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Published: September 5th 2006
Uncle Ho
Chi Minh So we have finished our tour in 'Nam, did some patrolling, sniping, infiltration of native population and recon of key sites.
Although we didn't know exactly what to expect of Vietnam, mostly we'd heard good things, so we were looking forward to our tour of duty. It was pretty good but - and we suppose it had to happen after 10 months of travelling - we came away a little underwhelmed. Feels like we had similar and better experiences elsewhere in SE Asia. the weather played a big factor in our enjoyement and it seemd to rain more than not - even though the Lonely Planet AKA The Book of Lies told us we should be fine sticking to certain places.
Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot, and, as they say, first impressions last (to coin two crap phrases!), but for the first half of our trip, in the Communist stronghold of the north, we felt that us visiting capitalists were ruthlessly drained of every last dong (one 30,000th of a pound).
The Great Hanoi Traveller Swindle
So, continuing from our last Laos entry, we took a lovely 13 hour bus journey over the border to
Old men chilling outside
Temple of Literature in Hanoi Vinh, a town not even in the Lonely Planet. It was a stink journey but we met up with some nice people so we decided we'd all try to get right up to Hanoi the same day and get the trip over with. Nine of us banded together to bargain for a private minibus, supposed to take 5 hours, and to leave "soon". Reality: we got ripped off eating average food at the restaurant owned by the bus driver, set off a couple of hours late after cruising the streets of Vinh looking for more locals to cram into the bus, were all shouted at by the scary bus lady to give up our seats and sit on boxes so that the locals could sit together, and subjected to 8 hours of PAP Vietnamese kareoke videos, each overloaded with pics of Ho Chi Minh giving flowers to children etc.
We arrived at 3.45am and bargained with a tout for a hotel. He showed us a leaflet for the hotel, with pics of the rooms, lists of ameneties and a map. Decided it was OK and crashed there, only to find the next morning we were in a completely different
Ho Chi Minh Returns
Old man with the obligatory Ho Chi Minh white goatie hotel to the one we'd agreed to stay in! We stayed another night as it was cheap but got thrown out the following day as some people had booked and agreed to pay more than us, and we hadn't made the hotel any money by buying a trip with them. Anyway mustn't grumble! It makes a good story now!
The Great Halong Bay Swindle
From Hanoi we went on a 3-day boat cruise round Halong Bay, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site bacause of its amazing landscape - millions of limestone islands and islets, quite similar to those we saw in Thailand but better. Unfortunately it rained for all 3 days! The trip itself was interesting, we had to change boats 3 times in the 3 days (once at 6.45am after no warning the night before - otherwise we wouldn't have got so absolutely wasted with the Irish!). Also on visiting a island, we almost got stranded and couldn't get back to the boat there as there were freak floods due to the rain. We also had EXACTLY the same food for lunch and dinner for all 3 days, it was funny to see a normally mild-mannered Scandanavian
Rua Thap
Hoan Kiem Lake In Hanoi Old Quarter couple almost expode when the tucker was served up each time!
One thing to add is that every single traveller we met had the same things to say about Hanoi; it might be that tourism is still fairly new there so things haven't settled down there yet, and the main focus is extracting as much cash as poss from each traveller in case tourism suddenly stops - once they realise it is here to stay I expect that there won't be so many rip offs (except the average number of rip offs you expect when travelling and are par for the course).
Sleeper trains by name not by nature
Basically road and rail quality in Nam is crap and because of the shape of it it takes hours and hours of crawling transport to get anywhere. We were so sick of the constant cachphoy of noise and blarring horns we decided to splash out and swap horrid overnight bus journeys for sleeper trains. Leaving Hanoi we paid for luxury soft sleepers (Vietnam relative) at the travel agent, however we were undelighted when the tickets arrived to find they had booked us a hard sleeper. We had hard sleeper
Ngoc Son Temple
On Hoan Keim Lake in Hanoi trains all the way to Saigon consisting of 6 peeps stacked high in a carriage, benches to sleep on, screaming kids dropping minging cabage on our beds and best of all masturbating teenagers!!
