Report from Vietnam

[andsome]

My son is at present on six months holiday, touring South America and Asia. He has just sent this very long e-mail from Vietnam. I think that some of you who like a good long read may appreciate some of it's content. If it is too long for the forum, and a mod wants to remove it so be it, I am happy to accept that.

Hi,

Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon - now there's a name to conjure with after the wealth of recent history that has affected this place. Well you can conjure with it as much as you want because quite frankly it must rank up there with Bradford and Lima as one of the worlds great cities. At least no one expects Bradford and Lima to have any attractions but Saigon - now there’s a name to conjure with......

Back in 1950 it was described as follows:- "A French town in a hot country. Its inspiration has been purely commercial and it is therefore without folly, fervour or ostentation. There has been no audacity of architecture, no great harmonious conception of planning. Saigon is pleasant, colourless and characterless"

I guess the only thing that has changed in 50 years is that the adjective pleasant no longer applies. Mainly because the bicycle has been replaced by the motorbike which now choke the streets day and night creating a cacophony of noise, pollution and hastle.

The main problem is that Saigon has no texture. Its a large city of four million people that just sprawls in all directions in a featureless mess. There are some small pleasures to be had, but these mainly involve acts of imagination when looking at the hotel where Graham Greene set The Quiet American or the American Embassy where the last helicopter left after the American War or the Palace where the president of the American backed regime had its headquarters.

Sure the people are friendly, the food is wonderful and you can party all night but I imagine this will apply throughout Vietnam.

I need to get some cockroach spray and practice my mime in the hotel beforehand. Later on I ask for the spray, am met with incomprehension and my inner thespian dutifully emerges. I squat on the floor and rapidly run my hand across the ground in a convincing impression of a multilegged creature. Siezing an imaginary can of spray in my other hand I cover the insect in a cloud of poison which immediately starts its death throes before collapsing on its back, legs in the air. The storeowner calls the rest of the family and demands a repeat performance. Gails of laughter break out, I am clapped heartily on the back and am swiftly escorted from the building. I now have to walk a different route as I have grown tired of the number of people who throw themselves to the ground and spray their hands whenever I pass.

The main attraction in the south of Vietnam is the Mekong Delta, this is where the seven tributaries of the Mekong river end their journey from Tibet to the South China Sea. It is a fascinating area as it contains one of the last examples in Asia of floating markets and is also the commercial hub of the whole region. You can get a four day guided trip with hotels etc.for next to nothing and get some exposure to the huge variety of enterprise that occurs.

The villages on dry ground all seem to pick one specialty. What would be mundane on a small scale seems to take on a bewildering significance in the large. The sight of red and yellow incense sticks gathered together in little bundles of ten and then laid out to dry, on the road, in the sun, in their tens of thousands stretching away into the distance and beyond is remarkable. Everywhere men are making the mixture of sawdust and glue that forms the basis of the stick and women then take the large sticky balls and shape them into individual sticks before dipping them in the fragrant powder. Indeed this must be about the only country I can remember for quite a while where the men seem to work as hard as the women, rather than indulging in important drinking activity.

Everything in the area is manufactured on a small scale by family units and the machinery used seems to be taken from the set of an Dickensian film director with an overactive imagination. There is always a diesel powered generator bellowing away somewhere and then a dangerous labyrinth of long spindles, cogs, ratchets and wheels in frantic motion to agitate, rotate, mix and otherwise interfere with a variety of foul smelling vats of strange brews.

I didnt realise how hard it is to make rice paper. There seem to be innumerable sortings, mixings, heatings, rollings, dryings and beatings before you get to the final product. Again the sight of acres of rice paper laid out to dry is an arresting one.

Out on the river there are houses that are floated on barrels with a surrounding net that extends downwards for several metres towards the river bed. At the centre of the property is a rectangular hole to access the river. Each house then becomes a floating fish breeding farm and thousands boil to the surface when you throw a handful of seed in.

The main attraction is just to drift between the boats of the floating market where an incredible variety of wares are on offer. Again each boat has one speciality so some are ablaze with the colour of one type of flower whilst others seem to be in danger of sinking beneath the weight of pineapples. Women in conical straw hats punt passengers across the wide width of the river and small boats selling meals have to snake around to seek out their customers.

I fear that before to long the benefits of captilism will be reaching here - there is money to be made. A nice big and "efficient" rice paper making factory with modern machinery and ten employees could make a tidy sum for the right brave entrepreneurial type person.

I am the only one who has elected to have a homestay here and so the tour guide personally drops me off at the house of a local family.

