Impressions of Vietnam
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…
Tags: Asia, communism, Ho Chi Minh, Southeast Asia, Travel, Vietnam
Nick