Yo, Ho - Vietnam!

End of May to end of June, 2006

Before I go on about going on through southeast Asia, I wanted to include a photo that really belongs to a blog entry way back in India. I didn't have it then, and it's a goodie so it deserves inclusion even this late on. It was taken by Espen on camel safari in the Great Thar Desert in India last February. Click here to see...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/espenlodden/127154636/

Anyway, my flight from Siem Reap landed in rainy Hanoi at night and I found a cheap guesthouse down a little alley. It was pretty grubby, so I stayed the one night then found somewhere else in the morning.

The next day I got stuck into all that Hanoi has to offer, including the Ho Chi Minh Museum, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, Ho Chi Minh's former residence..... as you might be able to tell, the Vietnamese love their "Uncle Ho", (yes apparently they do call him that). He is revered as the father of modern Viet Nam, and his image and name are everywhere.


Uncle Ho's museum was an odd but entertaining place. It contained the sort of exhibits one usually finds in these places, ("These are slippers that The Great Leader wore during the fight against the fascist French oppressors..."), but it also had some confoundingly surrealist installations that tried valiantly to tie anything and everything back to glorious socialist principles. Check out the table and chair installation, (I really have no idea, even having read the explanation), and the take-off of Picasso's Guernica, (Uncle Ho's Cubist period, perhaps?).

And what capital of a socialist state would be complete without a revered former leader, stuffed, embalmed and put on display? Uncle H's mausoleum was an interesting experience, from the military discipline dished out to the queue going in, (two fellas in front of me were told by soldiers to take their hands out of their pockets!), to the weird ambiance of the room itself.
Shuffling in you find yourself in a huge chilly vault, with a walled walkway on three sides around a sunken floor with a plinth in the middle. At each corner of the plinth is a serious looking soldier standing to attention with a rifle and no-nonsense-looking bayonet attached. On the plinth is Uncle Ho, who really just looks like he's made of wax. Anyway, everyone files past and you're in and out in 45 seconds, after having queued for some 45 minutes. Needless to say, no photos allowed....

One of the first things that strikes you about Hanoi is the total chaos on the roads. In Vietnam I am told that there is about one motorbike for every three people and all of them seem to be in the capital, completely ignoring any traffic rules, going the wrong way up one-way streets, weaving in and out and shaving so close to each other that you think collision is inevitable. But somehow they always manage to avoid each other, and in a mad way it all seems to work. As everywhere else in SE Asia, hardly anyone wears a helmet, and they have an interesting attitude to the capacity of a two-wheeler. As a bike is often the sole means of transport for a family, then the whole family fits on it! The most I ever counted on one bike was five, and here's a pic of mum, dad and three kids going at a fair old clip on their trusty old scooter...

This situation on the roads makes crossing them interesting, as they take no notice of pedestrian crossings or traffic lights. The trick is to just step out and cross the road slowly and in a predictable direction, (no sudden movements!). That way the thousands of motorbikes and cycles can just drive around you like a river flowing around both sides of an island. No-one gets angry or considers that they have "right of way", as no such thing really exists. It works, but it takes a bit of getting used to at first...

Anyway, I soon realised that the only real way to get around the city was on the back of one of these motorbikes. There are normal car taxis but they're expensive, often rig their meters and, as I was to find out, not nearly as much fun! Having mastered a few words of Vietnamese, including the numbers, I was able to get a reasonable price out of the drivers who are on every street corner touting for work. Then it's just a case of hanging on to the seat and keeping your knees in as close as possible to the bike, because as they come so close to other vehicles there is a real chance you'll catch your leg on something...

After a few days in the capital I took a trip to Ha Long Bay, a beautiful collection of some 1600 islands, islets and spectacular limestone pillars in the Gulf of Tonkin. Most of the islands are uninhabited, with the local population living in floating villages around the islands, and fishing for a living. We went out on an old wooden boat on which we spent a night, did a little kayaking and also saw some pretty impressive caves.

Then I started my move south through the country, taking a sleeper train, (in the tiniest sleeper berth I have ever encountered), to Hue. A nice enough town, Hue had an impressive citadel but really only warranted two nights, which was what it got. A bus then took me to Hoi An, a very pretty town on the coast which had some excellent beaches but also some lovely old parts as well. On the bus there I met Kiwis Dylan and Lauren, and Canadian Steve, and when we got to Hoi An we all allowed ourselves to be biked off by hotel touts to a new hotel halfway between town and a great beach. It was fun trying to stay balanced on the back of a motorbike with a 20kg pack on my back..... the corners were particularly interesting.

