North to South through Vietnam

Three weeks in Vietnam.

Where we went:

Hanoi = Old Quarter, Ho Chi Minh’s House and Mausoleum, Temple of Literature.

Highlight: As we left there were two women fighting in the street and the Vietnamese guide said, “Look! Vietnamese folk dancing!”

Halong Bay = Huge bay with thousands of large limestone Karsts dotting the water – beautiful.

Hue = Imperial City of Nguyen Lords.
Vietnam version of China’s Forbidden City, built for the Nguyen emperors (pretty much everyone and everything in the Nam is named Nguyen…).

My Son = Cham Ruins
We took scooters for a day trip here to see the vestiges of the temples of the Cham empire. Impressive as quite different to any other types of temples we had seen but again took a toll in the war. The VC used is as a base so it got carpet bombed. A professor of Cham culture in France sent Nixon a protest letter and Nixon responded by ordering his troops to continue killing the VC without damaging the buildings – pretty difficult to do from a B-52…

Hoi An = Old riverside town with colonial buildings.

Na Trang = Nice beach

Dalat = Crazy House, Easy Riders, 1930’s Emperor Summer House.
If anyone offers you fox or weasel coffee from Vietnam – it’s coffee beans fed to, passed through and “recovered” through these animals; does something nice to the taste apparently - we declined to taste.

Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon = Cyclo Tour, Re-unification Palace.
The locals still call it Saigon. Much nicer than Hanoi; wider streets, calmer traffic, more trees, decent buildings. Looks like one place the French actually invested some money while they were here – Town Hall, Opera House, Post Office, Notre Dame Cathedral – all very nice. We took a Cyclo tour (guy cycling you around in a seat at the front of the bike) around the town and survived!
Saw the former Presidential Palace where the tanks crashed the gates to end independent South Vietnam. They still have a Huey and a Northrop F5 on the grounds. Place is a 1960’s monstrosity that was rebuilt after President Diem was so unpopular his own air force bombed him in the old colonial palace.

Cu Chi = Cu Chi Tunnels and Cau Dai Temple.
Cau Dai is the craziest religion ever – a fusion of Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity Victor Hugo as a saint! They worship four times a day at this barmy temple with dragons wrapped around the columns and the eye of Sauron overlooking everything. It has 2 million followers all hedging their bets for whatever deity meets them in the afterlife.
Cu Chi is the area with famous VC tunnels where the Ho Chi Minh trail ended, now with widened tunnels for Western tourists to crawl through! Scary as hell down there but they went underground as half a million tonnes of bombs were being dropped from above. Saw the worst propaganda film ever, made in 1967, which included lines such as, “Like crazed devils, the Americans shot everything, including the trees, the chickens and pots and pans. They shot everything in peaceful Cu Chi, very far away from Washington D.C.”.

Mekong Delta = Various Islands, Can Tho, Rach Gia

Phu Quoc Island = Long Beach
Billed as ‘The next Phuket’, not quite there yet unless staying on a construction site and watching distressing amounts of litter bob in the ocean is your idea of paradise.

General Observations: - What we call the Vietnam war, they call the American War. The war is not really an issue anymore, especially in the south. It was just another war in a long history of wars. They had the French to contend with for 80 years and the Chinese for 1000 years before that as occupiers. The population now is young and very forward looking and the only way is up.

- A Vietnamese said, “When the British left Malaysia they left a full infrastructure. When the French left Vietnam they left baguettes.” There’s not much to show for 80 years of colonial rule.

- One very disconcerting thing is how they keep touching you in markets to get your attention, one woman held on to me as I tried to walk away and wouldn’t let go!

- Customer service still an infant concept. They don’t do what suits the customer, they do what is convenient for them. No information on tours during the tour, they stop and kick you off a bus and don’t tell you what is happening next; told us the boat trip we had booked was cancelled only when we were on the replacement bus!

Overall Best places we visited were Halong Bay, Hoi An, Siagon and Cu Chi. Unfortunately after a while you feel like you’re walking around with dollar signs on your head and the only thing the locals care about is how much money they can get out of you - constantly being ripped off gets tiring after a while.

In hindsight, would have just gone to three places mentioned above and spent more time in China, Cambodia and Laos, where the people are nicer, haggle nicer, are interested in you beyond money (in places often much poorer than Vietnam), more polite and not just trying to rip you off all the time.