Vietnam

The immigration formalities at Moc Bai only took about 45 mins, much shorter than I had expected, and there I was, in Vietnam. The difference between the 2 countries was immediately noticable; smoother roads, more traffic and all the signs were in a latin script (though still somewhat difficult to decipher with their bizarre array of accents). The traffic was sheer chaos and before the bus had reached Saigon I saw my first serious road accident, well the aftermath at least - a motor scooter under the wheel of a big lorry, with a large pool of blood next to it. I made a mental note to be extra careful when crossing the road.

My first job in Saigon was to get some cash. I was pleased to find that getting 100 quid from the bank made me a Dong millionaire twice over! My second job was to get my visa extended as I'd arrived slightly late and had only 3 weeks left. Unfortnately, this was a somewhat complex process and I was stuck in Saigon for several days while the paperwork was processed. I was amazed when the only visible result of the ordeal was a small rubber stamp on the reverse of my visa. The positive side of this is that I had time to take things easy in Saigon. I toured round several of the muesums and some were interesting. The War Remenants Museum had an excellent tempory photographic exhibit about the effects of using chemical weapons and defoliants during the war which showed the long term dammage done. I had a soup at the Binh Soup Shop, which was the secret VC base where the Tet offensive of 1968 was planned - a bit tacky but good fun all the same. The soup wasn't bad either. I also had some excellent vegetarian food in Saigon. The vegetarian cuisine here is designed for carnivores. They attempt to simulate the taste and texture of meat with vegetables and tofu and generally end up with a suprisingly good facimile.

Me, slupring at the Binh Soup Shop.

Another way of killing time I found was to go to the markets and just wander round. They had everything conceivable on sale and quite a lot more besides. My favrouite areas of the markets were the food stalls. They have amazing fruit and veg presented in impeccible pyramids, fish and meat which was so fresh that most of it was still alive and some exotic items like dried seahorses and pipe fish and even (the somewhat questionable) snakes penises!

One of the many mushroom stalls at the Cholon Market.

New Year Trees being unloaded at the dock in Cholon.

When I finally got my visa back it was time for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Tet is the major public holiday in Vietnam and everywhere promptly closed leaving me stranded for even longer in Saigon. On the positive side the approaching holiday had made the markets even more frantic and lively and there were special events for the holiday itself like an enormous firework display that made me wonder if the war had started up again. One particularly nice thing to see were the Dragon Dances that took place at the Pagodas around the city. These incredible displays of gynastics with the dragons climbing huge scaffolds were truely breathtaking. All in all it wasn't a bad second New Year this year.

A dragon dancing his heart out at a Pagoda in Cholon on New Year's Day.

With the holiday in full swing and the city on holiday, I decided to take advantage of one of the only things happening - a tour to the Caodai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels.

Caodiaism is a fusion of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam, and was an attempt by the Civil Servent Ngo Minh Chieu to form a perfect religion. I was somewhat sceptical when I heard about this but I went along to see what it was all about and at the Holy See, their great temple was somewhat gaudy in decoration but the service that I saw going on inside had a very serene atmosphere with the quite chanting and seated worshipers. It was a much more plesant experience than I've had at some temples.

The Caodai Holy See.

The other stop on the day trip was the Cu Chi Tunnels which were built and used by the Viet Cong during the American War and were close enough to Saigon to be a launch pad for the Tet offensive of 1968. Unfortunately, the original tunnels were destroyed at the end of the war by a massive aerial bombardment by the Americans and the tunnels today are more recent creations. However, this gave them the opportunity to make them twice as large, but still a lot of crouching is in order to navigate them without bumping your head.

A sight that any soilder wouldn't want to come up against in the Cu Chi Tunnels - a maurading tourist!

After spending so long in Saigon, I was keen to move on. Unfortunately, I picked a bad option for my next move - I took a tour. There's nothing worse than having about a quarter of the time you want to see some particular sight or 4 times too long at a place you've no interest in. Couple this with the fact that when 20 or more tourists pile out of a bus and start pointing cameras at anything and everything then it not only feels like an offence to the people at the other end of the lens but there's very little chance of you being able to have any one on one contact with the local people. Despite all this, I met some good people on the tour and we had a good laugh at what was going on around us.

