North Vietnam, half of a Nation, and yet very much in charge.

(Roof Top Room
Elizabeth Hotel
Hanoi
North Vietnam.

The re-unification express was immediately re-named the re-fornication express by me for our video production “good god there is a wog on the train”.(outraged people please note that I am the wog). Our Spaniards are interesting enough and the night passes with some conversation and lots of sleep. It soon becomes apparent that the reunification express is the star attraction of Vietnam. Travelling by train in the daytime is the way to travel in this long and strange country. The Vietnamese have a patent inability to build beautiful with concrete, and through development and private investment the standard tourist stops become concrete hell. The reunification trundles sedately through the paddy fields where real Vietnamese with real water buffalos with real ploughshares stagger knee deep in brown water to make rice. The express continues through real villages, and towns. When I say through, I mean through. The tracks go in between people’s backyards and anyone foolish enough to walk on the line would be squeezed to death between the concrete walls and the train carriages. In the tiny concrete enclosed back yards laundry would be hanging up along with a pile of plastic chairs and some large pot plants. Occasionally we would pass through a small station. Blue shirted officials with semi soviet style caps would stand on the platform holding up a rolled up yellow flag. The reunification never stopped. Once it was out of any given town, the express might pick up speed and thunder and rattle and roll along at speeds touching 50 miles per hour. Always, in the background, one could see the line of mountains that often came down to the sea. At 1430, about 30 minutes late, we arrived at Da Nang. Once an enormous airstrip and army base with 8 runways, Da Nang is now the central capital of the centre of Vietnam. With China beach running south from its town centre it has the makings of a pretty city. Instead of capitalising on this, the locals, in true Vietnamese style have applied concrete with vigour and the place is rapidly looking like any new town in Asia. Twenty miles to the south of Da Nang and just off the southern tip of china beach is the small and old port town of Hoi An. Hoi An is a crumbling but pretty old Chinese trading town on the banks of a putrid river. It is charming, but it is ruined by the innumerable groups of French tourists that barge past you while you try and take something in. It is not the fault of the French, the group could be Japanese or British or Vietnamese, but the tourist sites of Vietnam are over touristified. I found myself wishing I had come here in 1994 when I was supposed to have done so.

It was with no great regrets that we re boarded the grand old express again for our northbound journey. We were in carriage 12. But carriage 12 did not exist. I started to wonder if this was the latest Vietnamese scam. Selling tickets for non existent carriages. I collared a blue shirted man with staff tabs on his collar.

“Number 12?” I asked politely while showing our tickets.
“Coming” He replied enigmatically.

We stood near two young British lads who were lounging casually on their backpacks.
“You in 12?” I asked.
“Yep” They replied “apparently its coming”
“Ok”

This formation of the reunification was made up of new broad red white and blue carriages with air conditioning. Our carriage was shunted on by a Seimens turbocharged locomotive. It was painted Chinese green and had a yellow stripw down the side. It was noticeably narrower than the newer multi coloured train. Inside it had no over-corridor luggage stowage space and it was dirty. We shared the cabin with a well spoken polite Vietnamese couple. No fuss, we thought. At least we were on. The blue shirt switched on the air conditioning and we stowed our kit on our bunks. Then we stood in the corridor.
“Lets find the restaurant car” said Cisca. And so we walked the entire length of the train, through soft sleeper new, hard sleeper new (which was infinitely better than our soft sleeper old) and soft seat. Soft seat looked excellent, apart from the blaring flat screen tv and the occasional drunk entertaining the carriage. At the very end of the train, we found the restaurant car. This was much more of a field kitchen than a restaurant. Half of the carriage was taken up with a huge mobile kitchen. The car had many chefs, many trolley stewardesses and few waitresses. Indeed there were no customers, only the chef de train filling in his time logs while waiving his rolled up flag from time to time. We communicated our needs, tipped the head waitress two dollars and sat down to watch Vietnam with Ice tea. To move to the restaurant car was the single greatest move we had made in Vietnam. We were afforded double window views of one of the most spectacular train rides that exist on earth. The train climbed up to 600 feet above sea level and crawled along a track perched on the tiniest of ledges on the side of a mountain range. This was made more spectacular by the fact that we were literally 600ft above the South China sea, alternately crashing on rocks or lapping up on untouched sandy beaches. This view went on for two hours. The experience reminded me of a Swiss Mountain train. Had we stayed in our cabin “soft sleeper old” we would have been on the wrong side of the train and missed everything. When I saw the beaches, both tiny and large, I was happy to accept the concretisation of China beach. Vietnam leaves me with the constant feeling that it has so much more to offer than what the tourist sees.

