Ha Long Bay

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Hi everyone, it’s Bill. We have had a couple of glitches with the blog mechanism, but now all seems to be working well, and Colleen has gotten up several pictures from our trip. It has been a wonderful, wonderful experience thus far. I am writing this from Ha Long Bay, about a four hour drive from Hanoi on the South China Sea, one of the wonders of the world: 5000 limestone islands come straight up out of the ocean, most with almost vertical sides due to the soft limestone eroding. We will take a boat ride today to see them and climb in caves on a couple. It is foggy today, so we don’t have a grand view of hundreds and hundreds of islands at once, but we will be able to see them up close from the boat.

The ride down here was fascinating. I made a mistake in a previous posting about the population of Vietnam, and the trip down reinforced it. The population of Vietnam is not 28 million, but between 80 and 100 million. So think of the US population of about 300 million, take a quarter to a third of it, and put it all into a space half the size of California. That will give you the idea—one of Vietnam’s most pressing issues is population, land use, economic growth, and all the issues that go with it. On the way down and back to Ha Long, we could see dozens of very large new factories and assembly plants along the road for miles and miles, but often these factories are sit in around rice patties with dozens and dozens of people working in them, bent double while they transferred small rice seedlings by the thousands to the paddies. One of the real issues in Vietnam is how to productively occupy all the people—there are lots of places where you see several people where one or two might do.

Vietnam is a very complicated and subtle country, and this blog is not the spot for an essay on what any of us on this visit would barely understand. But there are several layers: antiquity is one: the Temple of Literature in Hanoi we visited two days ago was founded as an open air university to train Buddhist monks as government administrators—in 1060. So at the same time that William the Conqueror was fighting it out with the Celts with clubs and broadswords, the Vietnamese had university level training for their government administrators. Second, there are powerful traditions from the Buddhist and Confucian teachings that emphasize loyalty, family, the unit (village to nation) and the like. Third, there is a thousand year tradition of a small country with a highly disciplined and inventive people repelling invaders—we were only here for 10 years, while the Vietnamese fought the French for 100 years and the Chinese for 1000 years. And finally, seeing all the loyalty to Ho Chi Minh (every school room in the country has his portrait at the front and some sayings on the wall) reminded me of how incredibly new they are at all this: the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence was read here in Hanoi in 1954, so they are only about 50 years old as a independent state, and have been at war or in an economic blockade from the west for all but the last 10 years. So seeing how much they have accomplished just in the last 10 years since we were here to get Jessie is amazing. There are large high rise apartments going up on the outskirts of the city, and new buildings somehow shoehorned into the very crowded downtown of the old city, without losing the spirit of the city.

I am now continuing after the boat trip out around the Hal Long Bay islands. They really are one of the natural wonders of the world—thousands and thousands of them, some only a few acres, some much larger. We climbed around in two beautiful caves on one of the islands, just stunning in their beauty. The ceilings of the caves were perhaps 250’ off the floor, and with waves of complex stone erosions and stalagmites. There are probably several hundred steps from top to bottom, so Colleen’s knee got a good workout.

The islands themselves are just amazing as a landscape: green vegetation hanging onto almost vertical sides of the islands, most them several hundred yards high and grey stone against the jade green of the sea. We rode out on a largish boat, with dining tables on the lower deck and deck chairs on the top. There were some larger boats with staterooms on the lower deck, dining on the middle and viewing on the top deck, for people making multi-day excursions out to the islands. The folk story of the creation of the islands has to do with a dragon who lashed the water with his tail, and the islands are all the pointed edges of his tail.

Interestingly, all the Vietnamese stories of dragons—there are thousands of them, as the dragon, turtle and a few other animals feature in all the creation and nationalism stories—have to do with water, not fire. Vietnam is a country where water is everywhere: most of the land between Hanoi and Ha Long is table-top flat, and mostly used for rice cultivation, so by definition, mostly under water for a good part of the year. If global warming ever throws off the delicate balance of those water levels in Vietnam, they are in big trouble, as a huge percentage of the population is still largely rural and dependent on rice for a great deal of their diet. I also read that after the Communist government tried state ownership of the land for a few decades, they had to acknowledge that it didn’t work, and reintroduced private land ownership. When that happened, the currency inflation dropped from several thousand percent to 7 percent, and Vietnam went from a net rice importer and economic basket case to the second largest rice exporter in the world after Thailand, despite their huge population. It tells you something about economic systems, but also about hard work and discipline.

Enough (and maybe too much…) for now. We are just back in Hanoi, and letting everyone have some slowdown time.

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