Vietnam Tour of Duty: Hanoi to the DMZ
Trip Start
Feb 29, 2004
1
26
33
Trip End
Nov 24, 2004
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Tuesday, October 5, 2004
HANOI TOUCHDOWN
I'm becoming a jaded traveller. The Hanoi airport minibus, which usually drops passengers off outside the city centre Vietnam Airlines office, had a very helpful driver who said he was happy to help me get to the hotel of my choice. Now in Asia nothing is ever for free and I knew it was probably some kind of scam (something confirmed as soon as they ask 'first time in Vietnam?'), but I went along with the ride to see what would happen. This is a working trip, after all.
Sure enough, the driver hadn't counted on me carrying a map and a compass, and I soon traced the roundabout way he was driving through Hanoi's Old Quarter. So when he stopped outside a hotel that was going to pay him a commission for bringing me there, I jumped out, thanked him very much for the ride, ignored the eager hotel staff trying to grab my baggage, and legged it down the street to the hotel of my choice. I looked back to wave at the baffled-looking minibus driver. Scamming the scammer left me feeling very smug for at least two days.
Before arrival, I had a good laugh in Bangkok where I landed to change planes (the Thai Airlines flight being twice the necessary distance, but much cheaper than a direct flight). BKK airport has two parallel runways with a long strip of land in between. As we landed, I couldn't help noticing unusually large trees on this strip of land, just 50m from the plane. Then I noticed the tidy grass and people walking around dragging big bags - they had actually turned this strip into a golf course. I still can't believe that anyone would want to play there, as it's completely surrounded by busy runways and aprons - the clubhouse seemed to be attached to the airport fire station. A bad hit would cause the ball to bounce all over the airport, causing a considerable delay in the game (maybe the fire brigade collects lost balls in their spare time). Besides, you could take out the window and pilot of a passing Boeing (a 'hole in 747'?), forever losing your ball, and probably your membership too.
HANOI
A pleasant surprise after Big City Hong Kong, Hanoi's centre is low-rise and quaint, with lots going on all the time; fish and vegetable markets, schoolchildren in Pioneer outfit walking home, open-air restaurants and beer stalls everywhere, and the incessant offers of the 'xe om' drivers (motorbike taxis; 'hug bikes' literally). The Old Quarter survived American bombing and Commie town planning intact, and is the centre of retail and tourism, with plenty of good restaurants, bars and cheap hotels to choose from.
The xe om drivers are best kept quiet by renting a bicycle for 10,000d/day, though moving through Hanoi's traffic can be daunting. I reckon 95% of the vehicles on the road are motorbikes and scooters. Apart from the noise and pollution, they save the city from huge traffic jams (which only occur where cars appear), but also adhere to the rather informal traffic rules.
Theoretically, traffic drives on the right in Vietnam, but when it comes to turning left, you just speed along the other side of the road so you don't have to wait for the traffic coming from the other side. When coming to a crossing without traffic lights, you just edge slowly ahead and let others go aside for you. When you turn out onto the road, you just edge slowly out, against the traffic if necessary, letting the others avoid you. Larger vehicles have right of way; smaller ones can be completely ignored. You're only responsible for what you see ahead of you, so cutting into someone else's path is not something to worry about. Most importantly, it's essential to use the horn as much as possible. Thanks to slow average speeds and these clear rules, driving in Hanoi is not as dangerous as it looks at first glance, and even can be fun.
Motorbikes are the backbone of Vietnam's transport sector; there's nothing you can't strap on to one. Things I saw on a motorbike:
- a cage with dozens of birds;
- a 10m-long pipe;
- a 3-seat sofa (sideways);
- another motorbike (held sideways by the person sitting on the back);
- a family of five (from front to back: small child standing, dad driving, small child standing, mum, child sitting).
Because of the high-security ASEAN European-Asian conference, revolutionary leader and president Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum displaying his frozen body was not open during my time in Hanoi. I did visit the Military History Museum, where a Vietnamese Mig jet was proudly parked out front while the remains of several types of French and American warplanes were stacked against a tree in the courtyard - the ultimate humiltiation for their defeat. The museum is dedicated to the recent wars in Vietnam; the first one was all about the huge loss the French suffered in 1954 when their showcase military base at Dien Bien Phu in the northern mountains, was completely overrun and captured by the Vietnamese who had dragged incredible amounts of hardware though dense jungle. The 'Total Victory hall' is all about the '1954-1975 resistance war against the United States for national salvation', and still has photo captions that are full of Communist rhetoric; I noted: 'spies', 'bandits', 'American clique', 'puppet regime soldiers', 'imperialists' and 'secret agents'. Of course, heavily supported by the Soviet Union and China, Northern Vietnam was just as much a puppet state influenced by imperialists.
It was interesting to read that even after the Americans had been cleared out (the Paris peace treaty allowing for a silent retreat but not solving any problems in Vietnam itself) the signing of the peace treaty was done reluctantly. An article in India's 'Sunday Statesman' paper from January 28, 1973 says: "The four ministers were meant to start signing in unison, but Mr. Rogers [US Secretary of State] had trouble in choosing a pen from the half a dozen offered to him, and was off to a late start."
