Vietnam Redux, Part Three - The Coast and Hue

A few hours north of Hội An was our next destination Hue. To get there we all loaded into a small van and headed north.  Along the way we stopped at Da Nang, a familiar name from the Vietnam War.  Over two millennia Da Nang has had many different names, and different occupiers.  It is the fifth largest city in Vietnam and has always been a key port, for the Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, French and US.  Da Nang was the principal port of entry for the US occupation.  During that time the airport was the busiest in the world.  

US Military coming ashore on Da Nang beach.

Bill on same beach today (I at least wade in every body of water I visit)

Da Nang waterfront skyline rivals any modern urban beach city

Hue has been settled for over 20,000 years, and has been an independent nation for two millennia.  It was the imperial capital from the early nineteenth century through the French occupation to the end of the monarchy in 1945.  Its walled palace is called the Imperial City and faces the Perfume River.  

Entry to the Imperial City

The fashion of Hue set the standard for what we consider traditional Vietnamese.  

Young ladies at the Imperial City

Wedding couple with more historic outfits

In the Imperial City gardens

An unrestored gate within the Imperial City.  Its color and architecture reminded us of Angor Wat in neighboring Cambodia.

Temple in the Imperial City

Restored detail of column with Chinese influence

The emperor's palace, a combination of French Rococo and Vietnamese

Quite excessively ornate but of that period for Emperors

The Library for the emperor's private study.  

After our touring of the Palace in the evening we went for a home cooked dinner.  The family has owned their own home for several generations and their extended family lives with them.  They have dinner every night together.  Too much togetherness.  

In 1963 the US backed South Vietnamese government of Dinh Diem, who was a member of the minority Catholic population.  He instituted policies that favored the Catholics for public office, military advancement and land allocations while persecuting the majority Buddhists. Thích Quảng Đức, a monk who was born in Hue traveled to the capital of Sai-Gon with two fellow monks.  They notified the press that "something important" would happen at a particular intersection.  Very few press showed up as there had been many buddhist protests.  

Over 350 local monks created a cordon around him while his traveling companions placed a mat at the center of the intersection and poured gasoline over him and lit it.   Thích Quảng Đức stayed in his meditative position while the flames engulfed him until he fell over backward and was consumed.  However, while his heart was charred, it remained intact as evidence of his holiness.  

Self immolation of the monk in Sai Gon

Note the car in the background that was driven from Hue to Sai Gon

One of the few journalists that did show up was the intrepid David Halberstam who wrote:

"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think ... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."

And John Kennedy noted:  "no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one".

Original Car in Hue

Hue during Vietnam War

The rest of our time in Hue was considerable less grisly.  Despite the craziness of traffic and prevalence of motorcycles weaving through traffic, our tour company arranged for us to take motorcycle tour of the city and countryside.  This was probably our favorite activity of the trip.  I've told Robin many times that I learned to reduce stress and fear when I am not in control in a risky situation (like traffic in Asia) by pretending I'm playing a video game. I imagine the world that I'm seeing is only a video screen and if I crash I'll just hit the "reset button" and all will be good.  Obviously, it doesn't reduce the danger, but it does make the time much more pleasurable.  

Robin leaving a stop after visiting a temple

Robin learning to make incense sticks at a stop

My Driver

At the end of our tour, we packed up for an overnight train to Ha Noi.  I think the reason I look forward to train rides in developing countries is it feels like another era away from the tourism and modernization of major cities.  This train met my expectation of traveling the rails.  

Robin and I outside Hue train station.

Our approaching train. Quite different after the Shinkansen of Japan.  

There were no single occupancy sleeping cabins, only couchettes with four shared bunkbeds.  We were paired with another couple on our tour from Newfoundland, Canada.  I was fine with sharing a couchette for the "travel experience", but the other three wanted to see if we could pay an extra for privacy.  After checking with TV the train was booked and even if one was available there was no guarantee that someone might not get on enroute and occupy the open beds.  As it turned out, we all managed just fine - we were asleep!

Barry, Crystal and Robin in our Couchette.  The boys took the top bunk.

If you've ever traveled over night by train that is laid out with cabins rather than open seating you know that the corridor is where to hang out.  You literally bump into the most fascinating people and strike up conversations.  Outside our room were two Aussie mates in their mid to late twenties, drinking beer of course.  These young men were not taking a Gap Year or bumming the world as many do.  They were college buddies with steady jobs that periodically need to go Walk-About.  They now live in different cities and just a couple weeks before decided impromptu to go to Vietnam.  While our train ride was about twelve hours overnight, they started on the train in Sai Gon.  Their journey would be over 30 hours!  Just for the experience.  They were good looking and funny as hell.  When they departed the corridor they headed toward the dining car, a euphemism for the last car with benches, luggage storage, caged dogs, and disgruntled workers that also offered beer.  