Adam and Simon arrived and joined us. They had lunch and we sat chatting. We passed through Hue getting later and later. The pill boxes outside the train station showed many signs of the battle of hue. They were pockmarked with bullet holes and semi blown apart. As the evening drew on, I counted the rivers. I was looking for the Ben Hai River which was the old border on the 37th parallel between the “Peoples Democratic and Socialist Republic of Vietnam” and the not so democratic and totally unsocialist Southern “Republic of Vietnam”. I needed now warning as the land on either side of the Ben Hai River was flat and pockmarked with the occasional circular mini lake that I took to be shell holes. There were no towns for many kilometres on either side of the river. Only villages and paddy fields. Vietnam’s past seems to haunt it still. Darkness fell and it was time for an early dinner before an early sleep.

I woke in the middle of the night to find that the already asthmatic airconditioning was on the verge of breaking down. While the rest of the train froze in arctic temperatures, we sweltered. I went out to pee, and was confronted with water pouring out of the roof tank and gushing down the corridor. Perhaps this was the cause of the A/C packing up? Someone had helpfully put a bucket under the worst drips, but this had no real effect other than to tell people that the train crew knew about it.

I went back to sleep, this time without my Vietnam Railways Duvet. At four thirty our Vietnamese couple left us with a polite goodbye and good wishes. We slept on. At 0530 I woke up and saw daylight. Grey daylight, but daylight none the less. It was raining outside. With a squeeze and a bang we slowed and stopped suddenly in a four platform station. I panicked. I hopped off the top bunk and found blue shirt.
“Hanoi” I asked in English.
“Don’t be so stupid, this is phing bing bang, we are running two hours behind schedule don’t you know? Now leave me alone I have a train to run” Or at least that’s what he seemed to say, I have no idea because he was speaking Vietnamese. The sense of what he was trying to say was conveyed by the fact that the corridor was full of people and the train eased out of the station with a jerk, a bang, and the usual communist trainman’s rapid acceleration. We were now clicketky clacking along at the highest speed we had ever done. 50 maybe 60 miles per hour. I hoped that our old carriage could handle these speeds. I checked my email on my phone and replied to Major Mike in Istanbul, telling him that we were indeed still trying to get to the fabled city, and that we were almost on schedule. The express had now reached warp factor 9 and sleep overtook me again. I re arranged the bottom bunk, curled my legs over my packs and stuck my booted foot on the door handle. With that I dozed off.

Two and a half hours behind schedule, the filth express screeched to a halt in The Gar Du Hanoi. A scavenger came on board immediately, barged past blue shirt and Cisca and entered our cabin. He was a young man in a filthyt white T shirt. Who sat on the bed and feverishly started taking bottles and any trash from the cabins. I objected as my half full water bottle was not trash. Oi I shouted.
He ignored me.
And so wearing two back packs I leaned into the cabin, grabbed him firmly by the arm, escorted him to the corridor and gave him a hefty shove in the direction of Hanoi.
“F*ck off” I told him in my best English accent.
Blue shirt saw him at that moment and having lost face by allowing such a reprobate into our carriage escorted him onwards and outwards. We climbed down from the train to the tracks, walked around another express and sat down outside Hanoi Rail Station for a coffee and a think. Eventually we allowed ourselves to be escorted to the Elizabeth hotel where we checked in as 40 back packers were checking out for an excursion Halong Bay. While the melee continued we sat on the pavement drinking more coffee and watching Hanoi go past. I had a feeling I was going to like this city. I was correct, and yet there was a sinister side to Hanoi....


HANOI AND ITS HILTON.

We went to Vietnam's oldest university ad looked around. I was un-impressed. It was some sort of temple with nothing to reccomend it. (The reader may feel free to call me a philistine at this juncture. We sat down and I wrote in my diary.I wrote from the heart a usual with no editing:
:
Hanoi is everything the Saigon is not. It is quiet, well laid out, packed with colononial era buildings, and it is full of government sh*t. Where Saigon is madness, Hanoi is carefully choreographed propaganda. Even on one’s first day, one gets the impression that every other building is a ministry of something, and that socialism is the order of the day. Dissent is not tolerated. The city revolves around government types and posters.

