THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9507050204
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STORY AND PHOTOS BY SCOTT SHELTON, TRAVEL CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 374 lines
SITTING AMID the crowded, jostling din of a train station in Vietnam earlier this year, I thought about how much and how little had changed in that country since the end of the war.
With relatively few paved roads, fully one-third of its children malnourished, and nearly 40 percent of its 72 million people unemployed, Vietnam is still in many ways a struggling Third World country.
Yet it is also a country very much on the move. Tempered by years of fighting the Chinese, French, Americans and Cambodians, the Vietnamese people are turning their considerable energies to commerce. Looking more to the future than dwelling on the past, Vietnam is today a country changing almost before your very eyes.
I traveled to Vietnam out of sheer curiosity about the place. For me, this Southeast Asian country had been a war-torn, far-off land brought into my family's living room every night on the evening news when I was a kid.
Despite some apprehension regarding how I, an American traveling alone, would be received by the Vietnamese people, I wanted to see for myself this enigmatic, jungle-cloaked land.
Suddenly stirred from my thoughts, I realized that several Vietnamese in the train station were glancing over at me with curious eyes.
Feeling a bit self-conscious, I yanked a paperback out of my pack and started reading. From a corner of my eye a few pages on I noticed a little Vietnamese girl in a red dress shyly emerge from the baggage-laden throng.
With two fingers pursed against her lips, she carefully watched me as she slowly walked over to the bench I had wedged myself onto and asked in halting, accented English, ``What is your name?''
She grinned with delight at getting a response, immediately returned to her mother for a bit of coaching, and slipped back through the cramped confusion with other questions: ``How old are you?'' . . . ``Do you like Vietnam?'' . .
Though few in the crowd of curious eyes understood English, all knew what the last question had been as I answered, ``America.''
At this, the girl beamed with excitement, turned on her heel, and dashed back to her mother. After a few minutes she hesitantly returned, stood up straight in front of me, and softly sang a Vietnamese song as the place gradually quieted and all the eyes looked on.
Touched by this gesture of hospitality, an especially open-hearted one in light of the tragic past our two countries share, I had to briefly look away, press my lips together and slightly turn them inward to keep my eyes from watering.
As she finished the song, I started a solitary applause which was soon heartily joined by everyone in the waiting area.
At that instant, the train whistle abruptly echoed down the station platform. Bundles and bags were quickly hoisted and the little girl was grabbed up waving goodbye from her mother's arms as they disappeared into the crowd flooding out to the waiting carriages.
Although the moment evaporated with the sound of the train whistle, it was an encounter that will always remain in my memory, one of a very rare sort in most places, but one I would find to be surprisingly typical for an American in Vietnam today.
While U.S. citizens have been able to travel to Vietnam on group tours for a number of years now, it has only been within the last few that opportunities for independent travel have really opened up.
With the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo in February of last year, many restrictions on Americans, such as previously required inter-province travel permits, have been abolished.
Not so long ago, Westerners traveling in Vietnam were sometimes jailed on trumped-up charges in attempts by corrupt local officials to extract exorbitant fines. A 1991 U.S. State Department travel advisory warned that some detained Americans had ``been held incommunicado for months without any contact with U.S. authorities or family.''
Today, however, it has finally sunk in among Vietnam's communist leaders that there is more money to be had by encouraging tourism than by extorting a few dollars from individual travelers. So now they're officially discouraging tourist scams and letting in as many ``capitalist dogs'' as are willing to visit.
Still, in a country where the per capita income is only about $250 a year, there are naturally going to be a few freelancers around.
After catching a Vietnam Air flight from Bangkok, I was matter-of-factly told by a passport control officer at the Hanoi airport that my visa was not valid. Behind a pair of Ray-Bans he went on to say that I would have to fill out a new application form and pay the fee, about $25.
As I pointed out that I already had a valid visa stamp in my passport, the green-uniformed officer lowered his sunglasses, angrily glared at me over the rims, and ordered me to the back of the line.
Recognizing the obvious hoax, but also realizing the opportunity afforded by the chaos of the airport's passport control area, I simply entered another line out of sight of the crooked official.
After a half-hour wait my visa was stamped by another officer without the slightest question, and I was motioned through the checkpoint.
Despite my initial apprehensions, what I found beyond the passport control gate was a country of people who exhibited no outward bitterness toward Americans.
About the closest I ever came to danger during the trip was in Ho Chi Minh City (most everyone still calls it Saigon) where I had a brief scuffle with two pickpockets. Other than that one minor incident, though, I felt safer in Vietnam than I do in some American cities.
Like the little girl in the train station, the majority of Vietnamese welcome Americans to their country with a genuine hospitality.
