I didn’t go anywhere other than Thailand when I visited Southeast Asia last year, and although Thailand is a rich and varied place with a lot of things to sea within its borders, I wanted to get out and explore a little more this time. As it happens, I did a bad job of that, but where I did get to go this time around was Vietnam.
My friend Maxx, who lives in Bangkok, also wanted to go and because I had to leave Thailand after 30 days anyway under the terms of the visa exemption I arrived under, we scheduled a week in Hoi An, just south of Da Nang, in early February.
As it happens, although Da Nang is well known for its beaches (it was where the famous China Beach of Vietnam War lore was located), February is a terrible time to visit them. It was 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit during our visit, and the ocean there was pretty frigid. We went to the beach two days, and into the water once, and only very briefly at that.
Hoi An is about an hour south of Da Nang (by bus–more on that in a moment) and it was picturesque and lovely despite the occasional showers and chilly weather. A trading village dating to the 15th Century, the central area of the city has been remarkably well-preserved, comprising today a UNESCO Heritage Site.
While it’s picturesque and quaint, today it’s also a tourist town of the first order. I was a little taken aback by the aggressive street vendors, who I have read about but not heretofore experienced first hand. In Thailand, I’m insulated from such episodes by often having Monica with me and going to mostly local places–outside of that, I have a few words of Thai that quickly short-circuit most sales pitches. But this is how these folks make a living in Hoi An and they weren’t interested in “no” for an answer.
Fortunately, I have a pretty decent “don’t mess with me” face and was accompanied by a first-rate decoy in the form of Maxx. Not nearly as hard-hearted as I am, he was almost instantly pegged as the the more susceptible target and drew most of the attention from the hustlers when we were out and about together.
A lot of what they sell in Hoi An are clothes. Apparently, the local tailors are well-known for their wares, and the inexpensive local labor costs convince a lot of tourists to commission some new suits while they are in town. I can’t say that the styles worked for me, but then, I’m not a very stylish guy.
Of course, any place you have a lot of clothing stores, you have a big demand for mannequins. The mannequin factory appears to either be located next to or possibly within a historic temple. Freshly painted mannequins haunt the streets out front, glowing in the sun and horrifying passers-by.
As with any Asian town or city, the streets themselves provide all the entertainment you could ever need. While it’s just daily life for the folks of Hoi An, little vignettes were a constant source of amazement or amusement… such as the somewhat impractical habit of carrying about live poultry in plastic bags.
Our hotel room looked out over the Thu Bon River. It was a great little place with a friendly front desk staff and free bike loans. We roamed all over town on the creaky old bikes, threading our way through crowds and getting honked at constantly by the local drivers.
The Vietnamese love them some horns. One lonely car can be driving down an empty road and the driver will lay on the horn like they were stuck in the middle of a New York City traffic jam. Of course, most of the traffic is motorcycles and scooters rather than cars, and some of them are pretty beat up–no lights, no mirrors, questionable brakes–but every single one of them has a fully-functioning horn.
They aren’t honking mad, however–as in Thailand, honking serves as a “hey, I’m here, watch out!” signal rather than a “get out of the way, moron!” call. The big difference is that they just do it more here than in Thailand. Like, constantly.
On the plus side, they’ve invented some extremely melodic horns for the purpose.
That was our bus back to Da Nang. It even had a custom “dial-a-horn” option to select different tones and notes, presumably to convey different messages.
I thought Thai motorcyclists were impressive in terms of audacity and carrying capacity, but they’ve got nothing on the Vietnamese. We saw everything from refrigerators to fruit trees being carted around on the back of motorbikes.
There are also more bicycles, which makes it easier and safer to ride on the roads. On the whole, the Vietnamese just seemed more sane and rule-abiding than the Thais. Riding in traffic felt adventurous rather than suicidal, as it seems in Thailand.
Riding the bus, on the other hand, required nerves of steel. It’s not unusual to have to board a Thai bus in motion, but they at least slow down. With the Da Nang bus, little old ladies had to sprint alongside and make a leap for the doors to get on… frequently weighed down by large boxes and bags, since the bus also seems to be a freight moving system. Sometimes the boxes would just get on by themselves, collected by someone else later along the route.
Live poultry, fortunately, were relegated to the cargo compartment below.
It was also the only bus ride I have ever taken where we had to pull into a gas station and fuel up along the route. At least you get to see exactly where your fare is going–right from you to the ticket-taker to the gas station attendant. Transparency in transit services!
We had a good view from our balcony of an island in the middle of the river where what looked like a massive theater set was under construction. In the evenings, the sound of rehearsals came across the water in between the rhythmic thumping of diesels from tour and fishing boats.
I halfway want to go back to catch the show, whatever show it turns out to be, when they are ready. It’s probably Hamilton.
On the other side of the river, past the island, there’s a renowned woodworker’s village. That’s where they do a lot of the boatbuilding and maintenance and Maxx and I biked over one day to check it out.
The local waterfront is slightly underdeveloped as well, but there’s a robust fishing industry. We took a boat tour up and down the river a bit and passed all manner of craft large and small either fishing the river or heading out to open water to do the same.
Through the whole trip, I kept waiting for that moment to come when it would hit me: it’s Vietnam, man, you know, like Vietnam. Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now Vietnam… the napalm-blasted, Agent Orange-dusted scene of America’s last big foreign debacle before the current one.
I’ve been steeped in Vietnam War movies since I was a kid; various relatives and older acquaintances had served there, been wounded, lost friends. It’s a big psychic stain on the country, even though it was all over before I was old enough to know about it. I expected I’d feel something when I went there.
But there was nothing.
Although the effects on both countries are dark and unavoidable, it wasn’t my generation’s war. My generation, fortunately, didn’t really have a war. A few contemporaries served in the Gulf War, and some of them ended up in Iraq or Afghanistan as they were called up for duty after 9/11. But on the whole, the long war of Vietnam belonged to my parent’s generation, and the even longer GWOT to the Millenials who came after me.
As we were waiting for our plane back to Bangkok, I looked out across the tarmac at Da Nang International toward a series of revetments that probably at one time sheltered American helicopters and fighter-bombers. Not far from here, a friend of the family slogged ashore in 1965 with the first American ground force committed to combat in the war.
He later became a highly decorated Dust Off pilot, but what I remember most vividly are his stories about how to hit it off best in a Vietnamese house of ill repute (I learned later they are called “tea houses” here, which made sense as the ubiquitous Thai “massage parlor” was nowhere in evidence): ignore the girls and go chat up the mama san first, she’ll make sure you are taken care of later on.
I didn’t try out this advice.
So Vietnam is just another Asian country to me. Thailand’s Mexico, as Maxx put it, somewhere curious and inexpensive and foreign. I felt like the tourist I was.