[LEMONS] 12.15.2002
Beach Party Vietnam
Saigon, shit. (Hell yeah! I've been waiting for months to say that!)Travelling in Vietnam has been amazing, although much more difficult than travelling in Thailand. This is not due purely to transportation--although partially--but also due to the steady stream of "He-llo!-Mister-where-you-from"'s that greet you about every five feet, and which are inevitably a prelude to offering you something you don't want. It can be hard to walk down the street without picking up a crew of salesmen--most under the age of 14--to tag along with you.
No, I don't want to buy postcards.
No, I don't need a room.
No, I'm not hungry.
No, I don't need a shoeshine. Besides you can't shine sandals.
No, I don't want to buy a lighter.
No, I don't want a cyclo.
No, I don't want... what the hell is that anyway?
And the roads are terrifying and your van is packed with people and everywhere you go you're sold and lied to and shortchanged and someone swipes 10,000 Dong off you at the post office and your clothes aren't warm enough and the pillow smells like the underside of a log and the sheets are damp and the manager of the hotel comes knocking on your door at night to try to sell you tour packages and it's worth every bit of the hassle. Every bit. It's amazing. It's completely foreign to me. This is what you come for, this is what you put up with it all for. The rice paddies and the hills and rivers and jungles. The temples and shrines and strange ceremonies. The markets and street hawkers and wide variety of local beers.
You put up with all the hassles for the payoffs. You look around you and say "yeah, this is what it's all about." You have conversations with locals and learna little bit more about their culture as they learn about yours. You sample food that you've never even heard of in the States and discover that it's just delicious.
And you also meet some of the nicest people. We've had several folks come up to us and start talking to us just because we were Americans, and they were curious about us. They've been invariably nice, and all have been happy to have us in their country. This is not what I thought. I thought there would be more bitterness. Particularly after seeing some of the destruction we wrought here. oming in, I was even wondering if we should try not to tell people we were from The States. I wasn't going to be one of those travellers who fakes Canadian (eh), but neither was I going to wear a flag on my shirt.
In Hue, we went to The Citadel--the Imperial City of Hue--where the Nguyen dynasty ruled, Vietnam's last dynasty. It's a ruined city of crumbling walls and pagodas, destroyed in 1945 and again in 1968 during the Tet offensive. This was the setting for Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." You can still see bullet holes in many of the walls. But this destruction has, oddly enough, added to the beauty of the place. It gives it a haunted, tragic feel.
Hue lies just south of the former DMZ, and we took a day trip up there, along both sides of the old border. There is not much to see there, literally, as just about everything there was destroyed during the Vietnam War (which is caled The American War here). The DMZ was very depressing. Our tour guide grew up there during the war, his hometown was completely destroyed.
We toured the Vinh Moc tunnels, where an entire village lived undergound. This was just north of the border, and was extensively bombed during the war. Several villages in the area went underground after we began carpet bombing the area in 1966(I believe it was 66). But Vinh Moc, at 27 meters below ground, was able to survive, while many others collapsed. Unlike the Cu Chi tunnels here close to Saigon (we're going tomorrow) which were rebuilt for tourist, these are the real thing, exactly as they were. In other words, look out for rats, yo. We went down three levels, the very bottom of which was covered in water, it being the rainy season. We took off our shoes and waded through about an inch and a half of water out to the beach, where the village received and sent supplies. Afterwards, we were muddy.
And then there were the after-effects of Agent Orange. A great deal of the hillsides are covered in short, stumpy growth (which is remarkable in SE Asia where trees and vines seem to sprout from every square millimeter of soil. There are still large swaths of land where nothing grows but grass, and others that are just now being able to support trees. You see row after row of stunted little pine trees--no more than 3 feet high--growing around some of the old American firebases where the government is trying to replant the soil.
Khe Sanh almost made me cry. I'm no nationalist, I'm not even particularly patriotic. Nations are antiquated, in my opinion. The stuff of tanks and guns and suicide bombers. I'm proud of where I'm from, yet I believe that you must have a global perspective. The world is smaller every day and we have to stand together or we'll all hang seperately, to paraphrase an American patriot.
But Khe Sanh bothered me. I can understand the Vietnamese anger with us. I can even sympathize with it. But seeing the glee taken in making Khe Sanh a "hell on earth" for American soldiers made me sad, and then reading the arrogant comments of some of the European visitors flat out pissed me off.
Khe Sanh was foggy, and surrounded by mountains. It looks, and is, completely foreign. I couldn't help but think of the kids who died there--because that's what they were. Kids! Kids, terribly far away from home fighting for something they probably couldn't even explain in a place they didn't want to be. The Vietnamese lost 10,000 to Khe Sanh, and we lost 500. Any way you look at that, it's a tragedy.
But you wouldn't know it by reading some of the comments in the guestbook--almost exclusively from Europeans. There was unbridled joy there. And it infuriated me. I recognize that most of the rest of the world hates Americans, and I understand what it is about our corporate consumer culture that makes them feel that way.
But what kind of monster do you have to be to take joy in death? Lord knows that--despite what the government may say--the Vietnamese people I've talked to all seem to consider it a tragedy. Why can't the Europeans have the same perspective?
Look, Jorn, you want to criticize the States? Fine. That's your right, and more power to you for doing so. We probably have a lot of common ground. But if you're going to talk about American Imperialism, stub out the Marlboro, take off your Nikes, and lose the North Face backpack, hypocrite. It's particularly galling coming from the French, who spent a century here doing atrocious things before the Americans ever showed up; the British, who ran roughshod over most of the world for two-hundred years; and the Germans, who had been busy with their own atrocities twenty years earlier.
But enough of that.
Driving from Hue to Hoi An, we passed along a section of road that looked remarkably like Big Sur. Mountains hitting the sea. As we passed through the hills, the weather warmed remarkably. Below us, a thick blanket of fog covered everything. I was listening to Bob Dylan and Cymande and the minutemen on my headphones, and wondering how such beauty could exist unknown.
Hoi An itself was a small riverside town next to the beach, full of quainty little shops and fabulous restaurants. Several of the local specialties there were just top-notch. One of the meals I had there was the best I've eaten yet in Asia. Were I the suit-wearing type, I might go there for an entirely new wardrobe. A tailor made Cashmere suit will only set you back about US $30 in Hoi An. The architechture is equally col, being a blend of Vietnamese, Chinese, French and Japanese influences. I loved it.
Travelling by train has also ben a gas. You really get to see the country. Yesterday, on the train ride from Danang to Ho Chi Minh City, we passed rice paddy after rice paddy being cultivated just as they were a thousand years ago. You'd see the local people in their conical hats with wooden implements hooked behind oxen, digging furrows in the muck barefoot. Ducks and pigs and chickens and cattle (oxen? water buffalo?) roam free in the paddies, and the rice is housed in large, conical bins made from straw. You could have come here at nearly any point in history and it would have looked exactly the same.
And now we're in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, where I find it impossible not to quote "Apocalypse Now!," just as I *had* to quote "Full Metal Jacket" in Hue. Sorry Harper. But if it weren't for pop culture, I'd have no culture at all.
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