While walking through the streets of the coastal town of Nha Trang, for instance, I was approached by an elderly Vietnamese gentleman with several missing teeth and a white wisp of hair hanging from his chin who inquired as to my nationality. When I answered, he reacted with a jack-o'-lantern smile, enthusiastically shook my hand with both of his, and said with a glint of sincerity and affection in his eyes, ``Welcome back.''
Along with their general welcoming of outsiders, the Vietnamese are by and large ignoring the tenets of Marxism and are in a headlong rush to get ahead.
The communist government, mindful of Vietnam's desperate need to modernize, has turned a blind eye to many free-market endeavors, and has also thrown open the country's doors to foreign investment.
As a result of this socialist/capitalist ideological mix, the once-stagnant economy has grown at an annual rate of more than 6 percent for the past several years despite entrenched bureaucratic red tape and pervasive official corruption. Examples of the people's enterprising spirit can be seen most everywhere in the country.
On the streets of Hanoi and Saigon, fledgling capitalists hawk everything from Marlboros to Madonna posters.
In the north a cluster of old B-52 bomb craters has been turned into ponds for raising ducks, and in the south the metal from abandoned U.S. Army tanks and other wartime hardware is being sold for profit to Japanese scrap dealers.
One ironic harbinger of change is that, on the site of the old ``Hanoi Hilton'' prison where American POWs were held by the communists, construction has begun on a luxury hotel.
A block-and-a-half east, merchants carry so many TVs, VCRs, and stereos that their boxed inventory is bursting out of the shops onto the street. Never mind that few Vietnamese can afford such high-priced items. The merchants are obviously not pessimists.
Further down the street a dozen barbers plop down chairs on the sidewalk, hang mirrors on the side of a building, and set up shop for haircuts and straight-razor shaves.
While you're getting a 10,000-dong trim (about a dollar), or having your ears cleaned with cotton swabs twisted at the end of a wire (an extra 5,000 dong), you may be approached by acupuncture experts, tour guides, back masseurs, souvenir vendors and prostitutes offering their respective wares and services.
Should any of these touts know the least bit of English, you'll be in for a persistent but good-natured sales pitch, usually for something you have absolutely no use for: ``Hello! Hello! Look see! Wooden sculpture of Ho Chi Minh, very, very nice! Hello! For you, only 100,000 dong! OK? Hello! You buy?!''
In spite of the head-spinning changes going on in the country, travel in Vietnam is still not what you'd call cushy. While there are a number of government-owned hotels, such as the Continental in Saigon or Hanoi's Metropole, that are up to Western standards, there are relatively few good ones along the 1,200 miles between the two cities.
That will also be changing, however. A host of international developers is planning three- and four-star resorts complete with golf courses at several points along the coast, most notably beside the sparkling turquoise waters of China Beach and Cam Ranh Bay.
Most existing accommodations are of the $5- to $15-a-night variety with leaky plumbing, no phones, maybe a bit of falling plaster here and there, mosquito netting over your bed, and possibly even a couple of bugs in it. (It's not a bad idea to check the sheets in questionable establishments for small blood spots, a sure sign of bedbugs.)
Food is of a somewhat mixed nature. After seeing two small live dogs tied up like pigs and hanging from a fellow's bicycle handlebars on the way to market in the Mekong Delta, I took up the practice of always inquiring as to the type of meat I was eating.
The cuisine is as good as it is varied in the larger cities, where you can get anything from crisp roasted duckling served with black currant sauce to burnt snake on a stick. Freshly baked baguettes and light, flaky pastries, flavorful remnants of French colonial times, can be purchased on many street corners.
If you get really off the beaten path, where variety and cleanliness are at a minimum, you may want to stick to the safety and peace of mind afforded by rice and bananas, a diet on which I ended up losing 18 pounds.
Despite the fact that Vietnam is in what you might call a pre-McDonald's era, I was amazed that you can get Coca-Cola (bottled in Bangkok and Singapore, and at 10,000 dong a can costing more than most meals) in out-of-the-way towns near the Laotian border.
Tea is another relatively safe drinking bet and can be had virtually anywhere in the country. If your coffee should taste a little different from what you're used to, it may be because it has been brewed from beans force-fed to and regurgitated by weasels, a special blend in some parts of the south.
Getting around the country is as easy and affordable as your tastes and wallet may dictate. On my overland journey from Hanoi to Saigon, I traveled by train, bus, motorcycle, car, boat and cyclo, a variation on a rickshaw.
For ease and comfort, the trains are far and away the best mode of travel. Despite being a little cramped for Western frames, the seats are reasonably comfortable, and the carriages are kept quite clean. The food served as part of your ticket, usually chicken and rice, vegetables and rice, and what you hope is beef and rice, is surprisingly good.