BY MINSK TO THE NORTH
One of the strange results of Communist fraternisation between Vietnam and Eastern Europe (apart from the thousands of 'Friendship' slave workers sent from Vietnam to Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany) is the domination of Vietnam's rural roads by the Belarus-imported Minsk motorbicycle.
My father used to have a heavy petrol-powered lawn mower with a clutch to get the bastard rolling. The Minsk is no different, except that it kills the grass with fumes instead of whirling blades. A sturdy and simple design from the 1950s, the Minsk (named after the Belarussian capital, spelt MIHCK in Cyrillic and pronounced 'mingk' by the locals) is a wonderful beast. To give you a better idea of the machine, Minsks are officially imported from Belarus as farming machinery, not as any kind of means of transport. The manual says that the Minsk is a bike that likes to be greased, not polished, and that alarming clouds of smoke coming from the exhaust is a good sign.
Despite a decade of intense Honda-imports into Vietnam, the Minsk is still the best choice when you're going rural here; it will roar over any road, no matter the condition; its two-stroke engine is noisy and dirty but very powerful; you can plough a field with them.
Perhaps best of all, if (better: when) it breaks down you can nearly always get it started again using no more than a rock and a piece of bamboo. Try that with a Honda. For Minsk initiates, the manual usefully lists all the sounds and rattles that normally should emanate from beneath the seat, and what to do if there's a noise that doesn't belong there.
I rented a yellow Minsk from Cuong's Motorbike Adventure workshop in Hanoi ($6/day including Western helmet) to visit Mai Chau, a mountain village southeast of Hanoi. It was an eventful trip, and not just because I had to learn to drive a motorbike in Hanoi's mad morning rush hour. I don't have a motorbike driving licence (and the police doesn't care too much about that in these parts), but the experience I had on my dad's lawnmower and the ancient 50cc scooter I had at school 15 years ago turned out to be sufficient.
After a test round, I was escorted to the city limits (a necessity in a city with no direction signs at all), and soon I was roaring along the highway leading northwest. I made my way to a few atmospheric temples near Hanoi, testing the maximum speed along the way (no dials on this bike, but I think it was about 80km/h). Then, while cruising over perfect roads along a beautiful rice-paddied valley, there was a sudden grinding sound (not listed in the manual), and with a loud pop a part of the engine was catapulted out on the road in front of me while most of the oil in the sump (the tank holding all the important, whirring, noisy bits of a bike) trailed out behind.
It turned out that the interior chain connecting the engine axle with the clutch mechanism had decided to die, and took off part of the sump cover with it. Later I read in the manual that 'you don't want this chain to break on you'. A man in a nearby house called Hanoi, and while Cuong sent two guys out to find me, I was given green tea and chatted in German with him - he had worked in Rostock, Eastern Germany, as a crane operator for a few years from 1987 to 1990, when the thousands of Vietnamese workers were kicked out of the brave new Germany. He showed me his book of German language lessons; it was full of labeled drawings of crane and machine parts, and the ubiquitous Teutonic 'es ist verboten' warnings. It's strange to think that he witnessed the successful 1989 popular revolt in the GDR, just to be sent back to a country that's still ruled by red fossils.
After a few hours, Cuong's guys arrived and gave me their Minsk for me to continue on to a hotel, while they fixed the broken one (with spares, not bamboo) to get back with. The replacement Minsk was even better - a sort of rallybike with suspension that even had the locals impressed. It was fast too - I can't remember any vehicles overtaking me, it was just me passing them. The next morning I was off again, swapping the flat and reasonably busy roads of the Red River Delta for the near-empty roads going though amazing karst landscapes. Years ago, I read 'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance', but only now I know what Pirsig meant when he described the joy of riding along a winding mountain road; you really only do need to shift your weight to zoom comfortably through a bend (compared to being pressed into the door when you take a hairpin bend in a car).
After reaching its highest point at 1200m, the road descends steeply into the Mai Chau valley. Road workers were pretending to be busy widening the road with dynamite, and the the going was pretty tough, with rocks, gravel, sand and potholes everywhere; the perfect place to learn riding a bike. At one point, they had just blasted part of the mountain away, and instead of waiting together with the buses and trucks for a few hours for the bulldozers to push the rocks down the valley, the workers (after some skillful bargaining on my side) carried the bike over the rocks for a handful of dong.
Mai Chai was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. A calm valley of rice paddies surrounded by forested tropical mountains, with several pretty ethnic villages consisting of bamboo-made stilt-houses (good against floods and rats). I stayed the night at one of them, eating a great home-made dinner and sleeping on a mattress on the see-through split-bamboo floor. I drove 15km down the valley to a swollen brown river, and visited a roadside factory where machines churned out chopsticks made from the huge bamboo stalks that grow everywhere here.
THE FAR NORTH
Backtracking to Hanoi, I took a night train to the Chinese border and rented another Minsk there to ride up the slaloming road to the mountain town of Sa Pa, near Vietnam's most interesting minority villages. The market here is amazing - women of several different ethnicities dressed in truly amazing colourful costumes come to trade and sell handicrafts to tourists. The minorities have fabulous names like the Black and White Thai, Muong, Dao, Giay, and the white, red, green, black H'mong or the Flower H'mong. You can trek through the valleys and visit the villages from Sa Pa, and this would be the main reason for me to return to Vietnam.
