Viet Nam

Dong Ha and the DMZ

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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October 4, 2002
Stumbled off the night train from Hanoi at 6am and found a seat at the outdoor railroad station cafe to dump my bags and have a wake-up Vietnamese coffee that is very strong but with hot water added to it makes a good cup of black coffee. I hear the ubiquitous �where are you from� coming from a table of men having morning tea behind me. An older fellow invites himself to my table. I love traveling alone. I am approachable…my experience is not determined by being part of a couple with a dominant male. And I think that in Asia, because of my age, I seem to draw out a kind of protectiveness in people here. My new friend hands me a little black book in which are written enthusiastic testimonials, many in English, by people that he has escorted around the DMZ.

I end up spending two days on the back of Mr. Binh’s motorcycle exploring the old American bases in the DMZ (demilitarized zone of the Vietnam War) and the tunnels at Vinh Moc in Central Vietnam. Mr. Truong Van Binh was an officer in the South Vietnamese army during the war and knows this area like the back of his hand.

Dong Ha served as a US marine command and logistics center during 1968-69. In the spring of 1968 a division of the North Vietnamese troops crossed the DMZ and attacked the city that was later the site of a South Vietnamese army base. Mr. Binh takes me miles west down Highway 9, down dirt roads, past rubber trees growing in and around huge bomb craters, rice paddies, banana trees and through tangled jungle to a bunker that sits on what used to be Con Thien Firebase. We cross the Ben Hai River, once the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Eight km south of the Ben Hai River is Doc Mieu Base, once part of an elaborate electronic system called McNamara�s Wall named after the US Secretary of Defense from 1961-68 intended to prevent infiltration across the DMZ.

Incidently former defence secretary Robert McNamara wrote a book called “In Retrospect” in which he shows how and why the American intervention was a terrible mistake…and “The Fog Of War” is an excellent documentary of the man in his role in the war. Today the area is a lunar landscape of bunkers. Nearby Son National Cemetery is a memorial to tens of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers, regarded as “martyrs” for the liberation of Vietnam who were killed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I thought of Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C. The only difference is that the grave markers in this cemetery have pictures of the dead on them.

A woman in her 30’s snarls at the others in the roadside cafe…Mr. Binh says she is “confused in the head” because of the orange spray…yes, I said to him, many of our Vietnam veterans feel their cancers and other maladies are due to Agent Orange also…it has been 25 years and the damage is not done.

Getting Blessed

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Getting into Hanoi late on the train after visiting Sapa, I walked into a hotel down the street from the train station because I was going to leave again the next afternoon on the train for Dang Ha in Central Vietnam. The hotel workers were all sitting around a table in the foyer about to have their dinner of soup and rice and vegetables. They were accompanied by a Buddhist monk who spoke excellent English.

The next day the hotel management kindly allowed me to stay in my room for a nap while I waited for my 3:30 pm train when I heard a knock on my door. The monk joined me in my little room and said he wanted to talk to me. He was in Hanoi, he said, to work on his doctorate in education…his thesis was on an idea he had about how to work with the street kids in Saigon. What is your job he asked. I got goose bumps as I told him that my major was education and my last job was developing an alternative education program for Latino street kids in the US. Yes, he said, as if he knew it all along, and then asked if he could bless me. He took out his little brass buddah and as he screwed off the head showed me what was supposedly tiny pieces of Buddah relic. Then he put the Buddah image on top of my head as he blessed me. We talked some more, exchanged email and mail addresses and then he left.

My god, I thought, I was in my hotel room in Hanoi Vietnam with my door closed-alone with this man who I did not doubt for one second was a very good person.

Sapa

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Tuesday October 1-3, 2002
Took the narrow gauge train to Lao Cai on the Chinese border and then traveled an hour by 4-wheel drive over a torturously slow single lane dirt road to the cool mountain town of Sapa. Spent a couple nights overlooking incredibly beautiful terraced rice paddies carved in perfect symetrical half circles up the mountain ridges. At the market I had a bowl of chicken noodle soup for lunch but forgot to ask the price first…the first rule…and paid 30,000 dong for a bowl that goes for 5000 dong in Hanoi. (I’m a rich tourist) Declined the trek into the minority villages where very charming laughing girls and women bat their pretty eyes at you while asking astronomically expensive prices 10-20 times the value for their handmade aluminum jewelry.

