Vietnam
We've been a week in Vietnam, leaving tonight on a train to China. It's my third of three short trips to Cambodia and Vietnam, the other two being mostly cycling tours, but the first north of Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City.
It's difficult to say anything authoritative after such short visits, but Vietnam seems a big change from a zone from Singapore to Cambodia that seemed to share some cultural threads, from the curries that come to an abrupt halt at the border, to the Indian Hindu heritage that so strongly influences Buddhism, particularly in Cambodia, the Muslim influence. The Chinese influence is feels much stronger in Vietnam, from the ubiquity of chopsticks to the prevalence of ancestor worship.
But perhaps the influences are more modern too; the Vietnamese fought and won two brutal colonialist wars, first against the French, then against the Americans and their puppets, such as Australia. Visiting the War Remnants museum in Saigon was a heart-breaking reminder of the brutality of our war on the people of Vietnam, but also a testament to their courage and determination in defeating the greatest military machine the world has ever known. Whatever the merits of Communism, or the effectiveness of its implementation in Vietnam and its current status in the modern limited-market economy, contemporary Vietnam seems to lack a lot of the extreme poverty of Thailand and Cambodia in particular, as well as the disturbing super-rich elite of most of the countries we've been through so far. Cambodia, in its vulnerable post-war state, was an IMF/World Bank wet dream, and the fantasy dictates of western capitalism were imposed on it. The result is an economic basket case with a super-rich – and super-indifferent – elite in charge and well-meaning, foreign-funded NGO's trying to mediate the worst excesses of this state of affairs.
Vietnam, by contrast, while lacking fundamental freedoms we take for granted, seems much more equal, with that edge of desperation present through much of South East Asia, clearly lacking. This comes through in their tourist industry, which seems like just another branch of a healthy economy, rather than a mainstay of economic life, so there's none of the weary smiling (and insincere) subservience of Thailand or the can't-do-enough enthusiasm of Cambodia. So, while I've found people to be extraordinarily rude, or at least indifferent, at times, it's been refreshing to be amongst proud and independent people.
Anyway, enough of the facile political theorising – if anyone can add some depth to these observations, please leave comments below!
In terms of our lived experience here, we arrived in Chau Doc by boat from Phnom Penh. By pure luck, we were in a small boat that didn't have any other booked passengers, so the 4 ½ journey down the Mekong was spent with a choice of seating and the room to move and sit on the small rear deck. It was a lovely trip down the river on a still day which would have been hell without the breeze of the moving boat! Almost as soon as we crossed into Vietnam, the shores, in Cambodia sparsely populated by farmers and fishing villages, started to fill up with houses, towns, factories and busyness, as if the great, energetic mass of Vietnam was straining and bulging at its extremities.
We arrived in Chau Doc in late afternoon under a beautiful, cloudy sky, went for a wander and found a place to stay, then, on the advice of the really helpful hotel staff, wandered through the markets to a sort of cultural and food fair that was being held to commemorate the end of the school holidays and/or a Buddhist holiday, depending on who we spoke to and the thickness of the linguistic barrier!
It was a lovely scene, with different food stalls and families wandering around eating and looking at the day finishing over the Mekong.
Then the music, which we were told was 'folk' music started and it was a 2 ½ hour extravaganza, performed by about two dozen local teenagers, who had a dizzying array of costume and style changes, but did it all really well. They would have gone straight to the gold if they'd been in any Australian Eisteddfod!
There was a nice friendly vibe in general in Chau Doc – a bloke in front of us even turned around and offered us some of his beers and we talked off and on through the whole performance with him and a young kid across the way introduced himself with a shy handshake. Overall, it was a very nice introduction to Vietnam.
The next morning we went on a 'tour' of the local sights around the Mekong, which was really a bloke on his boat taking us around the lovely waters with the odd interruption of a thoroughly uninteresting visit to a tourist trap like a 'fish farm' or a 'local village'. Apart from these annoyances, it was a lovely morning hour or so chugging around the water.
Around noon we got on our last bus trip for a while. As keen readers will have noted I'm not a huge fan of buses and this was certainly a huge send-off! It was a sleeping bus, which sounds good, but is pretty hellish, especially if your seat is up the back on the bottom level where you squeeze in a two foot high space and lie in a too-short semi-prone position with no view in front or to the side for six hours. And no, I'm not making it sound worse that it was.
Well, all bad things must pass, and so did this! We arrived in Saigon and settled into the little hotel Niamh had found, and then went out to meet a mate of hers who was travelling with her partner in Vietnam. And so started a pleasant few days in Saigon.
We had a few nights out, including at a strange western ex-pat oriented warehouse club that could have been in Melbourne, as well as wandering the streets and looking at museums. The well-known War Remnants museum tells the history of the French and American wars in all its shocking detail, including a heart-breaking section on the effects of Agent Orange and is well worth a visit. The lesser known Revolutionary Museum, which also includes the Museum of Ho Chi Minh City, was also really good, with quirky, but interesting, facts about the revolutionary movement in Saigon as well as some good background on Saigon's history and recent economic development.
From Saigon we headed to Hanoi, which we reached after two nights (about 30 hours all up) by train, a pleasant trip through lovely scenery.
Hanoi is very different to Saigon – one of the few places we've seen so far that have footpaths that are more or less usable!, which makes walking around far more pleasant. Compared to most other places we've been, the past has been far less obliterated, with lots of older buildings more or less as they were, public spaces like parks and lakes abound and many of the streets are tree-lined. We're only here a night and two days, so it's hard to get more than a fleeting impression, but it's been a nice relaxing time. We visited the Women's Museum, which was another good Museum; it was part feminist, part reactionary, with a section of the leading role women played in the revolution and resistance, but also sections on marriage and the value of traditional roles; and somewhere in between there was a whole section devoted to worship of the Mother Goddess, a Vietnamese cult of women worship practised quite widely in the north by both genders. On balance though I found it very interesting and well worth a visit. On the more traditional side of tourist travel, we went to a section of old Hanoi where you can get very cheap beer on tap, and spent an hour or two people-watching and drinking the nicest beer I've had in Asia. Then, on recommendation of a local we spent the evening with (thanks to the wonders of couch-surfing connections!), we went to a water-puppet show. Perhaps I was weary, but it was a bit of a trial, having no idea of the context watching various puppets splash about in the water from a very cramped seat for 45 minutes. Still, it was an experience I suppose...
Tonight we head off at 21:40 for Nanning in China and onwards for a few days to Shanghai and Beijing, then to Russia, first stop Vladivostok.