The hotel was actually very nice for the price so we stayed, using their free bicycles to ride to the beach each day. The little bikes weren't all that good, especially for Dylan who is something like six feet two tall. He was the lucky one who got the most rusty bike and the delightful experience of the front forks snapping as he was riding along! Fortunately he wasn't going very fast...

Hoi An was great. The beach we went to was beautiful, empty during the day then full of Vietnamese once the sun got lower and the temperature dropped. We'd just lie on loungers all day having cold beer and food brought over, swimming from time to time and wondering what the little stinging things in the water were, (tiny jellyfish, it turns out, each about the size of a small pea!). On other days we'd go into the town and look around; they have an old covered bridge there which is something of a tourist attraction...

So after a few days Dylan, Lauren and Steve left on a night bus to go south, and I stayed another night to follow them the next day by train. That afternoon I met American Lyndsay, and hung out with her in the evening. She had been in Vietnam for a while, and had adopted the Vietnamese women's custom of wearing a face mask to keep the sun off their faces. Across southeast Asia the convention for women is that pale skin is beautiful, so they avoid suntan if at all possible. They also have "whiteners", (i.e. bleach!), in all of their skin products. These masks are a little disturbing at first; they look vaguely surgical...

So then on to Nha Trang, another town with a beach but not as nice as Hoi An, where I met up again with the Kiwi/Canook party. I went on a boat trip around some nearby islands which was fun in a cheesy kind of way. The boat crew put on some entertainment by turning into a band playing improvised instruments and encouraging karaoke. Also at one point there was a floating bar made out of life buoys, from which they were dispensing free local "wine" to the passengers who were all floating around in life buoys! On another day I did some diving; it was fun, but the South China Sea is colder than the waters around Thailand, and the marine life not nearly as abundant.

After Hoi An I visited Dalet in the central highlands. The best thing about Dalet was that it was higher in altitude and so considerably cooler than the coast where it had been sweltering! I stayed there for a couple of days, renting a mountain bike, (a decent one this time!), and riding around the lakes and the town.

From Dalet I then moved on to Mui Ne, a funny place which was little more than a very long coastal road with numerous beach resorts built along it but no real centre. The beach was OK, but only existed at night when the tide was out! In the absence of a beach I went on an interesting motorbike tour of the area with a couple of Australian girls. This took in a stream and waterfall through some interesting red sandstone hills and paddy fields, a fishing village, some very impressive white sand dunes and some less impressive red sand dunes. Wherever there were sand dunes there were also kids renting little squares of linoleum for you to surf down the dune on!

So then on to Ho Chi Minh City, (I told you his name was everywhere!), or what used to be called Saigon and still is by many. There I met up with Ingrid and Michi, two girls from Vienna that I had met on the boat trip around Ha Long Bay. I liked Ho Chi Minh City far all the reasons that I liked Hanoi, mainly the busy chaotic feel. On the first night there we also uncovered some pretty interesting nightlife, courtesy of some well-connected Vietnamese woman the girls had met earlier. She took us on to a club where we drank for free until the wee hours; I'm still not quite sure how that happened, but it was fun...

Much of our time in HCMC was spent exploring the city and seeing sights, such as the War Remnants Museum, formerly known as the Exhibition House of American War Crimes. This was an interesting jumble of exhibits mainly concerning what the Vietnamese call the American War, including some pretty gruesome photographic evidence of atrocities committed against civilians by US forces and of the ongoing birth defects caused in children as a result of the use of chemical weapons such as Agent Orange. They also had on display various weapons captured from the Americans, but also a guillotine brought over earlier in the century by the French colonisers...

Ingrid and Michi left to go back to Thailand, and I took off for two days in the Mekong Delta. This mainly involved cruising on boats around the river, touring local craft workshops where they made various foods such as honey, rice noodles, puffed rice cakes and candies. We also visited a floating market, which dealt mainly in fruit. The Mekong Delta is pretty in parts, but it's really a working river and looks like it here and there. Also by the time it has gone from its source in China through the various countries to the South China Sea it has got pretty grubby along its way through towns and past riverside industry.

I visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, near Saigon. These are an underground network built during the 1940s to fight the French, but more famously were used in the American War. It was a fascinating tour, led by an old guy who had fought on the losing South Vietnamese side.

So after four and a half months in the region, that was me finished in southeast Asia. Onwards to Hong Kong...