The pony-tailed fellow sitting next to me in the internet cafe was from San Francisco…had worked the Green Turtle hippy bus that runs (or used to run) from SF to Seattle and back…eating yogurt and granola in Eugene just south of Salem for a few years before he joined a non governmental organization and is now teaching English to tribal women in an ethnic minority village 15 miles in the mountains from Sapa. I love internet cafes!

Hanoi City Tour

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Wasn’t excited by the city bus tours so spent an entire day riding behind a motorcycle taxi guy to visit the One Pillar Pagoda, Temple of Literature and the Martyrs Monument erected to those who died fighting for Viet Nam’s independence. The Ho Chi Minh Museum, and History Museum was full of propaganda but contained interesting artefacts from Vietnam’s hundreds of years of feudal and modern wars against the Chinese, the Khmers, the French and finally the Americans. Could have spent a half a day in the excellent new Museum of Ethnology.

Visited the Fine Arts Museum and loved the compelling feudal statuary with robes flowing…the folds of the bottom hems rhythmically rising into the air. A statue commemorating the victory over the French at Diem Bien Phu in 1954 is not unlike our statue in Washington DC of the men pushing the flag aloft during World War II except that this memorial was of three people including a woman and a child. There were pictures of demonstrations of Buddhist monks who demonstrated against the South Vietnamese Thieu administration…and pictures of the conflagration of the two monks who set themselves afire in the middle of a Saigon street in front of a pagoda…

The Women’s Museum was arresting..and illuminating. Inside the front door you are met by a 15 foot high Vietnamese mother in overlit blinding gold leaf. It is designed to depict the mother of past, present and future…very feminine and elegant…representing the combination of traditional and modern beauty…strong…her right hand wide open and palm down signifying all that is difficult in her life and a child on her shoulder representing the responsibility and happiness of the mother toward the family and her people…the child with arms raised in the air representing the future generation and a prosperous future. A huge piece of glass stood behind the statue…etched with mountains showing the strength of the father and a stream of water flowing down from the mountains showing the source of the mother’s strength…have to admit I had to swallow a catch in my throat…

After this wonderful introduction to the museum, however, you then walk upstairs to the first floor where you see grizzly pictures of women’s contributions to the war effort against the Americans where they fought equally in all capacities alongside the men…heart rending pictures… one of a nurse who saved a child’s life by nursing it when it’s mother was killed by a US bomb. (I thought to myself, yes, this is what the Communist Party want us American tourists to see.)

Another picture was of an agonized mother hugging her son who had spent 10 years in the South Vietnamese Con Dao Prison. She had just heard he was sentenced to death by the enemy in 1975 after the fall of Saigon because of his rebel activities. There were pictures of Vietnamese film star Tra Giang and “Hanoi Jane” Fonda taken together during the American actress’ visit in 1972…pictures of women lying torqued on the floor with this caption: “The barbarous tortures women had to suffer when imprisoned by US aggressors and their lackeys.”

Another picture showed a militia woman escorting William Robinson, an American Prisoner of War and another of a female artillery unit firing on American warships in 1968-9. More pictures of female guerrilla groups…their faces hard. I felt sick to my stomach as I stumbled out of the building and entered the street full of light and the living Most people in Viet Nam were born after the war…not giving the past a thought as they were now concentrating on making the market economy work in their country. Somehow I am not surprised that the people here seem “harder” than the people in Thailand.

The Ho Chi Minh Museum was the most facinating…post modern design where you start in the “Past” and walk clockwise through the “Future” to view displays with a message…peace, happiness, freedom…the 1958 Ford Edsel bursting through the wall apparently symbolising the US commercial and military failure knocks your socks off. I skipped viewing Uncle Ho’s shriveled body at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum next door.

