Doing Vietnam: the highlands and the coast
Trip Start
Feb 29, 2004
1
28
33
Trip End
Nov 24, 2004
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
DOWN THE NORTHERN COAST
Just south of the DMZ, the royal city of Hue brims with tourists viewing remains of the royal palace (the scene of the American War's most bitter battles in 1968 and 1975, and also the place where the Northern Vietnamese mercilessly slaughtered thousands of 'anti-revolutionary elements' in the days after recapture) and the Royal Mausoleums outside town. The citadel offered photo sessions with actors dressed up in the attire of the former Vietnamese royal court; 20.000 dong for a picture on the throne, 20.000d more for an 'escort of imperial maids'; 30.000d more for a selection of mandarins and yet 30.000d more for a bunch of soldiers. I'd settle for just the bargain escort of imperial maids, thank you, and maybe they'd be able to escort me all the way home...?
The citadel museum had an interesting game on display that was all the rage in the courts of Vietnam and China; the vase-stick-throwing game. You'd stand a metre or two from a narrow-necked vase, and throw a stick twice the length of a chopstick onto a little trampoline, causing it to bounce back up, flip in the air, and plonk into the vase opening for admiring applause all round. These royals must have had lots of time on their hands.
Further down the coast, dull Da Nang was the main US airport for bombing raids and looks like what I think an American town might look like - wide long roads and long walks to get anywhere. Da Nang does have the Cham Museum, displaying the pretty carved temple statues (similar to the ones in India and Cambodia's Ankor Wat) left behind by the Cham Hindu kingdom that ruled southern Vietnam for centuries before the Viets migrated from the north put an end to it.
Nearby Hoi An was another highlight though; a pretty harbour town with rench colonial buildings mixed with Vietnamese and Chinese temples, excellent bars and restaurants and a great beach nearby; I'll be back one day.
Driving along the coast, I've irritated many a fellow traveller by remarking how much the tropics sometimes look like rural Holland with flat green fields, roads on dykes and isolated farms. Graham Greene seems to agree with me on this point, as he wrote about the coastal areas as "... that Low Country landscape where young green rice shoots and golden harvests take the place of tulips and windmills."
Vietnam was the scene of unimaginable, senseless butchery during the American War.
I'm going to be harsh now, as it's the only way to describe this and convey how you feel when visiting the sites of all this avoidable misery. Son My village, near the nondescript town of Quang Ngai, was witness to one of the most shameful episodes of the American War, the massacre of My Lai. It's here that a platoon of US soldiers landed in helicopters outside the My Lai hamlet during the morning market on March 16, 1968, and systematically killed all the people they could find. The soldiers, who had suffered many losses from the invisible guerilla attacks, had been told that anyone present was a Viet Cong sympathizer. They cremated the bodies, burnt the houses and then later bombed the area. 504 people were killed, the majority of which were women, children and elderly; not one shot was fired at the soldiers. Babies were laid on the ground and shot, families rounded up and machine-gunned down, grenades tossed into the air-raid shelters that the locals had built to offer some protection from the bombing raids.
In Europe I've seen many sites of Nazi atrocities, but this one equals them in brutality. And just like the Nazis, the Americans documented this crime themselves, with army photographers present to record the scenes. Ironically, it's these photos that now constitute the majority of exhibits in the My Lai massacre museum. Photos of crying women and screaming children together in a hut just before being killed, a dazed-looking old man being led out of a hut for his execution, and a road full of bodies; people killed while running away.
When the story came out, having been repressed by the propaganda machine for over a year, the platoon commander was arrested, but released after serving a short sentence; the soldiers were left alone. There were acts of heroism too; reminded of WWII, one of the helicopter pilots, after realising what was happening on the ground, saved a group of fleeing villagers by threatening to shoot the persueing soldiers from the air. The massacre did much to turn public opinion in the US and around the world against the war. Nowadays at the site, palm trees scarred with bullet holes still stand between the remains of the air raid shelters. Signs point out the location of family homes, and the names and ages of the people killed there.
