Back in business with a vengeance: Vietnam

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Yes, I’m back. After much deliberating and many hours spent walking around various malls in Bangkok I decided that I really did need a new laptop. I settled on an Acer Timeline AS1810T which is one of the latest in the small pc segment, like the Asus eeepc or Dell mini. Except that it’s slightly bigger so it’s still got a pretty normal keyboard and the screen is 11.1” which is about as small as I would like to go since we also use the computer to watch movies. With a 320 GB hard disk, 2 GB RAM and a decent processor it can run most software that I need it to run. It came with a free external DVD player so we can finally watch the rest of the cheap movies we bought along the way. On top of all that it has an amazing battery life of around 8 hours and weighs only 1.4kg, which is just perfect when traveling. Perhaps best of all: because I bought it here in Thailand the keyboard has all these cool Thai characters on it, yay!

So now it’s time to start pumping out some blogs and pictures and catch you people up on what we’ve been doing here on the South-East Asian mainland for the past weeks. After Indonesia, we went to Vietnam. We took four flights in two days to get from Bima, Indonesia to Saigon, Vietnam. The country is a lot more modern than Indonesia, which is obvious from the quality of the buildings, the cars and the clothes that people wear. It’s also a lot cleaner and there were even rubbish bins on the street; madness I tell you. After six weeks of nasi goreng we were more than up for a change in menu and Vietnam certainly proved to be different. My first meal was rice with bbq pork, fried morning glory and a curry type stew with snails.

The area where we stayed -Pham Ngu Lao- is a little touristy (think Khao San Road or Kuta) but still quite nice and conveniently located; we basically walked everywhere we needed to go. There are hundreds of little hotels and guesthouses, all with good aircon rooms with fridge, tv and shower for around $10. We stayed about a week and visited all the common highlights: The War Remnants Museum which gives a different if not altogether unbiased take on the Vietnam War, the architectural horror that is the Unification Palace, the Notre Dame de Saigon, etc. We also took the opportunity to go to the cinema and watched Public Enemy, the new Johnny Depp movie.

On one of the last days we took a half day trip to the Chu Chi tunnels: an extensive network of tunnels surrounding what used to be the American base at Saigon. There’s some 200+ km of them and they’re spread over three different levels with the highest one just below the surface and the deepest one up to six meters deep. During the war the Vietcong lived in these tunnels, family and all, and fought the Americans from the tunnels and the trenches that they dug around them. The nearest tunnel exit was no more than 500m from the American base, which allowed them to mount surprise attacks and raids, and the extent of the network meant the VC could move quickly around the area without being detected. Every ten meters or so there were air holes disguised as natural features such as termite mounds. The entrances are tiny rectangular holes, covered with a camouflaged piece of wood. Some of them are still in place now and so as a visitor you can try to go into the tunnels. The technique is to raise your arms over your head, then bend your knees all the way and finally pulls your arms in when you’re down. Not an easy task, even for a skinny guy like me and obviously impossible for most American G.I.s. Apart from that, the diameter of the tunnel is so small that we wouldn’t be able to move through them. There’s a part that has been ‘westernized’ and made about twice as high so tourists can get some idea of what it’s like to duckwalk through a few hundred meters of pitch black tunnel. Hot, sweaty and very uncomfortable, I can tell you that much and like I said, the original tunnels were only about half the size of these. Imagine living like that for about 20 years.

Since they had to live below ground for most of the time and the Americans were always on the lookout for them, ready to chuck a couple thousand pounds of high explosives on their heads from B-52s, they got very inventive. For example, fire usually generates smoke yet you need it to cook on as induction stoves were still exceedingly rare in the jungle. So they built a horizontal chimney with up to seven chambers where the smoke cooled off and dissipated before finally trickling to the surface up to 200 meters away from the actual kitchen; even if the Americans did spot the smoke, they would bomb the wrong area. Likewise, the Americans used dogs to track down the entrances and throw hand grenades in or use flamethrowers. So the VC used dried pepper around the hatches, destroying the dog’s sense of smell, or alternatively they used clothes from Americans they killed, marking the entrance as friendly to the dogs.

And then there were the booby traps. There are many examples of different nasty traps used, but the most interesting aspect of it all is that they basically created all their weapons from bombs the Americans dropped. They used the shrapnel to make spikes and casings for new bullets, they used unexploded bombs to make mines, etc.