That evening I treated myself at a lovely outdoor garden restaurant where my waiter (who was a university student by day) described the effects of an American bomb that fell on a Hanoi city street… and where the memory of the people killed are still celebrated each September. “I am afraid of war,” he said, but what put the goose bumps on me was his curled lip. Then, I thought he was going to cry as he said “why can’t they sit down and discuss?” But then, apparently feeling bold by my eagerness to hear what he had to say, he said “Mr. Bush lies…Hussein is a good man”…at which point I lost my composure. Don’t know which made me sicker…his statement or the white haired man in his 80’s fondling the legs of the 15 year old Vietnamese hooker sitting at his table. I asked the waiter how he knew this. “But I read in the paper…” I even don’t believe everything I read in the paper here or at home…I replied in muted desperation. Bush may be lying but Hussein certainly isn’t a good man either.

Hanoi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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September 24 2002
Bob left Hanoi right away on the train for Sapa near the Chinese border to do some trekking among the colorful minority villages and then to spend three days in Halang Bay learning to kayak. We are traveling separately until we join a friend in Hong Kong on November 20 when the three of us will spend two months in China before going back to the US after the first of the year. Bob is presently somewhere between Hanoi and Saigon and I will meet him in Saigon on Monday for a flight to Phnom Penh Cambodia.

Flying into Hanoi felt very strange after watching years of television during the “Vietnam” War in the 6.s and 70.s. (The “Vietnam War” is called the “American War” here.) The first night in Hanoi I ate a dinner of pork with pepper sauce and french fries, a wonderful break from the Burmese and Thai food, on the deck of a popular cafe while watching the lights reflect off Hoan Kiem Lake near the Old Quarter.

I stayed at a small charming hotel called the “Classic Street Hotel” in the Old Quarter which is full of narrow winding streets with tunnel or tube houses so called because their small frontages hide very long rooms that were developed in feudal times to avoid taxes based on the width of the frontage onto the street. At the time they were only two stories high but over the years stories have been added so the buildings are now very narrow and very tall.

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My cozy little room had a little veranda where I could stand and watch the busy street scene below.
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I loved my little neighborhood for the five days I was there…early mornings the same ladies in the same clothes and cone hats came to sit on the street below me with their big shallow baskets to sell small silvery fish and vegetables…one morning a young woman at a street stall angrily chewed the heck out of one of the women for some reason and chased her away…every day in the early afternoon I ate a huge bowl of duck noodle soup for about 30 cents at a food stall down the street….sitting on a little plastic stool at a two foot high wooden table with my knees under my chin……the same old man and his wife with kind faces welcoming me like old friends each day.

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Across the street was the A to Z Queen Cafe which was a kick-back comfortable budget backpacker hotel with dorm beds for $2.50 a night and free internet if you bought something at the bar…otherwise you donated a few dong via honor code in the little plastic boxes sitting on top of each terminal. Every night the guest house showed a war movie to the mostly young males from around the world, many of whom are Israeli by the way. An Israeli guy told me that every young man has to spend three years in the military…and then they take off to travel to clear their heads.

Nearby was a street market where the women did all the selling and the men sat on the sidewalks drinking whisky and playing board games. As I walked by, the women laughed when I gestured and said to them…look…you work…they play…

Down the narrow street and around the corner the local street kids pestered you to buy postcards…just buy from me today…I am lucky you are my first sale today so I can buy some food…old ladies glided along in slippered feet carrying two fruit-filled baskets one on each side of them that was balanced like a pair of scales across their backs with a long flexible blade of bamboo who wanted to sell you exotic fruit…pumalos that have to be picked a few days before it is eaten so it has time to “forget the tree,” custard apples, durian so stinky it is forbidden in the hotels, green dragon fruit, guavas, jackfruit, longan, lychees, mango-steen, rambutan, starfruit and juicy persimmons.

Then you could escape all this by ducking into the Tamarind Cafe & Fruit Juice Bar where the Handspan Adventure Travel Company sold tickets to Halong Bay and Sapa in the back. Bob took a three day excursion to incredible Halong Bay and claims it is one of the very best experiences of all time. Here you were sure to find fellow foreign travelers to trade stories with…not just a few of whom…to my amazement…or maybe just never noticed before…were women traveling alone. In happy solidarity I invariably urged them on…