March 24, 2002.
Dear Family and Friends,
Swarms of motorcycles, straw woven conical hats, very narrow buildings, rice paddies so green they seem to glow, fresh baguettes, Hill Peoples in traditional dress, remnants from decades of war, all will be my enduring memory of Vietnam. These letters may be getting boring to many of you, but I am going to persist anyway, and hope there is something of interest for you.
Lorraine, Carole and I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) nearly three weeks ago and we have had a whirlwind tour of the country, south to north. With a population of 80 million, Vietnam is the 9th most populous country in the world, and, or course, it dominated world news for most of the sixties, seventies, and even eighties. Today these determined, hardworking people have put that struggle behind them and are now looking towards a prosperous future. They seem to be a country of entrepreneurs and there is really little evidence of Communism save large billboards urging workers on. Vietnam is full of tourists, Australians, French, German, Dutch, Scandinavians, and lots of Canadians. In fact, we met two pairs of Newfoundlanders in one hotel. I can't recall ever meeting someone from Newfoundland on any of my previous trips.
Saigon with broad, tree-lined avenues is a busy exciting city of 8 million. And, reportedly, 6 million motobikes, mostly Honda Dreams. Many, if not most, of the women motobike drivers wear bandannas over their faces and long silk gloves up over their arms to protect themselves from the sun. Although six million sounds like a bit of a stretch, I believe that number; crossing the street near our hotel through the swarms of motorcycles was as exciting as this old quad bypass heart could stand. Carole, having prepared herself for South East Asian traffic in Niagara-on-the-Lake rush hour, found each crossing particularly challenging.
We visited the War Remnants Museum (originally called the Museum of American War Crimes, a name I prefer), a stark record of that terrible time, with a large section dedicated to the My Lai massacre. We had lunch at the Rex Hotel rooftop restaurant. This hotel was made famous in the sixties, as it was there the US military held all their press briefings during the Vietnam War (called the American War here, of course) with their many questionable body counts.
We rode around in pedal rickshaws most places we went, and we all generally liked them a lot. However, Carole felt guilty about putting these tough little buggers to work. Although she weighs at least 70 pounds less than me, her immediate question to her driver was always "Not too heavy?" We were never able to find a cyclo driver of sufficient size, strength, or adequate health to make Carole feel comfortable so in the end we usually hired motobikes, with drivers, as they are cheap and everywhere.
I had at one time thought I would rent a motobike for myself to ride, but having seen many accidents involving motobikes and met several tourist casualties, I have decided against that idea. We met one young Australian guy who spent three days in hospital with head injuries and the ugliest burn on his lower leg you could imagine. I told him, "Man, you should go home". Being an Aussie, he limped out for a beer instead.
We made a one day boat tour of the Mekong Delta, a great day involving three different size boats taking us through many water ways with visits to a pineapple farm, a honey bee operation, a coconut produce shop, and small villages. Our guide was an engaging young man named Binh. At one point he told us "I have very funny story to tell you". He then told a joke of a young Vietnamese couple who was necking on the beach when a mosquito "flew in her dress". Binh then posed the question "What it bite?" He asked the question several times, giggling all the while, before he supplied the punch line, "His hand".
On the same tour we had an odd Belgian man who had tried the local custom of drinking fresh snakes’ blood. It is, of course, considered an aphrodisiac, as is the other local speciality, snake liquor, the ugliest concoction I have ever seen, rice whisky filled with all manner of snakes, geckos, and frogs. I have passed on both. The Belgian was in the wine business, which may have accounted for his taste.
A bus tour took us from Saigon into the mountains through coffee, tea, mulberry, and rubber plantations to the Hill City of Dalat where we rented bikes to pedal around the city. The next day we were back on the bus for the ride to the Seaside City of Nha Trang. We passed through many areas where vegetation is just now struggling back following the devastation of Agent Orange and napalm. It is estimated it will take a full one hundred years before the vegetation will be fully restored. Nha Trang is noted for its lovely beach, but we merely overnighted there before flying to Da Nang for a four day stop at nearby Hoi An.
Hoi An is an ancient city which was somehow spared all the destruction most of the rest of the country suffered during the decades of war. It has many heritage houses dating back several hundred years, but it is the hundreds of tailoring shops, equal number of craft stores, and a range of excellent restaurants that draw people here to stay for a visit. (Ironically, after 80 days of travel, including my one month in India, it is here in Hoi An, the epicentre of Vietnamese epicure, that I get food poisoning. Fortunately, it wasn't serious and I was pretty much back to normal after three or four days.)
Lorraine took the opportunity to shop for tailored clothes. She and Carole were soon well known up and down the streets and in the market. The locals had learned Carole's name early on and you could hear "Carole, Carole" (the name for them both) being called out up ahead as they arrived. In the end, Lorraine bought a two piece suit, a three piece suit, skirt, two silk blouses, all perfectly tailored for her. (These tailors will promise, and deliver, a suit within six hours of measuring you up.)
