern China.


Halong Bay

My frozen fingers are about to fall off my hands as I've been typing this for hours. The internet café's owner is glowing as he's looking at my wallet. This has bad news written all over it so I'll leave it here for now.

I'll keep you guys in touch.

Chuk Mong !

Rem.