After about fifteen minutes hanging around the corridor with the others I left to join them to have a beer and do what guys do best, tell stories.  We shared adventures about travel, hiking/climbing and mishaps. After mentioning that I wanting to travel to Kazakhstan they said it was on their bucket list to - but for a very different reason.  They want to see the national sport of Kazakhstan - Kokpar (also known as Bushashi).  It's a traditional equestrian sport where mounted players compete to grab and carry a goat or calf carcass and attempted to score by tossing it into a raised pit.  There are no safety rules and often a winning rider might end up in the pit as well.  They pulled up a YouTube video to show their motivation.  Considering they came to Vietnam just to ride the rails for thirty hours from Sai Gon to Ha Noi it seemed like as good a reason as any for these mates.    

When the youngest of our tour group El, the daughter of a Melbourne couple, heard I left to visit the young men she quickly joined us in the cramped dining car.  While we boys were having fun, the entire dynamic changed when she joined.  Needless to say, I could not hold my own with a cute twenty year old and two good looking mates, all from Australia.  It was fun to see them all come alive with the dance of youth and romance.   

Aussie boys and El while Robin observes.

Eventually, Robin joined us as well.  With the two boys on one side, and El and I on the other, Robin sat on a stool at the end of the table.  Every time the staff needed to go between the dining car and the corridor Robin had to stand up while the tall seated Aussie just reached over and lifted the stool above his head and the staff shuffled around us.  It was hilarious, particularly after several beers. 

The "dining car" with workers cooking and loading a food cart while baggage filled the rest of the benches. 

Next Post:  Vietnam Part Four - Ha Noi and Ha Long Bay

Vietnam Redux, Part Two - The Coast, Hoi An

 After our day in the Mekong Delta we all flew from Sai Gon to Hội An on the east coast of Vietnam.  

Redux of Intrepid Tour route. 

Hội An is a UNESCO site known for its well-preserved ancient town, cut through with canals. The former port city’s melting-pot history is reflected in its architecture, a mix of eras and styles from wooden Chinese shophouses and temples to colorful French colonial buildings, and the iconic Japanese Covered Bridge with its pagoda.  Today it is also known for its custom tailoring.  You can get a made-to-order suit or dress in 24 hours and take it with you.

Our hotel was just outside the historic/tourist district, but because of the various ages and conditions TV arranged a tuk-tuk into town.  One of our first stops was to have lunch.  TV took us to a Banh Mi restaurant.  Banh Mi is a fusion of French and Vietnamese cultures.  Vietnam modified the famous French Baguette to a smaller version, stuffed it with pork or chicken, fresh and pickled vegetables, and soy, Maggi or chili sauce.  The claim to fame at our restaurant was that celebrity Chef Anthony Bourdain ate it here for his Parts Unknown travel/food series.  

Banh Mi with Pork

Processing your order

Advertising Chef Bourdain

Hội An historic district is pretty small, just two main streets and the river.  We visited an obligatory temple with their bulgy eyed spirits, the historic bridge over the river, a tailor shop where a suit could be custom-made of a style from a magazine or their own collection for about $500.  In the afternoon a couple of us signed up for a cooking class to make Spring Rolls, Chicken Pho, Mango Salad, BBQ Sea Bass, with Sticky rice.  

Map of Hoi An.  Our hotel is about 1/2 mile north.  

Temple

One of two spirits guarding the entry

Main street of Historic District

Famous eighteenth century Japanese bridge over Hoai River

Hoai River 

Tailor shop explaining how to make a custom suit.

Robin, Crystal and instructor with tray of spring rolls

Boats and lanterns floating on Hoai River.

Our first morning after arriving and touring Robin and I left the hotel to walk the neighborhood and find the local market near our hotel.  Here the market is not only in a "market building" but spills out onto the side streets.  Unlike larger tourist cities whose markets are an attraction, this one seemed only for the locals.  

Street Market

Neighborhood around market with hardly any tourists

After rejoining our group for breakfast at the hotel, TV arranged a bike tour of the country side through the rice fields for a few of us.  Hội An is a city of just over 100,000, but the built-up area just stops and the rice fields begin.  However, we could see the development pressure.  On the city edges were new houses and apartment buildings, and along the bike trail were build boards of more development to come.  It is a vanishing time for the farmers.  

Local farmer who didn't like us taking his photo

Family vegetable garden with hand watering.

