“Come to Vietnam with us next year,” pleaded a friend/co-worker shortly before I left the company and moved away from California. She didn’t have to plead twice. Vietnam is an interesting country — yes, still communist and quite hot, but often beautiful and increasingly modern with friendly people who have long forgiven Americans for the “American War.”
“Please respect local dress standards,” read the Lonely Planet Vietnam guidebook. “Avoid wearing shorts or sleeveless tops and always remove your shoes before entering a temple. In general, Vietnamese dress standards are conservative, especially in the countryside. Nude and topless sunbathing is considered totally inappropriate, even at beaches and hot-spring resorts.”
Considering this warning, I lifted an eyebrow on the Vietnam Airlines jet from San Francisco to Saigon when in the corner of my eye flashed an image of a stripper on the LCD screen in front of the Vietnamese gentleman on my left. Continue reading »
Perhaps Vietnam’s heat had finally gone to my head. Maybe having that bottle of Hue’s rather strong Festival Beer from earlier in the day had impaired my judgment. More likely, the summer doldrums of the last couple of days in Central Vietnam had me craving a little excitement when I returned via plane to Ho Chi Minh City. These are the only explanations for why I would willingly climb onto the rear of an aggressively-driven motorbike through the endorphin-crazed rat race of the streets of Saigon over to my designated not-so-close hotel, again.
Actually, I am starting to get good at this. Continue reading »
I was lingering at the Banana Mango in Hue, Vietnam, having just gobbled down the last meat spring roll that the little waitress — no older than 10 years old — had brought me. As sweat rolled off my forehead — the consequence of both the scorching, muggy evening weather and my indolence in dabbing everything with chili sauce — I was in no rush to leave, content to just sip my cup of piping hot Vietnamese tea. That is, until another young girl came over, stood erect by the table, and muttered something like “cheque.” Continue reading »
“I am 26, single, and available!” proclaimed the rather cute English-speaking female tour guide to our bus to polite applause. While this was a good start, the tour went downhill from there.
Why is that? It seemed like the entire day was just handing out dong (Vietnamese currency), going into some self-proclaimed heritage site, and then looking at tombs of some dead person whose name I couldn’t even pronounce. Rinse, and repeat. After a while, names like Thien Mu, Minh Mang, Khai Dihn, etc. all start looking (and sounding) the same. Come to think of it, so do their tombs. Continue reading »
We had crossed over the Ben Hai River — which was the de facto 100km boundary between the former North and South Vietnam — when our tour guide (finally, a good one!) made some passing remarks about being a little boy in this region during the Vietnam (or American) War.
“My brother, uncle, and cousin… killed,” he stated with nary a tinge of lament in his voice, but a look of sadness in his eyes. He then described the effects of Agent Orange, an herbicide dumped by the U.S. army to try to deforest these beautiful lands and blow the North Vietnamese’s cover. “Children today still are born deformed; people still get cancer,” he said, adding that American G.I.’s as well as the Vietnamese have been victimized by the chemical.
So three decades after the end of the war the region we were in — the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) — was once again lush with forestation and bamboo trees, but reminders of the war persist. Continue reading »
