Good Afternoon, Vietnam
We spent a month in Vietnam, and it might take you a month to read this blog. Apologies for the length, and the weariness it may create: I wanted to recreate the feeling that I had at the end of our month there and make my readers suffer. In hindsight, I was highly conflicted with being a tourist and so my own issues bled into our trip and stained our time in Vietnam.
Crossing over the border into Vietnam from the start of our bike tour in Cambodia, our diets immediately improved when we entered Vietnam. Our guide took us to vegetarian restaurants, and we quickly concluded that Vietnam had the best vegetarian food of any country we’d visited. Every city had a few vegan or vegetarian restaurants or cafes, and if they were vegetarian then they were mostly vegan given how little dairy exists in Vietnamese cooking.
While most of them seemed to cater largely to tourists, we found amazing food in every place we visited, except for the 24 hour boat cruise in Halong Bay, but honestly we didn’t expect anything edible on anything with the word cruise in it.
The quality and prevalence of the English spoken is fantastic in Vietnam. You honestly don’t have to speak a word of Vietnamese. As we found in Croatia, Helsinki, and Tokyo, English is expected by default in the world of tourism. We expected to struggle more, but were stunned at times by the level of proficiency. The La Siesta Hotel in Saigon was the best in class in many ways, including the proficiency of the entire staff in English.
While I had read some weird warnings about public displays of affection in Vietnam, it turned out to be no big deal. Even LGBTQ couples in Saigon are not harassed according to locals. Both Phnom Penh, Cambodia and in Saigon, Vietnam can look from a distance like any other major city, but at the street level there’s no mistaking this is not Europe, Japan, or the US.
Relaxing on Vietnamese Alcatraz
After five days in the crowded streets of Saigon, I was longing for nature. We boarded a prop lane and emerged on Con Son island, part of the Con Dao islands SouthEast of the Vietnamese mainland. The temps (30C+) and humidity (90%?) were brutal, but the thick jungle and empty rock beaches restored my inner calm.
Not recommended: Northern Vietnam
You have to take all of my recommendations with a kilo of salt, because they largely apply to people who are identical to me. But I would not refer or recommend most of Northern Vietnam to myself. And not just because that would be self-referential.
Ninh Binh / Tam Coc were fine. Interesting rock formations jut straight into the air, similar to the formations in Halong Bay that we’d see a week later. The highlight was visiting the Ninh Binh Bear sanctuary. In Vietnam, “bear farms” raise bears in tiny cages to milk their bile ducts monthly to use as a medicine, which is actually available from plant based sources. Bear bile extraction is now illegal in Vietnam, but the criminals are not pursued and so the disgusting, inhumane practice continues for something completely unnecessary.
The popular Sa Pa is a BJR nightmare. Take a picturesque mountain valley, carve every surface into terraced rice fields, and scatter trash, trinkets, and massage parlours liberally throughout. Sprinkle in ten kilos of people-trying-to-sell-you-cheap-crap (a la Hoi Anh) and then abandon handfuls of small children on the streets so that tourists will give them money. If you want to summit Fan Si Pan (the tallest peak in Vietnam), you’ll need to go to Sa Pa. If not, just stay away.
My ability to crash is not limited just to people-powered bicycles
In Ninh Binh, I almost ended our tour on a very, very bad note. I actually have a motorcycle license, and I’ve driven a scooter before, and had just driven one around Con Son island just a week before. But setting out from our hotel in Tam Coc, the scooter we’d been rented had a very jumpy throttle, and when I hit a patch of gravel and needed some power, the scooter shot forward and slid. I reacted in a pattern of overcorrection, and failed to brake properly, and laid the scooter out. It really shook me up, because with Kim on the back, both of us could have been seriously injured. Luckily we were only going about 10 kph, and she escaped with a small burn on her leg while I received a small fist sized second degree burn on my leg.
We set out again just minutes later, this time being much more mindful and forcing myself to do a little bit of reaction-braking practice, and we rode on the scooter for about three hours through some reasonably tricky roads: massive trucks, which were actually banned on the roads we were on, would fly by us at ludicrous speeds, but once again, the “laws” in Vietnam are mere suggestions in regards to roads.