CENTRAL HIGHLANDS
A pretty 6-hour bus ride away from the coast took me up though tropical mountains to the towns of Kon Tum and Buon Ma Thuot, which saw some bad fighting and bombing (Hamburger Hill is in this region), and where in 1975 the Southern Army generals were halicoptered out, leaving an army of 200,000 hopelessly surrounded South Vietnamese soldiers to fend for themselves. The area is now a centre for trekking in the jungle and visiting villages of ethnic minorities. These simple people, living in stilt houses and surviving from subsistence farming were trained by the US to fight guerillas, but later were punished for that by the victors. Now life is back to normal, and it's possible to visit the Bahnar minority stilt-house villages with their amazing community halls (rongs), which have towering thatched roofs.
The ride back down to the coast at Nha Trang was classic Vietnamese highland landscape; hills covered with waving high grass and remnants of tropical rain forests standing on the higher reaches of the mountains. Nha Trang itself, a seaside town with a good municipal beach, was nothing too special, though it's a good place to party and get Western food and books after a few days spent far from the tourist conveyor belt. I was supposed to spend a day on the beach here, but south of Da Nang Vietnam has a different climate, and the rain season was just petering out here, gving it one more good spurt of rain on my beach-day.
My last foray up into the mountains brought me 5 hours inland to Da Lat, an overhyped hill station at 1500m built by the French to escape the summer heat in Saigon. The town is not very special and the surrounding landscape is pleasant but no more spectacular than the Ardennes in Belgium, but many travellers come here anyway for the simple reason that their guidebooks list it and the open tour buses go there. So after an afternoon there, it was back in the bus to Mui Ne, Vietnam's newest beach resort. It's here, based in an $8 thatched bungalow, that after finishing my last research I finally succumbed to the tropics, forgetting about time for a day and relaxing on a beach straight from the Fa and Bounty commercials. Life was good.
S-S-S-S-SAIGON
With a half a day to spare in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), I wandered between the French era cathedral and train station, and the royal palace which was the scene of the North Vietnamese tank ramming the gate and ending the war in 1975. My last destination was the War Remnants Museum, formerly named the War Crimes Museum, but now absent of political overtones and more of an anti-war museum.
I remember that long ago at school, the teacher once asked us who would refuse to join the army; I was one of the few to raise my hand. I wasn't much of a talker back then, and I didn't have an answer why when the teacher and the classmates asked why, but having seen so many recent battlefields in Europe and Vietnam, I'm now just more convinced that since 1945 wars are not between nations or ideals, and that there's no such thing as 'fighting for your country' - whether in offence or defence - you're fighting for the interests of politicians or people smart enough to stay out of the mess. You've heard it all before. I just saw the photos. End of rant.
The museum has more displays of military hardware such as fighter planes, helicopters and bombs; incendiary bombs, fragmentation bombs, Agent Orange defoliant bombs, dioxin bombs, napalm bombs, bombs that destroy all oxygen within a 500m-radius, and 7 ton 'seismic bombs' that shake the ground 3km around, flattening everything within 100m. Again, it was the photo exhibitions that are most gripping and left me feeling terrible. A hall was filled with the last photos of the dozens of journalists that died in the American War in both Vietnam and Cambodia. There were more photos and US witness stories of the My Lai massacre, but nothing about the atrocities committed by the Northern Vietnamese army of course. Another hall depicted the long-term effects of the chemical warfare waged by the US army; poisoned landscapes and mutilated children. The children, always the children. On my last day in Vietnam, I cried for the children.
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Next up: Hong Kong, properly this time.
Sign of the day: 'My Dung restaurant'
Today's special: 'Boiled chicken testicles with bean sprout'
Currently reading: Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American', an excellent short novel about a journalist posted in Saigon in the 1950s during the French war.
Exchange rate: €1 = 19.500 VND (d; Vietnamese dong); US$ 1 = 15.600d.