None of us could believe the occasion where we were supposed to get our bus across a river on a ferry that was barely big enough for 2 cars. When the guide had the bright idea of taking the flex from his microphone in the bus and using it to measure the width of the bus and the width of ramp to the ferry, nobody could believe what was happening. Fortunately, the we made it across the river despite the ferry moving in the strong current as the bus embarked and disembarked. It seemed rather like a bizarre video game going on infront of us.

Some of the other sights on the tour were a giant bonsai garden, a very poor beach and a bus that had crashed into some houses (luckily nobody was injured - though the guide did insist on telling us about how frequent bus accidents were in Vietnam).

I was glad to move on to my next stop, the town of Dalat in the Central Highlands. The altitude brought a welcome break from the heat of Saigon and the kitch attractions of this Blackpool of Vietnam were great fun. I met the eccentric artistic monk who wants to travel the world and who asked me to paint a picture of him, saw the Chicken Village where a giant concrete statue of a chicken can be found (but nobody really knows why), saw Prenn Falls and Datlanta Falls where cheezy muzak is played as you walk around and you can have your photo taken with a guy in a teddy-bear outfit or with the Dalat Cowboys, and my personal favourite were the cabbages on motorbikes which I can't even start to explain but I'll post a photo from my good camera when I get home which should explain all.

The concrete chicken at the Chicken Village

Datlanta Falls

Moving on I reached Na Trang, one of Vietnam's better seaside towns. I spent a couple of days lazing on the beach and had some excellent curry which was touch of variety after several weeks of nothing but Vietnamese food. I did a couple of scuba dives but the visability wasn't too great. Apparently it's the wrong time of year for that sort of thing.

One thing that happened while I was in Na Trang which I had read about in the guide book but though wouldn't happen to me was that I was accosted by some ladyboys. They have a scam where a pair of jump you, one of them grabs you where it hurts and the other makes off with your wallet. I'm glad to say that I was too quick for them and they didn't get anything but it did set me thinking about what inspired them to such an activity. Does one say to the other "Let's go out and mug some tourists tonight." and his partner replies "OK, pass me that wig and lipsick then."? And what happens when tourists report the crime? They tell the police that there's a pair of ladyboys mugging tourists along the sea front. Do the police ask for a description (they were like a rather bad drag act than anything convinvingly feminie)? And how difficult would it be to find a pair of ladyboys in town? It's not exactly a disguise, is it? And what happens if the culprits are apprehended and need to be put in a line-up? Who makes up the rest of the line? Men? Women? Do they try and find more ladyboys from somewhere? Or do they ask half a dozen policemen to dress up for the occasion? The mind boggles...

Doc Let beach near Na Trang.

Around this part of the country there are several Cham Towers - ruins from the Cham civilisation which dominated the area between the 7^th and 12^th centuries. They were nice enough but after having seen the Khemer monuments at Angkor they seem a bit tame in comparison.

Po Klong Garai Cham Towers

An awful 15 hour bus ride took me on to Hoi An, which could be considered to be the Bath of Vietnam, full of quaint old buildings and complete with a bridge with buildings on it. The hotel situation in Hoi An isn't great and after spending my first night on the floor of a dorm I eneded up in a room where if someone on the floor above flushed the toilet, a geyser errupeted in the bowl of the one in my room! Real Fawlty Towers stuff! I saw a few of the usual sights and one rather less common. Hoi An has a local delicacy, Cao Lai soup, which can only be made from water from Ba Le well in the backstreets of the town. A small search led me to a well that was surprisingly clean - quite reassuring as I'd had the soup for lunch that day.