Lovely old Hue and war
Next stop was the old imperial city of Hue, where things began to look up: the weather cleared; we spent an afternoon by the pool in a plush hotel and did a cool motorbike tour of the tombs of the emperors who had lived in the city. The tombs are whole complexes, constructed by the emperors whilst they were still alive as splendid mausoleums to honour them after their death. They are all located down the river from the town. It was great fun to whiz around on the back of a bike, feeling like a local, however Becky managed to get the mandatory travelling motorcycle exhaust burn.
More recent in Hue's history was that it was near the North/South border and the Demilitarized Zone. Our guide had been a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army in the war, and when we got to a quiet place where he couldn't be overheard, he gave us the run down on the
Mod "Gook" Quadraphenia
Seems like every single person in Hanoi rides a moped situation of the Vietnamese who had fought with the US against the Communists.
When the US decided to withdraw from Vietnam after 7 years of fighting and achieved nothing but millions dead, the Southern Vietnamese who had fought for the freedom of their country from Communism were, well, buggered. The Communists overran the south and sent all of the officers from the South Vietnamese army to concentration camps disguised as "reeducation' camps. Loads of them spent as many as five years there. Even now, all the taxi drivers and bike taxi drivers and the poor are those who were army officers, or who were journalists, lawyers, teachers but sided against the communists. Now they are now third class citizens, not allowed to travel, leave the country, own a business or even a house. And their children are black listed too and their children's children. Awful.
Get Yer Clothes in Hoi An
Next stop was Hoi An, a lovely town with loads of traditional architecture. We did little there but chill and get lots of clothes made as it is the best place in Vietnam (and SE Asia) for tailors.
Nha Trang
After another epic train journey we
reached Nha Trang, a beach resort turning into Vietnam's equivalent of the Costas. Nice! Luckily there are some quite nice islands around the coast so we headed off each day on boat trips to them and to do lots of snorkelling.
War. What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing.
Finally, we spent 2 days in Ho Chi Minh city (still Saigon by the South Vietnamese who have good reason to be pissed off, what with being overrun by communists and having the name of their key capitalist city, changed to a communist one!). It was funny to see how much more commercialised it is compared to Hanoi, which is still hampered by its communist past, but in Saigon there are KFCs, shopping malls etc.
Our first day, we to see the Chu Chi tunnels, which is where the Viet Cong hung out in the war. It's a massive network of underground tunnels about 250 kms in area, only 45 km from Saigon. The Viet Cong, and southern villagers, who were woefully under-equipped compared to the might of America, supported them (it was easy to convince the poorer villagers and peasants of the value of communism and to enlist
Ancient Art of Water Puppet Theatre
in Hanoi. No idea what was going on but it was good fun. their support - in the South the cities and towns were supporting the South Vietnamese, but the villages were supporting the communists) lived in the tunnels to shelter from US bombs, and also used the network to stage surprise attacks, popping up here in Saigon, and, bizarrely, in the US army base that had been established to gain control of the tunnels! We learned that the 25th division of US troops,who were stationed right near the tunnels, couldn't work out for as long as a year, how the commies were popping up INSIDE the base to attack them! We saw the real tunnels, they are TINY. Crawled through one for 15 metres, it was a bit widened for fatty westerners but still so so cramped and claustrophobic.
The strangest bit was that they have a firing range where you can buy bullets and fire real guns! I fired 5 shots from an AK-47.
We went to the war remanents museum too, mainly graphically showing what the US did to the N.Vietnamese/VietCong in the war. As you'd expect it is toitally biassed but you can still read between the lines and there are some really grim reminders of what
Temple of Literature
Thought it was dead good chinese stylee but suppose we'll be bored of that in China the Vietnamese did to each other even without the Yanks hanging around. I'm never one to condone US intervention by occupying a country but lets not forget North Vietnam actually invaded the South and brought all this to a head.
Overall, an interesting experience, we did see some good stuff and learnt loads more about the war. Some of the Vietnam people were really friendly whilst others had more of a casual disdain maybe brought upon by some of the old blatant propagana (some of which is still around). It will be interesting to go back and see how they have coped with the massive influx of tourists and what happens to the communist stranglehold there which is rapidly changing and becoming more capitalist and material all the time but without the democracy.
So thats SE Asia over with and now we fly to Beijing in China for some more interesting Communist ideals and contradictions to come.
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Scooby
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Little Scooby's
On 25th August Scooby had 3 boys and 6 girls. Mother and pups doing fine. Take care, CU soon. xxx