All vendors, cyclo drivers, and motobike drivers are very aggressive in trying to solicit business and they are not deterred by "no" or "no thanks", regardless of how many times they are repeated. I was given the phrase "Khong cam on", no thank you in Vietnamese, by some helpful local and that works better. I also learn "Xin chao", hello in Vietnamese, and try to use it but I still wander around saying "hi, hello, hi", etc.
While in Hoi An we also rented bikes for a ride to the very lovely beach some 5 kilometres away from the city, and on another day, we hired a small boat for a putt putt around the delta.
We arrived in Hanoi early on March 13th. Unfortunately, Lorraine has to leave tomorrow morning for home. We spent the little time she had wandering around the old quarter, browsing in the arts and craft shops, the galleries and silk shops. As before, vendors are very insistent here, and many tourists are a bit fed up by the constant harassment. So much is on offer in the street; much of it by women carrying their wares in two baskets hung on the ends of a bamboo stick carried on their shoulder. I am determined to not lose my sense of humour with them, and I haven't, but I have been badgered many times by women selling rustic kitchen implements and knives. I wonder if I truly do look like someone who wants a big, crude knife to start hacking up a pig.
Traffic is every bit as intense in Hanoi as in Saigon, but somehow the city seems a little less busy, and more laid back, probably because of the pretty lake in the centre, which is great for strolling around.
Lorraine left on an early flight to Bangkok the next morning. I am really sorry she didn't have more time. It was so great having her come and meet me. Hopefully, we can come back again one day.
After Lorraine left, Carole and I had two days to arrange travel to Sapa, a French hill city in the Northwest very near the Chinese border, and to visit Hanoi sites of interest. Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969, is absolutely venerated in Vietnam, and despite his wishes to be cremated, he is on display at his Mausoleum. When we arrived to view him, we were greeted with a line up about one kilometre long, but undaunted, we got in line and found it moved quickly and soon we were inside. He is laid out, ghostly white, looking a bit like a Madame Tussaud's wax figure. (His remains are shipped to Moscow for three months each year for maintenance.) It’s actually quite moving, and regardless of one's politics, he was certainly a great Vietnamese patriot and hero.
We left on an overnight train for Lao Cai, right on the Chinese border, where we are to meet our guide for our tour of Sapa and other hill towns. A veteran of India Rail, I easily settled in for a night's sleep. Not so Carole, she doesn't sleep a wink. At Lao Cai we are met by our guide Dan, a miniature Cuba Goodings Jr., and our jeep driver Hung. We liked Dan right off, his English is good, and he is very enthusiastic. Most questions are answered, "Yup". However, when we asked Dan if he would be our guide for just the day, or would he also be with us when we went to Sapa the next day, he started singing, "Whereber (sic) you go, whateber you do, we'll do it togezzer". He was quite a card. Our jeep is a 1940's design, military khaki colour, Russian built brute well suited for our trips around the mountains visiting the hill tribes.
The mountains of northern Vietnam are home to a large number of ethnic minorities originating largely from China. There are over fifty distinct ethnic minorities, with dozens of sub-groups, in Vietnam, but in this area the principal groups are the H'mong, of White, Red, Green, Black and Flower sub-groups, and the Dao people of which there are at least Black and Red. The hill people eke out an existence high in the mountains, almost totally self-sufficient. They make their own cloth from hemp, grow their food, and live their lives with little interaction with the Vietnamese, let alone the rest of the world.
Our first visit was to the Can Cau market, held by the Flower H'mong in the open, on rough rocky ground each Saturday. There was no community nearby that we could see, not even a hut. But there were several hundreds of Flower H'mong, the women decked out in many layers of brightly coloured woven clothing. There were many stalls displaying local products, clothing, shovels, pots and pans, silver jewellery, vegetables, fruit, etc. The livestock market was located across the road, pigs, horses and water buffalo being eyed by interested buyers. It was the first time since I arrived in India over two months ago that I wasn't badgered in a market to buy something. Although tourists are arriving in ever increasing numbers, these people know they have nothing to interest tourists and so we were free to wander in and around the stalls without once being asked to buy.
Our jeep took us back to the small city of Bac Ha where we were to spend the night. Dan took us for a couple of walks into the hills to visit homes of the H'mong. We were received in one quite large, dirt-floored house by an old gentleman dressed in black pyjama-like clothing. Cleaning the cups on the table by pouring the dregs from previous guests into each of the cups, he graciously offered us tea. The tea was cold but it was hard to decline such generosity. He sat there on his little low stool, smoking his Boong water pipe and contemplated us as we contemplated him. These people generally have no religion, rather they worship their ancestors, and there was a mantle with pictures and relics, obviously those of his deceased family.
The Bac Ha market on Sunday morning was a great spectacle. It is a much more formal market than Can Cau, much larger, and with a broader range of products. But having said that, it was still pretty mean and bleak looking to me as compared to the many other markets I have seen on this trip. The produce was limited and the manufactured goods (plastic sandals, tin pots and pans, clothing) were quite cheap looking and poorly made.
