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Christmas in Vietnam

Friday, December 28th, 2007

A few days ago we arrived in Hoi An, a delightful small colonial town in central Vietnam at a good time for two events: the full moon of Dec. 23, and Christmas.

Each full moon night the street lights in the old part of Hoi An are switched off and the town is lit only by Chinese lanterns that hang from restaurants, shops and houses. There is also live traditional music and entertainment, and candles sent adrift down the river complete the ambience. It’s a lovely time to stroll around town and we really enjoyed it.

Hoi An isn’t as ‘into’ Christmas as Ho Chi Minh City is (but I suspect in Ho Chi Minh, the economic capital of Vietnam, Christmas is more about capitalism than Christianity; seeing Christmas decorations there reminded me of seeing them in the shopping malls of conservative Muslim Qatar), but Hoi An has probably the best food in the country, and that was good enough for me. We had a 7-course seafood feast for Christmas lunch – White Rose (shrimp wrapped in a type of rice paper), Fried Wantons, Shrimp Spring Rolls, Calamari Fried Noodles, Sweet and Sour Shrimp, Grilled Fish in Banana Leaves, and Fruit Salad for desert, all topped off by a couple of fruit cocktails … and it only cost us US$12.50 for the lot. Since we’ve had Christmases in places like Yemen and Burma before, this was actually quite a good one by our recent standards.

Yesterday we left Hoi An after four days and are now a little further north in Hue, famous for its 19th century imperial city and emperors’ tombs. The city is not nearly as nice as Hoi An because it’s much bigger and mostly devoid of French colonial architecture, but the sites have been interesting enough – today we cycled about 30km in our explorations of the tombs outside the city.

Tonight we’re taking the bus to the capital Hanoi, and we’ll hopefully be able to explore north Vietnam for the next 10 days or so.

Impressions of Vietnam

Monday, December 24th, 2007

With Laos and Cambodia’s Angkor temples being the focus of this trip in Southeast Asia, we arrived in Vietnam a week ago without having really given the country much thought. I’d sort of forgotten how much of this country’s modern history I had studied in high school and how the affects of the French and American wars are still so widely felt in Vietnam today.

Some impressions of Vietnam, compared with Laos, is that Vietnam is more developed, more chaotic, less religious (where are the monks?), more tightly controlled and (so far) not as beautiful. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have left Vietnam as an entirely capitalist country in economic terms, and indeed my feeling is that these people are capitalist at heart and this was not a great place for the communist experiment. (An example of this: in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), a few dozen women walk around the foreigner ghetto carrying about 20 English books in a vertical stack bound together with rope, an ingenious idea that somehow manages to encapsulate all of Western culture in one handful: all stacks start at the top with at least five Lonely Planet guidebooks to nearby countries, and the other titles are a typical lot: ‘The Da Vinci Code’, ‘The Life of Pi’, ‘Mr. Nice’, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, and the latest by Bill Bryson, Paolo Coelho etc.)

Politically, it appears to me that the country remains pretty staunchly communist. Propaganda signs and currency show good communist families, bridges and electricity poles and other signs of socialist progress and, of course, the ubiquitous image of Ho Chi Minh. This level of political control perhaps has extended to the tourist industry too; it’s been set up (very deliberately, I think) so that almost everywhere you go you almost have to go on a tour or another method of organised foreigner transport – it seems to me that it was organised in this way when Vietnam first opened up to foreign tourists whereas in Laos, also nominally communist, it’s not like that at all.

So, our first stop after leaving Cambodia was Ho Chi Minh city, certainly the most dynamic and chaotic city we’ve seen since Bangkok. It’s said that there are 8-10 million people living there, with one motorcycle per two people – by far the most dense concentration of motorcycles that I’ve ever seen. The highlights for me were outside the city: the Cao Dai temple (Cao Dai is a fusion of various religions) during noon prayers, and the Cu Chi tunnels, a great practical insight into the methods used by the Viet Minh and later Viet Cong against far more powerful forces, especially as I studied in school the concepts of guerrilla warfare and its specific use in the Vietnam conflict.

We also spent some time in the Mekong Delta area and a night and a day at Nha Trang, taking in a boat trip to nearby islands, before arriving in Hoi An, about which I’ll blog another time…

Cycling around Angkor

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

The incomparable Ted Chang, who I think has now seen every place among the 21 finalists for the ‘New 7 Wonders’ competition held earlier this year, says the Angkor temples of Cambodia top the lot – the Pyramids, the ... [Continue reading this entry]

Ruins, Elephants, and 4000 Islands

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

My apologies for not posting recently...

Well, after leaving Kong Lor Cave we headed to the very south of Laos, where there were a few things we wanted to do. We’ve been putting off any kind of elephant trek ... [Continue reading this entry]