I still wasn’t the same for the next week, feeling incredibly dumb, clumsy, and replaying again and again how much worse it could have been.
Not Communist But Still Very Much Pretending
Even after a month in Vietnam, I am sure I’ll get a lot wrong here, but the experience led me to see a number of things that I really hadn’t experienced on my previous trips to Vietnam.
Free Market, Closed Market?
The five pointed star on the Vietnam National Flag supposedly represents the five classes of people in Vietnam: The peasants, the workers, the business people, the politicians, and the intellectuals. The star “brings them all together” in Vietnam, but in reality they are still very much apart.
Life is better for many people when compared to the French colonial era. After Vietnam’s independence and sovereignty were established, the government gave land to thousands of peasant families in the countryside. You can see why Ho Chi Minh would have been popular. However there are still thousands of people without status in Vietnam, whose children are not allowed in school because the family lacks the correct papers. Not unlike Japan, or even the US in some ways.
There are certainly rich people and poor people in Vietnam — nowhere near the communist ideal of Karl Marx. The high level of corruption and the missing consistency in the rule of law don’t bode well for a transition to a more balanced society that Ho Chi Minh wanted for Vietnam.
While understanding the Vietnamese system is hard at first for foreigners, once you understand it, you can get a lot done very easily. Shipping a box back to Australia was amazingly simple — because our friends who live in Saigon who knew to call. A man on a scooter showed up and sat with me, and through the concierge at our hotel, got all the information he needed, and then off he went with our package. It arrived at its destination without a word from customs, unlike our other two packages we had mailed back from the US. It arrived in Australia without drama, a stark contrast from every other package we tried to mail during our world tour.
It also might be easy to observe the chaos and lack of rule of law to be simply “every person for themselves,” but we also found almost everyone we had the chance to interact with personally to be helpful, even if there wasn’t a reward in it for them.
Propaganda is alive and well in Vietnam.
We visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon (Previously the American and Chinese War Crimes Museum) and it was incredibly confronting, exhibiting the inordinate amount of ordinance (bombs) that the US dropped on North Vietnam, and the decades of birth defects from the use of Agent Orange during the war. I am not an expert in this part of history, and in no way will I dispute the notion that the Vietnam War was a horrible idea, continued often for political pressure, and that millions of people died unnecessarily, and that the US is to blame for so many of the mistakes.
But the stories shown in the War Remnants museum, in Hao Lo prison (a.k.a. the Hanoi Hilton) in Ha Noi, and in the Con Dao prison on Con Son island, paint a very one-sided and often false narrative (i.e blantant mistruths).
One of the main myths is that Vietnam was united in their love for Ho Chi Minh and Communism, and that the French and the Americans were just trying to perpetuate their colonisation of Vietnam. It’s a useful myth because it paints a picture of a unified Vietnam, and that no Vietnamese, other than those forced or manipulated into serving, were on the side of “the South”.
Yet the attitudes of some Vietnamese in the South heavily differ from this — families in the South would still frown on their child marrying someone from the North. I have no idea how prevalent the North-Side divide actually is, but it exists. The monuments talk about “reunification” but never acknowledge that many from the South never wanted to be part of Ho Chi Minh’s vision.
The explanation of the Tet offensive, the history behind the Geneva Accord of 1954, and the pretence of a unified Vietnam all contradicted the historical facts and left out any notion of error or inhumanity. Did I expect better? No. But maybe I didn’t expect it to be this bad. The US wasn’t kind to veterans of the South after our own Civil War, and it took President McKinley (and maybe a few generations) before the North could be honest about that and work to make sure the sins of the past did not serve as an anchor for all men. Will Vietnam’s government ever admit the wrongs they did?