"The city reminds me somewhat of Belgrade or Moscow. It is still ruled by the last vestiges of the enemy. Commerce may be allowed and encouraged, but political dissent is not. Our guide book says that there are 2 million communist party members in Vietnam and 80 million people and that juggling the socialism with the entrepreneurial desires of the Vietnamese people may be difficult. I remember what PT said in Vung Tau. “I bet that in twenty years there won’t be any communism in Vietnam”. I am inclined to agree with him, but I think that if there is ever a democratically elected boss, he will be the same man as is in power now. Power rarely shifts hands in 3rd world countries. And so, with no great regret, it is “back on the buses” and off to the Chinese border. When I say buses I actually mean trains. We take the overnight express to Lao Cai and then plan to spend some time in the hill town of sapa before disappearing off over the Chinese border to Yunnan and the western edge of the Himalayas. After our filthy train ride last night I am so tempted to catch the daily Vietnam Airlines flight to Kunming. But that is not to be. We must go overland on onwards to righteousness. “
We could extend our stay in Vietnam and visit Halong and the national parks, and Con do Island and many other beautiful places. But if we did this, we will be stripped of time in China. It is not the Vietnamese concrete or the ministry lies that are driving us out of Vietnam, but the backpackers. Every activity that is advertised is cheap, cheerful, and entirely filled with young backpackers who only want to get drunk and then come back and use face book. As I walked into the hotel today I saw yet more people writing messages to their friends back home. I have never come across a bunch of more un-imaginitive travellers in my life as we have in Cambodia and Vietnam. No one has a story to tell as everyone is too busy facebooking. Social interaction takes place in screen, not in person. When we return to Vietnam, we will do so and explore the Ho chi minh trail or the beaches north of Da Nang, the Islands, and the National parks. I will try to find the parts of Vietnam that are too expensive for the backpackers and where there is limited internet access."


Perhaps we should have stayed in Hanoi for a few days, rested, relaxed and seen the city and the supposed wonders of Halong bay. These were our original intentions but as we sat down over a cup of tea and decided that really we should leave tonight to see the edge of the Himalayas in Yunnan. We were a little torn, more time in Hanoi or more time in a place we had never seen except in a Micheal Palin book. (Himalaya). Eventually we flagged down a taxi, went to Gare Du Hanoi, pulled out a queue ticket with a number and waited our turn to buy tikets to Sapa. We waited for 20 minutes and still the numbers did not turn,. Exclusively at the Sapa counter, the Vietnamese would simply barge in and buy their tickets. We took another ticket for the Saigon counter. We were called almost instantaneously. We tried to buy a ticket to Sapa but the lady would not let us. I looked at her computer and hoped that she could magic up sleeper berths, but the systems were not the same. I then asked her to tell her companion to start using the number system, and not let people queue barge. She shouted at her co worker who just laughed. Loosing patience, I decided that we too should be Vietnamese and stood in the scrum. I noted who I was after and let them all go. When our turn came, and some fellow in a motorbike helmet tried to barge in, I pulled him by the collar and dragged him back from the counter.

“I say old chap” I said in my finest English Accent, “You seem to be in the wrong place, you need to get a ticket first”
He looked at me in a perplexed manner, and his indignation seemed to deflate when he realised that I was quite prepared put him through the nearest glass door with it still closed. He politely stepped aside and I bought two berths to sapa. We were off that night! I then stepped back and addressed motorbike helmet.
“Patience is a virtue you know” I smiled. He smiled, I had my ticket, violence (and my probable immediate imprisonment) was not called for. Life was good again.

As we were about to go back and merely close our back packs, I decided that we had missed something. I felt the need to go to the Maison Centrale, the old French prison, that the Vietnamese took over lock stock and barrel. I have a very few good few good friends who served in the Vietnam war, both Australians and the Americans I felt I should go and pay homage to their past, as I had in Vung Tau, and say a prayer. La Maison Centrale was most famous for being the notorious “Hanoi Hilton”, where American airmen and some soldiers were locked up and tortured by the Vietnamese. The Prison has only 30% remaining, as the rest has been turned into a shopping centre and it would seem, although I could be very wrong, a Hilton Hotel. It is not called the Hanoi Hilton but has some other name. The prison is now a museum that is dedicated to Vietnamese moaning about French oppression. Surely everyone who was colonised by the French was oppressed, indeed modern day French tax payers might consider themselves still oppressed. I wondered why the Vietnamese harped on about it. And so I tried to read as much of their information as possible. The Viets had even insisted on exhibiting guillotine. This was very small, I wondered if the French made special small devices for asia where the people were shorter? A “guillotine tropicale” as it were? I did not linger too long at the wooden bench and bucket, for while I am sure that that the guillotine is very humane, seeing the actual device used to kill people in cold blood is a little macabre.

The singularly most annoying thing about Vietnam, (ie not the backpackers) is the Government’s constant and consistently bad propaganda. The open minded tourist can just about deal with it as long as one has read history, but in the “Hanoi Hilton”, the tripe is unstomachable. People say that the government is trying to balance being a mildly repressive communist state with the new market economics of Asia. The cash is flowing, but the authoritarianism is still painful. The two rooms dedicated to the US prisoners tells of how the Americans “bombed the poor Vietnamese civilians” and how they were “war criminals” and how Vietnam was a victim. There are 1970’s photos showing the prisoners having a great time, playing basket ball and making Christmas decorations. The images are known to be lies.