On a particularly bad stretch of road-under-construction, my sturdy Minsk slipped and toppled over, causing a few bruises, torn trousers and breaking the hand break and the indicator light (which didn't work anyway), snapping the clutch cable (more serious) and causing the carburetor to drip petrol. A roadside shop nearby could sell me a secondhand cable and with a bit of help and tinkering (and using bamboo this time - the leaves to clean my hands) I was able to fix it enough to get back to Sa Pa. I'll try to get my license before heading out next, mum, I promise.
I arrived back in Hanoi by night train at 05:30 on October 4, international animal day. My hotel yet had to open up, but the spontaneous market on the street was already in full swing, and I watched a woman select a large fish from a bucket, and scrape off all the scales and start making incisions - with the fish still very much alive. If only the UN knew.
HA LONG BAY AND SOUTH TO THE DMZ
Vietnam's most sight must be the weird landscape of Ha Long Bay, where thousands of limestone hill islands rise vertically from the sea. I joined a tour from Hanoi which included a night on the boat and a midnight dip in the phosphorous waters, a visit to a floating fish farm, cave sightseeing on Cat Ba Island and an afternoon on the picture-perfect tropical beach of 'monkey island' where a bunch of semi-tame rhesus monkeys were fooling around in the trees. The tourism industry is roaring ahead in full gear here, and the boat trips are well organized, but unfortunately the bay is filthy with oil and stuff thrown overboard.
To check out the border town (that's the fourth time I've seen the Chinese border on this trip, with two more to go), I took a Soviet-made hydrofoil up north to Mong Cai, whizzing past the bizarre rock outcrops for the first hour. Not many tourists make it up here, and it's fun to be in a place where the children smile in amazement at foreigners or come over to practice their English. It's in the small towns that you notice that the Vietnamese are a really smiley, friendly bunch.
South of Hanoi, I spent half a day in the port town of Hai Phong, where French colonial buildings still line quiet streets. Further south, I motorcycled around Ninh Binh on one of my favourite daytrips in Vietnam, to see the limestone hills of Tam Coc, which are like those of Ha Long Bay but much less touristy and set between bright green rice paddies and cute villages full of waving children.
Getting around Vietnam is made easy by several companies running 'open tour' buses up and down the country, which take you from hotel to hotel in the city centres, and which work out about as cheap as taking a local bus plus the taxi rides to and from the bus stations. The problem with Vietnam is its length - overlanding, you can't escape a nighttime ride, and the one I did between Ninh Binh and Dong Ha was awful, but necessary as the night trains were booked full. The temperature of the air-conditioning went all over the thermometer, we had an unannounced bus switch at 02:00, we had to ask the driver to turn down the loud Vietnamese-style country music at 03:00 and the driver used the horn during the night as he would by day. I'm getting too old for this shit.
From Dong Ha I went on a motorbike tour of the DMZ, the 'demilitarized zone' around the border between North and South Vietnam where most of the fighting went on during what's known here as the American War. Apart from a US bunker in one of the old 'firebases', memorials and mass graves, there's not much to see, but it was interesting to link this desolate landscape to the images we all know from the media and films.
It seems that when it comes to fighting Vietnam, the history lessons are easily ignored. After all, before the Americans had a go at it, the Vietnamese had repelled Kublai Khan's hordes, the mighty Chinese Imperial army and, more recently, the US-supported French army in a protracted guerilla war with some very embarrassing defeats for France. After the Americans had been dealt with (with lots of material help from the Soviet Union and China that the Vietnamese are very quiet about), China invaded the north in 1979 to punish the Vietnamese for interfering in Cambodia (where it had ousted the mad murdering dictator Pol Pot) - but within weeks China, with the largest army in the world, had to retreat after suffering huge losses.
The statistics of the Vietnam/American war make you sick, with nearly 8 million tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, four times more than during the whole Second World War, 75 million litres of defoliant killing the forests and crops, nearly 3 million Vietnamese dead and 4 million wounded, and 58,000 American casualties. The US spent about US$ 352 billion on the war, but still lost from these proud, determined people. It's easy to be cynical about the reasons - the US apparently went to war because of the popular but naïve domino theory that once Vietnam would become Communist, other countries in Southeast Asia would follow. Stopping the 'spread of Communism' was the publicised reason for the war, but it was the threat to South East Asia's trade and oil resources that was the real reason. And the Soviets and Chinese supported North Vietnamese for the same reasons of power and resources. So these people, Vietnamese and Americans alike, suffered and died for commercial interests - now where have we seen similar circumstances recently?
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Next up: a job description
Sign of the day: 'Song Long karaoke bar'
Today's special: 'Fried goat's burst'
Currently reading: Milan Kundera's 'Life is Elsewhere'; sad and beautiful.
Exchange rate: €1 = 19.500 VND (d; Vietnamese dong); US$ 1 = 15.600d.
A word I'd like to know the origin of: slalom.