At the end of our bike tour we stopped in a small homestead that was the town's main supplier of rice noodles.  The woman demonstrated how to ladle the rice slurry onto a fine mesh over a pot of steaming water fired by rice husks (everything is used).  After less than a minute she used a dowel to slip under the thin rice pancake to lift it up and unroll it on a mesh lattice to dry.  After several hours she would stack the dried rice sheets and slice them into noodles of a consistent width.  She was so experienced that she could look at you while talking and chopping the noodles and they would not vary in width.  

Robin spreading the rice slurry on the mesh like pizza sauce.  

Lifting her rice patty to placed on the drying rack to her right.

Quickly slicing the noodles to a consistent width without looking.

Our final night in Hội An

Vietnam Redux, Part One - Decadal Review and the South

I visited south Vietnam in 2005 for a marketing trip to Ho Chi Minh City (Sai Gon).  Before our meeting I stayed in Ha Noi and Ha Long bay in the north on my own for several days. On our trip I looked forward to seeing how my previous destinations might have changed in the intervening twenty years.

When we arrived, we saw many Vietnam flags and billboards celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of "Reunification", or the end of the American War as they call it.  Throughout our trip were reminders of their struggles to become independent and part of the global community of nations, and we reflected on all the decadal anniversaries and evolutionary changes we were about to witness.

Arriving in Sai Gon over the Mekong River 

Billboards with Ho Chi Minh (Uncle Ho) and the Reunification celebration

Shortly after WWII France, exhausted by the war, tried to maintain their Indochine colonies of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. They were severely defeated in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam.  After the French defeat America became involved with "military advisors" to contain the communist threat in the domino theory of their expansion. 

Ten years later in 1964 Tonkin resolution allowed President Johnson to expanded the US presence with combat troops, ultimately to over half a million five years later.  

A decade after our expanded presence Nixon ended the war in 1975 after trillions of dollars, over 53,000 American dead and millions of Vietnamese deaths in "Peace with Honor".  The communist country was not a domino.  There are now only five communist countries remaining:  China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.  

Iconic photo of evacuating the US Embassy in Sai Gon in 1975

In 1995, ten years before my first visit, President Bill Clinton normalized relations with Vietnam and exchanged diplomats and trade agreements.

War, violence, starvation, poverty and disease were the daily human condition for millennia before the twentieth century.  Since then we've eliminated most of those privations, yet every generation since has still suffered calamities: the dust bowl, great depression, two world wars, red scare/blacklisting, threat of nuclear annihilation, civil-rights riots, environmental disasters, Watergate, 9/11, the great recession, and recently a pandemic, threats to democracy, climate change, and income inequality.  Because of our own past I am very empathetic to what the current generation is going through. And of course we can't know the outcome. The only advantage we have is perspective that while each calamity is unique, this generation is not alone in their challenge.  My counsel to them is not to be a victim, but have Courage and Confidence to "take arms against a sea of struggles, and by opposing, end them".  Then, this too shall pass.  

For many "boomers" in their seventies, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement are seminal events of our teens and twenties, and many who served are still traumatized by those events.  I couldn't travel through Vietnam without memories of that era - high school assemblies to morn upper class-men who died in the war, our neighborhood in flames during Chicago riots; people beaten at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention; students killed at Kent State; my low Selective Service draft number; being called up for an induction physical; debating whether to serve in an immoral war, go to Canada, or go to prison to be someone's bitch.  Vietnam's place names all revived that history: Mekong, Da Nang, Hanoi Hilton, DMZ, Tet, Hai Phong, Ho Chi Minh.  

A good friend in '70s "taking arms against a sea of troubles."

However, despite their century of suffering the Vietnamese are remarkably not victims. The country and the people have moved on (I suppose like the boomers after the Greatest Generation). They are very friendly, especially to Americans.  "That's in the past" they say.  (Not to say, in the immediate war's aftermath there wasn't much purging of, and violence to, of the opposition.)

Our ten day tour took us from Sai Gon north to Hanoi along the east coast via planes, trains and automobiles.  Sai Gon is the business/financial center of Vietnam, and Hanoi the capital and cultural center.  Since our tour did not include any time in Sai Gon, we arrive a day early to see it.  

I recalled from my previous visit that motorcycle/scooter traffic is the most congested and intense of any country I've been to.  There are now over 58 million in a country of 100 million.  (And unfortunately, since that time the air quality has considerably diminished.)  For the uninitiated, crossing streets without walk lights through a continuous flow of traffic requires calm and confidence.  In 2005 when I couldn't figure out how to cross I noticed an elderly woman just walk into the flow of traffic with a slow delibrate pace and not look up.  The cycles just flowed around her like water around a river rock.  Nobody honked or swerved in panic.  It was just fluid.  I learned the process and explained it to Robin when we arrived.  She clutched my arm, on the opposite side of traffic, while I held her back from running.  It is an amazing sense of trust in the drivers.  