The fact that the north Vietnamese tortured and killed the American POW’s, disobeyed the Geneva convention and, more importantly, tortured and murdered their own people is conveniently left out of everything. Truth is at the heart of any open governance. The truth in North Vietnam is as elusive as it is in Africa. All governments have their propaganda, most grow out of it after 40 years and move onto new lies. (Vide :Tony Blair and weapons of mass destruction) But in Hanoi, lies last for generations and even more pathetically, they are spelt badly. And that sums up the North Vietnamese attitude to the war. Pathetic. They cheapen their victory and the efforts of all the good people who thought they were “doing the right thing” on both sides by continuing to spout such shit.

The truth of the matter is that the war was war. It was horrible, and very nasty. Both sides were equally nasty. Now there is peace, and the Nation and people of Vietnam is dynamic, vibrant and fascinating. Would the government please catch up?

This was the final straw for me, I became angry. The Vietnamese people could be so friendly and decent, but their government was stuck in 1969. I sms’d a veteran friend and told him I was in the Hanoi Hilton and that I would say a prayer for the dead. He simply replied: “thanks”.

It was hard to find a quiet spot in the prison yard, but I did, and said the muslim prayer for the dead. Not for the Vietnamese executed by the French, but for the American servicemen who had done what they perceived to be the “right thing” and had been grossly mistreated by any nation or religion, or army’s code of conduct. And for me, that was Vietnam. After I wrote my last piece on the futility of the Vietnam war and the inability of the American military machine to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion, I received an email from a good friend in America. Not a Vietnam veteran, and actually a British passport holder. He accused me of being ungrateful and said that whatever America did, it did for the promotion of freedom and democracy. I have to say that neither the war in Vietnam or Iraq have promoted either. The subsequent economic ties with Vietnam however are doing just that. For after cash, people tend to want the vote.

That final thought led me to pack up my stuff and go to the railway station early. Three hours early to be exact. We ate dinner in a small open fronted restaurant frequented by locals. No one spoke anything other than Vietnamese. We used our life saving phrase book and the food was excellent and cost almost nothing. Then we went to the platform, but they would not let us board yet. So we waited further. Cisca sat on the steps outside the ticket office and then my phone rang a few times and then rang off. I looked at the number, I did not recognise it. I called it back and got impersonal voice mail. I left a message.
“this is raf, you called me, what do you want?” and waited, no one called back. After 10 minutes I rang the number again and got some woman, speaking in a very familiar manner on the line.
Not wishing to embarrass myself, I asked “Who is this?” rather bluntly. It turned out to be an ex girlfriend who said she had dialled my number in error. She was very busy and walking down the street and she was sorry. I replied that this was no problem as I was standing outside Hanoi Railway station about to catch a train to the Chinese border. (and that I was paying £1 a minute to make this call). There was a momentary pause on the line.
“only you “ She said “Only you” and hung up.

The express was unremarkable. The airconditioning almost worked, my bed was flat, we were not robbed and I woke up at the town of Lao Cai.

We seemed to be the only people without reservations on the express, and we made our way to the government minibus. This was a ford transit. We were joined by a mad American/Honduran photographer called Susan. She was the most hyperactive person that I have met in a long time. She positively bounced around the inside of the van and by the time we had climbed up to Sapa she had attatched herself to us and we spent the day wandering with a Hmong Guide. The Hmong are the hill people of Vietnam and while they are nice enough as people, they are the most annoying tourist touts in Vietnam. They had no idea of how to treat foreigners and followed every tourist trekker for their first half hour of walking, trying to sell something to them. That night we went to the red dragon, and English Pub in Sapa. The owner was not there, but the roast chicken in gravy was excellent. There we met the first group of interesting decent travellers since we left Bangkok. I wrote TWB (traveller with brains) on the forehead of the three. They did not seem to mind too much. An hour before closing, we met Johnny Reo, an Architech from New York who was travelling alone and en route to China. The next morning, he came round to the hotel and said that he was off to China that moment. He said that there might well be a train to Kunming at 1320 hrs. We decided that we should get a move on and leave Vietnam that moment. We stuffed everything we had into our bags, said a sad farewell to our Dutch friends and Susan and hired a minibus to Lao Cai border. We debussed and walked into the Vietnamese terminal. If we thought that we could just walk out of Vietnam, we were sorely mistaken. Cisca’s ugly passport reared its ugly head again. The Vietnamese would not stamp her out, even though they had let her in. So she produced her emergency passport and they were even more confused. They started to look very cross. We tried to explain the situation to them, but they were not interested in understanding. Finally they called over a tourguide and asked him to translate Cisca’s letter. After a photocopy and much tooing and froing and some (quiet) less than complimentary words from me, Cisca was stamped out of Vietnam. Jonathan had already gone ahead and so Cisca and I walked over a bridge over a river from one country to another. This was indeed a sedate way to cross borders. Vietnam was finally over, China and her catastrophe were about to start...

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