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| Talk,
Thomas Garland,
18 January 1999 | |
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Everyone has been heading for Vietnam lately. Things hadn't worked out so well, so the Communist Party started welcoming in the tourists a decade ago. They've been doing rather well out of them: expensive visas; tourist prices on trains and in hotels, the usual petty corruption, etc. But the whole country now seems to be getting involved, so that now you are never far from a Coca Cola. It makes you wonder who won the war, which of course is the no1 tourist attraction, (that would explain the unfeasibly large number of Apocalypse Now bars).
Anyway, I came from China, crossing into Northern Vietnam over a recently rebuilt bridge, they've been on very bad terms. I'd found no bank on the Chinese side that could cope with the impossibly complex transaction of changing Chinese Yuan into Vietnamese Dongs, however over in Vietnam there was no shortage of money changers in pith helmets and with pocket calculators who would gladly handle my cash. Countless other services were also on offer., Coming from China that was so refreshing.
With the country being so long and thin there are really only two ways around: up or down between Hanoi and Saigon (I won't call it Ho Chi Minh city, no one does). I started in Hanoi. The city has a lot to learn about the global economy, but fortunately it remains a laid back place centered around the calming Hoan Kiem Lake. Many of the streets remain little changed since French colonial days and it is possibly the only place in Asia that bakes a decent croissant. Check out the water puppetry while you're there, it's very odd.
Avoiding the notoriously uncomfortable buses I headed south on the reunification express, Vietnam's fastest train, which sometimes reaches speeds of up to 30 km/h. Crossing the old North South Divide, I stopped off in Hue to see the remains of the once beautiful Citadel. Now the war of liberation may have kicked out the evil Yankee imperialist from the South but it feels like a very different country. They never seemed to have quite got used to the joys of a workers utopia and have embraced the emerging free market economy with a lot more enthusiasm than their brothers in the north. They also don't seem to wear those funny pith helmets.
As a result you'll find yourself giving in to the hard sell and heading out on day tours to the DMZ, Khe Sanh, the Ho Chi Minh trail and down into the Cu Chi tunnels. You'll get to play around in the jungle and the paddy fields like you're in the Nam, which of course you will be. One tour that no one seems to miss is Ma Ma Han's tour in Danang. She'll take you and boats full of other westerners out to sea, throw you in when you're sufficiently drunk and serve you mulberry wine and soggy jazz tags from her floating bar. It's a surreal sight accompanied by the soundtrack of "Good morning Vietnam", how she gets away with it I don't know.
My journey ended in Saigon, a city that has little in common with Hanoi except for streets packed full of Honda Bikes, so packed that you hope they'll never get rich enough to afford cars, but I suspect they soon will. The party doesn't seem as pervasive here amongst the hussle and bussle, but they still try to get their point across. For a big dose of propaganda visit "The Museum of American War Crimes" (as it was once known), so horrifying that it's become a joke, I just hope the country has moved on.
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