The most interesting part was the livestock market. Carole has refused to accept that people could actually eat the hundreds of cute little dogs we see every where, but after watching the people size up a dog and pick it up by the scruff of the neck to check its weight, I have now been able to convince her that they are not choosing a pet. Dogs being dogs, they sat there contentedly, wagging their tails, oblivious of their fate. There was even one man trying to promote the sale of his dog by showing that it would shake a paw. There were pigs of every size on sale, and each time one was sold it would be dragged squealing from the market, trussed up on a motobike, or stuffed into a basket for the trip home.
From Bac Ha we drove to Sapa, a hill station built by the French in the twenties. It is at an elevation of over 5,000 feet and is often shrouded in clouds and mist. Such was the case for our visit. We even had a torrential downpour when Dan led us on a walk into the valley below the city to visit the Black H'mong hill people. In spite of the rain, it was a great walk along small trails, which, at times disappeared off into the mists, ghostly bamboo trees looming over head. Again we were able to visit with a family, seven adults, one child, and four babies sitting around a smoky fire in the middle of the dirt floor. The house was very large, made of rough hewn boards, and had a very low ceiling, sleeping lofts, and very little furniture. Carole and I both liked our guide Dan very much, for his constant good humour, but mostly for his respect and friendliness towards the minorities. He knew many of them quite well, spoke some of their language, and was obviously liked by them in return. There has been very little inter-marriage between the hill people and the Vietnamese who generally look down on them.
The Black H'mong wear clothing dyed so dark blue with indigo that it looks black, but this is not, apparently, the derivation of the name Black. That name, we were told, has more to do with cultural considerations than their dark clothing. The dye is not colour fast in the fabrics, and all the women have quite a blue cast to their skin.
Sapa once had about 100 villas built by the French in the 1920's, but most of them fell into disrepair or were destroyed in 1979 when 200,000 Chinese troops poured over the border, according to Deng Xiao Ping "to teach Vietnam a lesson", for Vietnam's invasion of Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia. Sixteen days later, 180,000 Chinese poured back over the border having learned themselves there was very little they could teach the Vietnamese about war.
Today Sapa is a destination for tourists wanting to visit hill people, but it is also the site of the weekly "Love Market" for the Flower H'mong. The Love Market occurs each Saturday so we missed it, but apparently all the teenage Flower H'mong gather there weekly to find "the other half of their life". If a match is made, and that can happen as early as age thirteen or fourteen, but usually after several meetings, the marriage takes place right after the market. It was also in Sapa that Dan tells me that Hi! is the number "two" (hai) in Vietnamese. After three weeks here I now learn friendly old Merv has been walking around like an idiot saying "Two, hello, two" to everyone.
On our arrival back in Hanoi we had time for a one day tour of Ha Long Bay, the area made famous in the movie Indochine. It is as beautiful as I imagined, and as I had hoped. The weather, which is quite variable in northern Vietnam at this time of year, co-operated fully and we had a glorious day cruising in and around these huge monoliths that rise straight up out of the water. Our first stop was in an area of small islands known as Bai Tu Long, or "children of the hidden dragon" where we visited Hang Thien Cung, "Grotto of the Heavenly Palace". This is by far the most spectacular cave I have ever been in, over 250m long, 100m wide, and at least 40m high in places. It is filled with stalagmites and stalactites (Remember guys, tights go down. Hopefully.) making shapes that people have identified as various figures, e.g. dragons, turtles, angels, etc. We then transferred to smaller boats and were taken into caves only available at low tide, one of which led into a most beautiful lagoon totally hidden from view otherwise. And so ended a too brief visit to Ha Long Bay, and a too short visit of Vietnam.
Carole and I have left Vietnam and are now in Laos from where Carole will fly home in the next couple of days. She has been a great travel companion. We really do have similar interests and travel styles. Not once has she complained about my arrangements and I truly hope it wasn't just because she is too polite.
I must, however, report on her money management. For most of the time that Lorraine, Carole and I were together, and later just Carole and I, we had a kitty that we all dibbed into and from which shared expenses were paid. I kept the kitty and it was strictly on the basis that there would never be an audit. It worked extremely well. But I have watched in awe as Carole managed her own money. Dollars, riels, dongs, bahts, and kips have been kept in a wad and she has had no success, that I have seen, in distinguishing 100 Vietnamese dongs from $100US. The difference is 1 cent Canadian versus $160 Canadian. Money has been lost, only to be found, only to be lost and found again. Generally she has just offered the wad up to the merchants to take the correct amount, and generally, I think that was the cheapest option for Carole. Just as we were leaving Vietnam I finally asked Carole how she was keeping track of how much she had, and how much it was worth. "By weight", she said defensively. Aha!
Anyway Carole, it has been great fun. Have a safe trip home. And to everyone else, I hope you continue to be well.
Merv.