I remember having a meal while the train passed through a flickering rainstorm with the verdant fields and blue-green paddies of Vietnam flowing by as being one of the most pleasant experiences of the entire trip.
In marked contrast to trains, buses in Vietnam are uniformly dusty and jam-packed, with passengers carrying a cacophony of blaring disco music, clucking hens and the occasional squealing piglet.
Periodically belching out black clouds of exhaust fumes, the buses ramble across potholes and under banyan trees along Highway 1 as the passengers settle into something of a diesel-scented torpor. Throughout the journey the driver blasts away on the horn while another fellow, hanging off the door, frequently secured by a strap, waves his arms and yells at pedestrians, motorscooters, and water buffalo to get out of the way.
If you're a Westerner and are unlucky enough not to get a seat on a bus, you can count on repeated bops to the head from the low ceilings. Still, buses in Vietnam should be used at least once for the sheer cultural experience.
In Vietnam cars are too expensive to hire and boats are too slow to use for any distance. That leaves two modes of transport ideally suited to the country: the motorcycle and the cyclo.
If you can handle a motorcycle or at least don't mind hanging on the back of one, this means of transportation is a truly Vietnamese way to see some of the country. They're everywhere. Whether on city streets or in villages along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you can easily hire a motorcycle or at least pay someone a few dollars to get you from one place to another.
For getting around within a town or city, the cyclo is best for two reasons. The first has to do with the fact that under the present communist government a large number of former South Vietnamese soldiers have been precluded from getting regular jobs. Many of them have consequently been reduced to pedaling cyclos (a large reversed tricycle with a passenger seat on the front) for a living. Using the cyclos gets a little money into the pockets of noncommunists.
The second reason is that they're a great way to meet people. Cyclo drivers seem to know everybody, and if if one takes a liking to you you're liable to be invited to have a meal with his family or friends.
Once, while riding on a cyclo through the streets of Hue, I had the driver stop so I could trade seats with him. You would have thought he was the grand marshal of a parade as he sat in the passenger seat and waved to people along the road. His friends particularly enjoyed the bizarre sight of an American cyclo driver unsteadily negotiating the three-wheeled contraption through the busy city streets.
For all the fun of meeting the people of Vietnam, enjoying its pristine beaches, and admiring the lushness of the land, there is another more somber side to any journey there, especially for an American.
Tragic reminders of the war constantly emerge. There is the so-called American War Crimes Museum, a curious mingling of propaganda and fact in Saigon, the lone citadel in Hue where the VC and North Vietnamese slaughtered some 3,000 civilians, the hundreds of maimed individuals seen throughout the country, as well as other awful scars from the war too numerous to mention.
For an American, even one who was safe in the States during the war years, such continual reminders of the war can have a gloomy effect.
Khe Sanh is a perfect example of this. Looking at the dateless mountain landscape surrounding the old Khe Sanh air base and marveling at the tranquil beauty of this green plateau, it's hard to believe that the bloodiest siege of the war took place here in 1968.
Yet, once you look down from the dreamy shadows of the surrounding mountains, you see that the ground is strewn with shell casings and unexploded mortar rounds, doubtless dug up by the children of local tribal villagers scavenging for scrap metal.
With the knowledge that nearly 500 Americans and an estimated 11,000 North Vietnamese soldiers died at Khe Sanh during the 75-day siege, you cannot help but feel somewhat depressed. With the additional knowledge that for periods during the siege, 4,000 to 5,000 rounds a day were showered on the Marine base there, you thank God you were not in the battle.
Several days later while I traveled through an area just north of the Ashau Valley near the Laotian border on roads that were once part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, further evidence of the war elicited similar feelings.
Seeing ghostly helicopter landing zones and mists coiling up through the silence of adjacent mountain jungles, I thought of 18- and 19-year-old American boys fighting and dying in this spooky, far-off place, and it made me sad for the tragedy and waste of the war.
My Vietnamese interpreter and guide, Trinh, commented that I had grown very quiet. I explained that I was thinking of all of the loss that my country had suffered and was still dealing with because of its involvement in Vietnam.
I suppose because he had worked with U.S. MIA teams recovering the bodies of American soldiers in the vicinity, and had seen first-hand a side of America's loss, Trinh began to talk of the war and what it had done to his family.
During the course of our conversation, this 30-year-old Vietnamese told me that his father and uncle had both fought in the war; his uncle for the South and his father for the North.
His uncle had been killed in the central highlands, and his father had lost a leg as the result of injuries suffered in a B-52 raid.
With some hesitation, he then went on to say that to this day his father occasionally wakes up screaming and crying after dreaming that he was again in that same B-52 raid. Seeing the hurt in Trinh's eyes as he spoke of his father's pain, I thought of how very long it will take for both sides to completely recover from the war.