So combine this naturally hostile environment of mud, heat, dense forest with a dedicated army of guerillas -consisting not just of men, but women and children- with booby traps and a maze of tunnels where the enemy could pop up seemingly at will from the front, the side, behind, above or below you and just as easily vanish again like rabbits down a hole and you get some idea of just how horrible it must have been for the conscripted kids from the States sent down there after only a cursory training.

Adding much to the atmosphere of the place is the firing range where tourists can shoot all kinds of guns, from American M16s and M60s to AK-47s and apparently even bazookas. Since there are a lot of visitors and a lot of them take advantage of the opportunity, the air is constantly filled with the sound of different guns. I had been looking forward to the opportunity to shoot an AK for a while but when I found out they also had an M16 I couldn’t resist. I mean, that’s the dream of any kid who’s every watched Tour of Duty or Platoon, right? So I forked over the $17 for 10 rounds (honestly, I think they make more money on the shooting range than on the tunnels themselves) and proceeded to the firing range. Oh my lord that is loud! Nothing in any movie can prepare you for the pure, unrefined violence of a machine gun shot. You can feel the shockwave of the sound; not just when you’re firing the gun yourself just next to your head, but also when you’re standing a bit further off. Then there are casings flying out the side of the guns and spinning through the air while the bullet tip flies off to somewhere random on the other side of the range. They gave away prices if you could hit the target twice or three times (at about a 100 meters) but I don’t think they have to make good on that promise much as the guns were extremely inaccurate and dingy old pieces of crap. I know M16s are notoriously unreliable but mine jammed four times on ten bullets. Not something you’d like to go to war with! Unfortunately the guns were mounted, I guess so tourists don’t end up killing each other, but the 5-6 cm of play in the mounting still gave a pretty good sense of the amount of recoil the gun creates. I saw an ad for the shooting range in Phnom Penh the other day and it seems that there you can actually shoot from the shoulder while standing so might have to give that a go if I’m ever back there.

We’d originally planned to head south into the Mekong delta from Saigon and spend about five/six days there but the last days in the city the weather was extremely bad with one epic rain storm which literally flooded the streets of the city, forcing cars and motorcycles to drive axle deep through water. We had planned to check out Chinatown -Cholon- but after only an hour or so it started to rain. We sheltered in front of a little shop since the rain usually doesn't last too long and this is what most people do; chat, read the newspaper, smoke a cigarette. However after over an hour it was still showing no sign of relenting so I ventured out to get a cab only to find out that all the surrounding streets were flooded. Not that it matters much; it's still life as usual with everyone driving cars, bikes, motorcycles and carts along the flooded roads. After looking at the weather and deciding that being on a boat on the Mekong during a 12 hour thunderstorm would not be so much fun, we opted instead to catch the bus for Cambodia and Phnom Penh in hopes of better weather. Vietnam seemed great and contrary to many reports the people were friendly. We’re definitely coming back at some point to travel between Hanoi and Saigon and see all the coastal beauty Vietnam has to offer. Preferably during the dry season though.

Since we’re here in the wet season we were of course prepared to endure some rain but for the most part it has been pretty good. Yes, it rains often -at least once almost every day- but it’s usually only for a short time. The clouds are often quite welcome as the sun adds an easy five degrees to already high temperatures (high twenties to mid thirties). The main problem is the humidity but then again I don’t think it is that much more agreeable during the dry season.

So that’s it for my Vietnam update. The Cambodia blog should follow fairly soon.

Just to keep you up to speed: we’re in Thailand at the moment. We’ve just spent five days in Bangkok and are now in the north, in Chang Mai. The plan is to check out this area for a few days before heading into north-west Laos and making our way back down along the Mekong to Vientiane where we can get another visa for Thailand (if you arrive over land you normally only get 15 days) and then we’ll go back to Bangkok and then on to the beautiful islands and coast line of the Gulf of Thailand.

As usual, I hope you’ve enjoyed this update and we’ll be back soon with the Killing Fields, some more scooter-adventures and of course the big one: the temples at Ankor Wat.

Stay safe!

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Comments

[jack]

Shave you bum
Looks like you are still enjoying yourself over there. Shave that fluff of your chin mate. It adds another easy 5 degrees as well Jack

[MartinNL]

but it makes me look so much more rugged and manly, don't you think? ;-) Actually already shaved it off before we left Cambodia but these are still old pics