I progressed north through some beautiful scenery to Hue, where it rained. It barely stopped for all the time I was there so I didn't do too much. I saw the Imperial Museum which had an interesting array of exhibits incluing and excellent xylophone style instrument with big bits of stone to hit - very funky! I hoped to have a piccy for you but my camera is playing up so you'll just have to use your imaginations until I can get some piccys from my big camera. Hue is also the place to buy Poem Hats - vietnamese conical hats with images worked into them which are viewed by holding the hat up to the light, and very nice they are too!

Hue is the closet town to the Demilitarized Zone - the area around the Ben Hai River at the 17th parallel where Vietnam was divided in two and where a lot of the fighting took place during the American War. It's a bizarre place to visit as it was such a dangerous place not so many years ago - even during my lifetime. I saw the Rockpile where an American base was stationed on top of a hill that was only accessible by air, and the Khe Sanh Combat Base that was attacked by the VC as a diversion just before their Tet offensive and the Americans didn't want to loose it at any cost - fearing another Dien Bien Phu where the French were defeated by the Viet Minh forces in 1954. Not much is left these days but plenty of relics are turned up by the locals who scavange for war relics like bullets and dog tags. The Ben Hai River itself is an interesting feature and just crossing it gives you a strange feeling of making a signigicant step on a journey throught the country. On the north side of the river are the Vinh Moc Tunnels - rather like the Cu Chi Tunnels near Saigon were where the VC lived and planned their attacks. These tunnels are originals though and are much bigger than those at Cu Chi. They were also more interesting to visit having different rooms underground like living quarters, guard rooms, meeting rooms, a theater and even a maternity hospital! Several children were even supposed to have been born in there.

After having had enough of bus journeys I decided to take the night train for the next leg to Ninh Binh. I arrived at about midday and so after lunch I decided to go for a stroll. I discovered a delighful market full of friendly locals who were just as interested in me as I was in their market - a very plesant afternoon.

Ninh Binh has more to offer than just a market. It is the nearest town to several major tourists attractions. I went to Kenh Ga floating village first where the boats that are made of reinforced concrete are rowed by the locals using their feet! The have a hot spring and a pretty limestone cave with lots of stalactites and stalagmites, but most of all they have beautiful and bizarre scenery made by limestone hills jutting out of the rice paddies. If only I had some picutres to show what I saw! Not far away is the other, more well known attraction of Tam Coc, which translates as Three Caves. It's an amazing place where you take a boat ride through the 3 caves, but they're more than just caves, they're actually tunnels which pass all the way through 3 of the limestone hills which are dotted all over the region, presumably along the course of an ancient river, and you pass through one to get to the next. It's quite a journey.

My next stop was Hanoi, the capital city. The weather wasn't great for me, unfortunately, and I ended up mostly going to museums to get away from the rain. Many of them were good museums, but the ones that stick in my mind are: Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum and Museum where you can see the man himself and learn about his great achivements and spectacular good deeds in a very modern 'learning-zone'; The Maison Central (otherwise known as the Hanoi Hilton) former prison under the French and Vietnamese and an eerie place to be free to walk around where so many people before me weren't (the guillotene was a particularly gruesome exhibit). There's lots more to Hanoi but one item that I feel I should mention was something I discovered accidently - the dog market. By this I don't mean they were selling pets... The comodity was whole roast terrier and I didn't stay around too long incase anybody offered me a sample!

From Hanoi I made a couple of plesant trips, one was to Halong Bay which has similar scenery to the area around Ninh Binh but is more famous. Here the limestone hills form islands in the sea just off the coast. The boat trip around them was breath-taking but I'm sure it would have been even more spectacular if the Sun had decided to come out. Still it was very beautiful. The other trip I took was to the Northern Highlands to the towns of Sapa and Bac Ha. The main attraction here, apart from the scenery, was the highland peoples. They dress in beautiful, colourful woven and embroidered clothes and look amazing. Unfortunately, due to my camera problems I can't show you what I mean just now, but when I get home I hope to have a couple of piccys I can upload.

Well, I'm in Hanoi now, writing this, and tomorrow I fly to Laos (since the idea of 30+ hours on a bus didn't appeal to me!). More soon...