Vietnam is a country possessing a hundred shades of beguilingly green tropical beauty. Yet it is also a land that after 20 years is still filled with tragedy and haunting memories.
Perhaps, for Americans who served as well as those who did not, going to Vietnam may help to heal the wounds of that tragic war by providing the opportunity to make new memories. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
The U.S. Embassy in Saigon, scene of the 1975 evacuation.
A fisherman takes a mid-day break. Though Vietnam is changing, it
remains a poor, rural country.
ABOVE: A woman labors amid Vietnam's green rice paddies. LEFT: An
enterprising spirit can be seen almost everywhere, including this
Hanoi market.
Photos
SCOTT SHELTON
The bicycle is one of the primary modes of transportation in
Vietnam.
A laborer outside Hanoi is just one of the friendly faces the author
encountered.
Graphic
TRAVELER'S ADVISORY
Getting there: Vietnam can be entered by air from a variety of
points, including Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, Jakarta, Hong Kong and
Bangkok. For Americans, Hong Kong and Bangkok are probably the
easiest transit points. At the time of this writing no American
carriers have direct flights to Vietnam, but that may be changing
soon.
With its cheap air fares, Bangkok seems to be the most popular
stopover for Vietnam. Round-trip flights from the eastern U.S. to
Bangkok are about $1,600. Round-trip air to Hong Kong will run a bit
less at $1,400. Flights from Bangkok and Hong Kong to Hanoi or Ho
Chi Minh City will be about $500. Flying into Hanoi and out of Ho
Chi Minh City or vice versa will cost $50 to $100 more.
Getting in: Visas can be obtained through the newly opened
Vietnam Liaison Office in Washington, D.C. The address for the
consular section of this office is 1233 20th Street, N.W., Suite
501, Washington, D.C. 20036. Phone: (202) 861-0694. Fax: (202)
861-1297.
Since the Vietnam Liaison Office is difficult to reach, and
considering the fact that they're tacking a $40 handling charge on
to the $25 visa fee, the easiest way to obtain a visa is by using
one of the many travel agencies in Hong Kong or Bangkok. (A $20 to
$30 agency charge over the visa fee will save you a lot of
footwork.) Until 1997, visas for Hong Kong are not required for U.S.
citizens. If you should elect to travel through Bangkok, get a
multiple-entry visa for Thailand. The address for the Royal Thai
Embassy in the United States is 1024 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20007. Phone: (202) 944-3608. Fax: (202) 944-3611.
Getting around: Pedicabs, called cyclos, are cheap and
ubiquitous, but police are beginning to limit the streets they can
peddle on. Expect to pay about 5,000 dong (50 cents) for each 15
minutes. Most larger hotels and tour companies will rent cars with
drivers. The rate is $30 to $40 for eight hours. Metered taxis are
numerous.
Tour operators: Several U.S. organizations offer cruises, tours
and independent travel packages to Vietnam. Contact a local travel
agent for details.
When to go: Any time of the year is fine. Winter temperatures in
the North, though, can be surprisingly chilly, so take along some
warm clothing. If the weather's too hot or cold in one region, you
can always head north or south for a temperate adjustment. Travelers
should keep in mind that during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year (late
January to early February), the country pretty much shuts down.
Health & safety: As with most developing countries, Vietnam has a
lot of diseases floating around, so be sure to consult with your
physician regarding necessary immunizations and vaccinations.
Especially inquire about a polio booster shot and an anti-malarial
prescription.
Vietnam remains largely free of crime, although the incidence of
petty theft is rising, especially in Ho Chi Minh City. The greatest
danger is being run over in the chaotic traffic.
In case of an emergency, call the U.S. liaison office in Hanoi at
84-4-350-445 or visit the Emergency Center in Ho Chi Minh City at
125 Le Loi, District 1, which has English-speaking doctors; phone
292-071.
Lastly, when in and around the former DMZ (Demilitarized Zone)
and other battle areas, don't go wandering off the footpaths. Since
the end of the war 4,000 to 5,000 Vietnamese have been killed by
undetected land mines and leftover ordnance.
Protocol: Relations between the United States and Vietnam are
changing almost daily. Check with the U.S. State Department's Office
of Overseas Citizen Services, (202) 647-5225, for updates and
possible travel warnings.
Read all about it: For information, get Insight Guides'
``Vietnam'' ($19.95), ``Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia Handbook 1995''
($19.95, Passport Books, a division of NTC Publishing Group) or
Lonely Planet's ``Vietnam'' ($15.95).
Info: Permanent Mission of Vietnam to the United Nations, 20
Waterside Plaza, New York, N.Y. 1010; (212) 685-8001.
- Scott Shelton
by CNB