A rare signalized crosswalk from our hotel window 

Taken while crossing the street.

Sidewalks are unusable due to parking and pedestrians are forced into the traffic. 

The current signature tower of Sai Gon, the 2010 Bitexco Financial Tower

Sai Gon is a modern developed city

Despite the modernity, we found our traditional market.  In addition to the vegetable stalls, meat markets, and fish mongers, there were aisles and aisles of clothing, many in silk.  Since Vietnam is a major producer of sewn goods, from clothes to backpacks, there were many knock-offs brands.  I haggled to buy a silk shirt for $30 and a travel carry-on backpack similar to Robin's for 1/3 the price.  All excellently made.  

Central hall of the market

Even more animal organs that we aren't used to seeing.  Here calve hearts...

...and their brains. If you're into it, it's fascinating Anatomy 101

The art of the deal - Yikes - NO!  Win Win negotiating.

There were several museums we wanted to visit, but had time for only one - the War Remnants Museum.  In the courtyard were many miscellaneous US military items from the war.  We saw this in Cuba too.  Items we associate with power and might to save the world, and are displayed and curated as weapons of destruction, murder, and oppression.  

But what most impressed us was the lack of propaganda demonizing Americans.  They had a whole room dedicated to "American Student Anti-War Badges" from the many protest organizations, including former combat soldiers, they say helped end the war.  In addition, they acknowledged the many leaders and organizations around the globe that protested the war as inhumane.

F 5A fighter

UH 1 - the infamous Huey Helicopter used in every Vietnam movie.

Entry display of many, many anti-war organizations.

One upscale restaurant we visited for just a glass of wine before meeting our group.

That night we were introduced to our new travel companions and guide Thanh Vu, who insisted that we call him TV for short (and probably to avoid butchering his name).  The next morning we left early on our bus to the Mekong River delta in the far south, one of the largest and most fertile in the world.  The delta is a vast maze of rivers, marshes, islands, floating markets and villages surrounded by rice paddies. Most transportation between them is by boat.  This is the rice bowl of Vietnam, which is the third largest rice exporter in the world.  Along the way we'd stop at a beekeeping facility, coconut gardens in a local home, float a sampan through mangrove, and ride a tuk-tuk ride through the village back to our pier to motor boat up the Mekong to our bus.

Area we motored by boat to visit

Bee keeper and TV.  I was asked to stick my finger (slowly) into the comb to proved the bees were harmless.

Old woman napping in family home.

Robin walking through the palm swamp

Our sampans took us through the mangrove and palms.

Reminded me a bit of the Everglades.

Robin in non la (traditional conical hat)

Cable-stayed bridge across the Mekong representing a non la.

Overall, I was impressed with how developed Sai Gon was with higher and more impressive architecture than anticipated.  TV said they wanted to be the financial hub for SE Asia and they seem to be on the way, but there's a lot of competition in the region.  However, in the rush for development the city felt a little soulless to us.  Lot's of traffic, noise, unpleasant air, and the hustle and bustle of any financial center.  We reflected how it's similar to the way Bangkok has changed since Robin was there in the late 60s and even twenty-five years later when I worked there.  The culture seems lost among the high-rises.  

Across the river from our hotel is an electronic billboard - transparent during the day and lit up at night.

At TVs recommendation, for our final evening Robin and I went for a night cap at the Caravelle Hotel, a short walk from our hotel.  This hotel, and the top floor Sai-Gon Sai-Gon bar, was a prominent gathering place for journalists and diplomats during the Vietnam war.  Peter Arnett, David Halberstam, and Walter Cronkite among others stayed and reported from here.  

Reflecting on our visit we thought about the disjointed attractions of the city.  The river front park with the long billboard is well used (if you can get across the traffic), and there are several museums that were worth visiting, but there wasn't a there there.  As we sat over looking Lam Son square in front of the French Opera House and other historic hotels we thought "if they would close off the street that runs through the plaza and make it pedestrian, it could be a gathering place instead of a motorcycle parking lot, similar to what many European cities have done since the 90s by abandoning surface parking and even traffic in their centers reclaiming their wonderful piazzas. It still has potential as they rush headlong into the twenty-first century.

 

Lam Son square in front of French Opera House on right.

Next Post:  Vietnam, Part Two - the East Coast and historic towns