The most egregious mistruths surround prisoners of war. The “Hanoi Hilton”, where American pilots were housed served previously as a house of horrors for Vietnamese dissidents. In the eyes of the French these were likely “terrorists,” of a sort, but they formed a core of the resistance that eventually led to the liberation of the North from the French. In the current propaganda, Vietnamese were tortured by the French and later the Americans, but the Vietnamese treated the Americans incredibly well and never tortured them. This mistruth was to me the most evil. It’s one thing not to mention that your side tortured your enemies (Americans still don’t like to admit that Guantanamo was absolutely about torture), but it’s another thing to claim that it never happened. There are countless books from trusted sources, like John McCain, who give first hand accounts of the brutality they faced in prison. And there in the Hanoi Hilton, they use McCain as an example in their exhibits. Their logic on display asserts that because he came back to visit and had nice things to say about the Vietnamese, he must have been treated well. His autobiography would strongly differ. Now, of course, these American pilots were bombing the North back into the stone age, so expecting them to be treated without anger is naive. Once again, let’s just be honest.
It made me a little sick to my stomach. But that’s not unique to Vietnam, not unique to Communism, and sadly part of history. I’ve been to Auschwitz and other memorials to genocide and other horrors, and Vietnam attempts to have their own in several of their museums and exhibits, but the entire effort is not one to document and share the truth. It is to reveal one side while concealing and blatantly lying about the other.
If you’re actually interested in the Vietnam War and feel like you don’t really know that much about it, the Ken Burns documentary is exceptional.
Religion and Spirituality Continue to Hold the World Back
It’s easy to forget in Australia how much of the world is still caught up in supernatural beliefs. You see Bible-driven decisions play out in American politics, you see the ridiculous beliefs from the Middle East and the violence they sponsor, and you see how daily life in Southeast Asia is wrapped up in superstition and absurd beliefs.
Fortune tells are consulted (for a fee, of course) for most major decisions. Chinese birth year signs are still considered valid: one couple we met were both born in the year of the pig, and their parents were worried that would mean the couple would be lazy (I’m a pig myself….)
People spent a lot of money buying fruit and alcohol, and buying and burning fake items in the belief that they will send the real thing to their ancestors in the afterlife. Fake money, fake clothes, fake phones, fake SIM cards, fake everything-you-can imagine is made out of paper by specialty shops so you can buy these fake things and burn them, making sure your great great grandfather has good mobile coverage in the afterlife.
The younger generation, especially the educated living in urban centres, see more and more of these as cultural rituals, but it’s stell heavily practiced nationwide from what we observed and were told. There is a beauty in caring about your ancestors and respecting them. But there’s insanity when you’re burning paper to send a Rolex into the afterlife.
Even tipping your cap to these as purely cultural practices, I look at the time and the money wasted. But put under a magnifying glass, people could find a lot of fiscal tomfoolery in much of my life, I suppose. I worship my own foolish gods of “purpose” and “giving back” and trying to be “ethical,” when my strongest beliefs are that none of this actually means anything. (Okay they would probably point out that I worship material things, carbon fiber, running shoes, and wetsuits.) There is no afterlife, but the lives we live don’t actually have meaning, either. So why not burn paper Mazaratis and hope that your Great Uncle will soon be cruising around with Buddha riding shotgun?
Ready to be home
Our last week in Vietnam, I often found myself going through the motions, until I stopped doing even that. The straw that broke the camel’s back was in Sa Pa, supposedly a trekking haven, but mostly just a trash filled tourist trap. Our guide for”trekking “showed up at our hotel, and could not keep up with us, even on flat land. She was allergic to UV light. She said. “I am fat and lazy.” Great. Glad you have chosen to be a trekking tour guide.
The trail was not something I’d ever bother to step foot on, were I hiking on my own. I was in a bad mood and wished I could just go somewhere quiet and walk in nature. The endless terrace rice fields surrounded by tourist cafes poisoned my soul.
Travelling gives you an overhauling feeling of helplessness at times. You stare at the scene in front of you and ask, “Is developing the world really better?” We applaud the building of schools but in many places the lives of the people appear worse than they were 50 years ago. We romanticise the native culture (where kidnapping and rape were part of courting rituals) but we’ve replaced it with the same people selling factory made fake indigenous handicrafts imported from China.
This cynicism, albeit honest, was tainted by the fatigue of shallow tourism. We had been able to avoid that feeling in the majority of our travels, but in Vietnam we succumbed to far too many guide-led hours, which we both agree we would not do again. Added to that, we had been on the road for over four months. Kim missed her pooch and I missed routine.
Being back in Yamba could not come soon enough.