The rules of the house are issued by The Socialist Republic Of Vietnam and state that foreigners must not:-

1) Bring plastic explosives into the house

2) Hold loud drinking parties that would affect the social order

3) Distribute pornography to local families

4) Start inflammatory conversations that would affect the social order

It is intriguing to imagine the type of person who after managing to smuggle quantities of plastic explosive and pornography into a Vietnamese village would be dissuaded by the presence of a large sign. I imagine such a person would be greeted with extreme disinterest by my family who's appetite for such things I judge to be minimal.

I make the obvious joke to the guide and ask him what I should do with the pornography I have brought with me and for some reason he takes this as a cue to show me a picture of his rather plain girlfriend. I remember a Germaine Greer story where she is humbled by a guy who keeps telling her how pretty his girlfriend his and he eventually shows her a picture. She is expecting a convential pretty blonde, probably with too much makeup, and realises that beauty is really in the eye of the beholder when what she sees is a rather conventially ugly and plain woman.

Remembering this I tell him how pretty his girlfriend is. "You think so?" he says. I repeat my claim and then he looks at me and quietly says "No, she is not pretty - but I love her very much". I liked that a lot.

Later on he tells me their plans for marriage might have to be put on hold as she may be able to go to America to study for four years as her emigre Uncle will pay for her. He looks at me and says he worries that she will not return. I guess you can get to see a country from other than Planet Tourist when something likes this comes up. This is not a bad Hollywood film - of course she is not going to come back. Beyond the smiling faces and the fact that green paddy fields with cute people in conical hats look quite nice in the right light, this is a pretty ugly place. I havnt met anyone who doesnt work seven days a week, or anyone who has managed to travel to another part of their own country. The sewers in the towns are often broken open and stinking with rats running along them whilst the countryside is covered with rubbish and plastic bags. For six months of the year the place fries under intense heat and crops are kept alive by back breaking maintainence of dykes and ditches that hold the water. For the rest of the year the rain pours down, the dirt roads are impassable and rivers burst their banks flooding the houses. Sure its not all bad but why would she come back?

Back in Saigon, the War Crimes museum has recently had its name changed to the War Remnants museum after improved relations with the US. I guess the contents havnt changed though as there are many pictures of Americans throwing live Viet Cong out of helicopters and dragging live prisoners along who are tied behind tanks. I guess they are sparing our delicate sensibilites somewhat and have left the photos of dead babies and raped and mutilated women in the archives.

There is a scratchy black and white documentary on the American war. It is quite startling to watch this after the one sidedness of movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocolypse Now which manage to have no Vietnamese characters in them and portray the people as some sort of savages living in a primordial jungle. It astonishes me that these films are viewed as being anti-war simply because they show that war is hell and people get killed a lot. My nine year old niece could tell you that. Surely an anti war film would expose the real political reasons for the decision to go to war rather than the propaganda we are expected to swallow? Apparently not, show people being blown up for 90mins, call the film Hamburger Hill and we have a profound anti war films on our hands.

Anyway, a number of people seem uncomfortable with this video about the American war. There are a number of uncomfortable mutterings amongst the audience when the "brave people of a South Vietnamese village collect their American Killer Hero medals". Perhaps this is too "in yer face" and people would prefer the sophistication of Western propoganda. How civilised we are in the West that we award our brave Americans the Congressional Medal Of Honour rather than the Commie Killer Hero medal.

Outside the museum a guy with arms similar to a victim of Thalidomide explains that he was born to parents of a village which was sprayed by Agent Orange. He makes money by selling photocopy rip offs of history/literature books about Vietnam. I buy one for $10 and then have an American telling me how I have been ripped off and could have bargained him down to $3. I dont think I have felt less ripped off by anyone in my life.

75K's outside of Saigon are the Cu Chi tunnels which were a VietCong stronghold during the war. There are over 200K's of tunnels with three different levels going down to a depth of ten meters. There were kitchens, clinics, operating rooms and sleeping chambers down here. Surely this place must rank as one of the man made wonders of the world. Up to 16 thousand people could live down here at any one time. The Americans dropped such a high tonnage of bombs in this area that 1kg of scrap metal has since been recovered from every square metre of ground

It is difficult to understand what the guides who show us round have been through and although they encourage questions it doesnt seem appropiate to probe too deeply. These guys all fought on the American side and were recruited from the small percentage of Vietnamese who had become relatively wealthy and educated under classic "divide and rule" policy during the French colonial period. Some of these people naturally took the Americans side when the decision to invade was taken.

After ten years of fighting, and failed promises of evacuation to America, many of these people were thrown into communist "re-education" camps, after the war, and after a few years were allowed back into the community. Many were then eventually allowed into America.

