Vietnam

Well despite a week here in Luang Prabang I have been unable to keep my blog up to date due to sheer apathy, I can't give any other excuse! So I'll simply summarise by saying that Laos is certainly some people's idea of paradise. Vang Vieng is a backpacker's dream, cheap guesthouses, great food, cheap beer, and tubing (floating on giant rubber rings down the river, stopping of at bars and swinging off giant rope swings). Lots of fun.

However, our enjoyment was marred slightly by the involvement with Laos police on our final day when we had two rented bicycles stolen from near a cave when we left them to go exploring, despite locking them together with the pathetic single lock we were given. So, if you decide to hire bikes DON'T LET THEM OUT OF YOUR SITE UNLESS YOU PAY SOMEONE TO LOOK AFTER THEM!!

After several hours interrogation during which we were threatened with handcuffs unless we relinquished either several hundred dollars or our passports, we managed to escape by simply walking off. We switched guesthouses in an attempt to lose them but they caught us at the bus station, and the driver, instead of pulling out on to the road towards Luang Prabang, pulled into the police station. After even more wrangling we got away with paying just 100 dollars. Ah well, you can't win them all...

We reached Hanoi via the longest and yet most comfortable stretch of the journey yet: the 16 hour sleeper from Hue. Despite charing a cramped cabin with 3 generations of a Vietnamese family (grandmother in one cot, mother and child in another) we slept soundly and in the morning felt thoroughly refreshed. Pulling into Hanoi around noon we were hastily greeted by a 'taxi driver' who was actually someone trying to bundle us off to his hotel. He succeeded and we found ourselves staying in a cramped and slightly musty smelling room, with an agreement that we would move to a slightly less cramped and musty smelling room when its occupants would depart later that day.

The Old Quarter of Hanoi is is made up of narrow streets filled with decaying pretty French buildings. It would be a pleasant place to walk around and get lost in if it were actually possible to navigate without feeling like every second is a potential traffic accident. Elsewhere in the country we had met an Irish girl who was cautiously attempting to cross a busy thoroughfare, unwilling to fling herself into the unrelenting assault of motorbikes upon which entire Vietnamese families and their possessions balanced precariously (presumably to the amusement of passing Vietnamese who seem to lack any fear of traffic), until a helpful old Vietnamese lady grabbed the reluctant foreigner by the arm and dragged her into the maelstrom, and unfortunately into the path of a motorbike whose driver was unable to swerve in time. Fortunately neither was hurt too bad, but it made us feel a little less comfortable traversing the city.

One reason why making your way around on foot is difficult is the fact that life in Vietnam is lived not in people's houses but on the pavements outside. Pavements in Hanoi are like cycle paths in London: almost entirely useless for the purpose they were intended for, but unlike London cycle paths they have adopted other purposes. Among these are: parking motorcycles, sitting, sleeping, eating, drinking beer, washing, cleaning, and selling. When you combine this with the relentless "beep....beep....beep" sounds on the roads, it rather quickly becomes a frustrating place to negotiate.

Exhausted by cities we resolved to take a 2 day trip to Halong Bay, including a night on a junk boat moored in the harbour. We spent an afternoon perusing the trips offered by different ages, came to the conclusion that they were all pretty much identical, then bafflingly chose the most expensive one. There was some reasoning behind this: we were told by everyone we'd met that had done this trip to go for the most expensive boat you could afford as it was worth it. How they knew this, having done only one trip themselves (and following the same advice to choose a pricey boat) is a mystery. Anyway, the boat we chose was nice and so were the people we met.

After enduring another 3 hour drive in a cramped minibus with seating arrangements designed it would seem for hobbits or amputees we boarded our boat and set off across the bay. Low cloud reduced visibility however we could make out the thousands of steep-sided islands in every direction. These islands are known to the geologically minded as karsts: chunks of limestone dissolved out of the surrounding rock by mildly acidic water over millions of years. This process also causes the formation of massive caves complete with stalactites and stalagmites which our guide would humourlessly lead us through over the course of the day. When in one such cave he invited us to compare the phallic formations to animals, and then to 'body parts' we cracked up like boys on a school trip. He even appeared slightly baffled when in the following cave, after sighting what can only be described as a massive stone erection jutting out of the central stone pillar (and lit up bright red for the benefit of tourists), we cracked up again. Apparently he didn't appreciate such comparisons that appealed to the Western mind and preferred to describe it as looking like a finger or gun. Later he explained to Emily that he felt it was disrespectful to laugh as apparently Vietnamese worship 'natural holes'. I wonder how many parties of sniggering Westerners he would drag around delivering his monotonous and unenthusiastically presented spiel to before he stopped taking offense at their wilful defiling of Vietnamese holy ground.

I think our guide that day was just particularly strange. Most guides we had experienced in Vietnam were from the older generation, those alive during the war, and were usually (if tentatively, sometimes because they had learnt in a reeducation camp after the war not be too open about their opinions) prepared to say something about their past. This man was very young and serious, and apparently unaware of the complexities in the history of the previous generations, as we discovered later that evening. During a conversation in which the Vietnam war came up, we asked him why we thought America had invaded Vietnam, he said he thought it was for America to dominate and control the region. Now, I'm no historian, and I'm sure people with anti-American sentiment could come up with an argument to support that statement to varying degrees, but I just thought the simplicity with which he grasped the situation betrayed an education that must have been heavily biased in favour of the communist party. He was unaware of little details like the fact that vast numbers of Vietnamese fled the communist North after the country was partitioned after the French withdrew. This is I suppose to be expected, but as time goes on there will be fewer and fewer Vietnamese who will have been alive in the years following the war, and so fewer who will have a genuine grasp of their nation's past.

Well it has been a long time to go without internet. I attempt to write this blog again, despite the fact that in Dalat the computer fucked up and I lost half of the Pulitzer-worthy material I was writing.

Anyway to cut a short story long we left Dalat in the company of two motorbike riders belonging to a group that style themselves the 'Easy Riders', who exist as tour guides of the Central and Southern Highlands of Vietnam. We travelled through the Central Highlands, 1000 km over 5 days, stopping frequently to marvel at the construction of various ethnic minority houses, and to attempt to discern information about the Vietnam War at key places from the semi-impermeable English of one of our guides. Although he was the more enthusiastic and clearly more historically erudite of the two, his English was unfortunately also the poorest, which we realised when we confused the word 'parachute' for 'battlesuit', at which point Emily burst out laughing. Feeling sorry for the chap I managed to keep a straight face.

Still their company was excellent, they were wonderfully friendly and enthusiastic, and when I said I would keep in touch with them via email at the end of the trip, I believed it myself.

We ended the trip in Hoi An, a small coastal city famous for its tailors. However we arrived in the pissing rain, which didn't let up for another day and a half. We had also both been suffering from stomach upsets and the shits for a few days, to the extent that the sights and smell of Vietnamese food, particularly the ubiquitous and toxically pungent 'fishsauce', were turning our stomach at every opportunity, to the extent that we had to survive on pizza for while.

Moving on to the former Imperial Capital of Hue, we passed through lush coastal mountains and arrived there in the evening, again in the pissing rain. Fortunately this had abated by the next day, although we then had a hangover to attend with, as the night before we had decided to sample the local brews with much enthusiasm after several days of forced abstinence due to the aforementioned shits.

That day we discovered after the briefest of looks around the UNESCO heritage site that is the walled citadel of Hue, we decided we were all templed out, and spent a day by the pool. The following day, having no hangover, we endured a motorcycle trip around the city, which would have been better if we both had more energy. That night we took the overnight train to Hanoi, the most comfortable journery yet, in fact one of the most comfortable nights sleep I have had, despite sharing the cabin with a 3 generations of Vietnamese (a little boy, his mother, and grandmother).

So, with enthusiasm for travelling resumed after a half-decent meal and an excellent nights sleep, we're both enjoying Hanoi. It's quite a charming city, and French influence is more obvious than Saigon, and although traversing the streets is similarly challenging, the many French cafes are relaxing oases of calm.

Right, I might try and write this more frequently now!

Today we got on an air-conditioned coach and headed up into the mountains, so high that air-con isn't necessary: Dalat, a former French hill station and now a tourist town for Vietnamese and foreign tourists, is blessed relief from the tropical humidity. Having experienced pretty much pancake-flat land since we left the islands of Southern Thailand, it was a relief as our coach started to climb into the mountains of Central Vietnam. Towards the end of the 8 hour journey I fell asleep, and when I woke I almost could have been in Switzerland: we were surrounded by pine trees and mountain scenery.

Arriving at the town itself was a reminer that we were indeed in Vietnam; despite the presence of swankier hotels the same kind of shops spilled out onto the streets from French-style townhouses. The atmosphere however is much mre relaxed than Saigon: still lots of motorbikes, but it is possible to cross the road without thinking that you might not make it this time.

With Emily temporarily out of action with a stomach bug, I ventured out into the town myelf and wandered round, finding a cafe where the furniture appeared to grow out of the walls, decked out with more plants than Percy Throwers Garden Centre. In here I had the BEST CUP OF COFFEE EVER,

Saigon: it's busy. Just trying to cross the road is a battle of wills and a potential traffic accident. The city is constantly alive, everyone seems to have somewhere to go, usually on a motorbike, usually accompanied by their girlfriend, pet dog, or a huge amount of unstable luggage.