The guide who showed me around said that he had turned down emigration, as American B52's had killed his wife after carpet bombing the south vietnamese village where she lived. Indeed it is a strange that the Americans are still allowed to claim they were defending the south of Vietnam where they managed to kill around 2million civilians!

So there the guide stands - he is still discriminated against in his own country as he fought on the losing side, the side he fought with killed his wife and now he is showing tourists around the very tunnels he spent ten years trying to eradicate. He smiles and jokes a lot and is an easy companion - on the bus home he says that he tries to smile and joke otherwise there is no point in his still being alive while all his friends are dead.

Details of the events and decisions that lead up to the war were leaked 30 years ago when a government insider released the Pentagon Papers. The excuse given was a North Vietnamese "attack" on two American ships in the Gulf Of Tonkin. The Papers reveal that neither of the ships had in fact come under fire and rather unfortunately President Johnson had written the denunciation of the attacks one week before they occurred! The Papers also revealed that by America's own estimates Ho Chi Minh was expected to return 80% of the democratic vote in the forthcoming nationwide elections.

Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist who wanted an independant socialist Vietnam that was free of direct influence/control from either the Soviet Union or America. Socialism in this context meant that the rich natural and labour resources of Vietnam would be used for the benefit of its own people rather than exported externally at knock down prices. America feared that if a country like Vietnam was successful in this model it could lead to the rest of South East Asia following suit.

It may help you sleep at night to believe that a naive America bravely entered Vietnam to protect it from the evils of global communism and tragically lost at immense cost to itself. The truth of the matter is that politicians cynically started the invasion of the country to ensure that the entire region would not develop along independant lines and the areas natural and labour resources would be available to Western Capital at minimal cost. It was a war for your right to wear cheap trainsers and America won it. How about an anti-war film about that?

This may now all be history but the parallels to current events are close. Around 50% of the UK population are happy to believe that because 17 Saudi Arabian nationals drove a plane into the World Trade Centre it is necessary to invade Afghanistan and Iraq to prevent terrorism. Perhaps the world is getting better at least that means that 50% have worked out its a war about cheap oil supplies (there is now an oil pipeline being built from Uzbekistan through Afghanistan and to the Black Sea). The Lancet reports 100,000 Iraq civilians dead so far (80% due to American action, 20% to the insurgents) which is also an improvement on the four million civilians killed in Vietnam. Happy times.

Mike

[doug]

A fascinating read.

[The Grump]

YAWN

[lester1]

Enjoyed reading that andsome

[andsome]

Two out of three can't be bad. I just thought that the deep thinkers may be interested.

[Agent Smith]

Well, it's now three out of four. I liked the cockroach story :P

Where else in Asia and S. America is he actually going Andsome? Or is it a case of see where the feet take him?

[Robbers Dog]

I cant see the point of this thread. If anyone wants to know about Vietnam, why not try Google?

[doug]

RD I think the point of this that it's a view from someone whos's actually been there, seen the sights, smelt the smells and met the people.

[lester1]

RD I think the point of this that it's a view from someone whos's actually been there, seen the sights, smelt the smells and met the people.

Yep :)

[andsome]

Well, it's now three out of four. I liked the cockroach story  :P

Where else in Asia and S. America is he actually going Andsome? Or is it a case of see where the feet take him?

He flew first to Mexico. Then on to Honduras and Guatemala, and Belize. He then flew to Sydney to meet up with a girl who he has know for several years. They motored across Australia to Perth, and spent a few days there at new year with her relatives, then motored all the way back again. He is now in Vietnam, and has made an excursion for a few days to Cambodia. Other ports of call are China and hopefully Tibet, if he can get through the border. Evidently the situation varies according to the mood that the Chinese are in on the Tibetan border. He is due home at the end of May or early June. He is a contractor in IT and business consultancy, running his own one man company. He hires himself on contract to company's that want his service and are prepared to pay his fee. He does so well that he can pack up now and then and have this sort of holiday. He went a few years ago all round South America, and visited the Galapagos Islands. He can afford these holiday due to the money that company's will pay for someone in his position who knows his job. He last worked at Bradford and Bingley at £2200 per week. Not bad money.

[Besty]

Just too long for this time of the morning hope he is enjoying himself

[bhuk]

I did enjoyed reading that andsome thank you

[andsome]

'Er indoors was well chuffed today. He had sent an online greetings card for Mothers Day, and later on phoned from Vietnam. He is at present in a place about half way down on the map, called Hoian. It looks very interesting.

Hoian link. Click here