I'm currently in Northern Vietnam, near the border with China, in a mountaineous town called Sapa. I took the overnight train from Hanoi and met two couples from the Czech Republic who are traveling together, and I linked up with them today for a trip to a neary village. I barely slept on the overnight train, so I decided to head back around noon and crashed in a big way. I also met a couple from Holland on the train and they decided to stay at my hotel, which is called the Cat Cat Hotel, with rooms sprawled over the side of a mountain. The view from my room is spectacular, although unfortunately this morning the horizon was shrouded in mist and the morning was a bit rainy. The ground is steep and I'm rapidly forgetting what it's like to walk on level ground. There are local ethnic tribes who live in this region, and many of the young children speak amazingly good English and even when in ethnic garb will pop up at internet cafes talking on their cell phones. An older woman from one of the tribes offered me opium and hashish on way into a restaurant, I could barely believe it.
I'm enjoying the peace and quiet after a couple of days in chaotic Hanoi, which marked the end of my 12 day tour through Vietnam with Gap Adventures. Overall it was a very good experience, I made at least one good friend and managed to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. It was also great to have a crew of folks to travel with, as too much solo travel can be a drag. I like being alone but sometimes it can be too much, especially so incredibly far from home. I met this dude Charlie on the tour who I almost definitely never would've befriended under normal circumstances, as he's about 40 times as conversative as me, an investment banker who thinks about nothing but closing the deal and his bottom line. But he's a good traveling companion and weathers my verbal abuse with good humor and tosses it right back. So I'll see him again in June, possibly in Borneo and definitely on a tour of Indonesia that will take us across the island of Java and end up in Ubud in Bali.
If you've been following my blog, you'll know that I anticipated Vietnam the most eagerly of all my destinations. I've been fascinated by the country and by the war with America ever since I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time at 9 years old. Landing in Ho Chi Minh City and knowing that I was in Saigon was a very emotional experience for me. But the Vietnam of today seems to have little connection to the past. It's a very young country and while I saw many sites commemorating the war, it's a country that is very much in the present, full of energy and a desire to change and improve. As a tourist, this can be a mixed bag, as the Vietnamese can be very aggressive with tourists and everyone seemed to have a story that involved getting scammed in one way or another. It's not that Vietnam is the only country that does this, but it tended to be a little more intense here and overall the Vietnamese are a bit rougher in their tone than Cambodia and definitely Thailand.
One of the highlights of the trip so far was when Charlie and I visited the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) in central Vietnam near the city of Hue. We gazed across the Seventeenth Parallel that once marked the division between North and South Vietnam. We wandered around the site of the battle of Khe Sanh, which some considered the American's Dien Bien Phu, although it was more of a diversion than anything else, committing American resources to a useless battle as the North Vietnamese prepared to launch the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. I drove by the Citadel in Hue which famously flew the North Vietnamese flag for a few weeks during the Tet Offensive. We also saw the Vinh Moc tunnels in the DMZ, which had three levels and were ventilated by a breeze coming from the neighboring beach. The Americans poured bomb after bomb into the area and bomb craters were everywhere, but the second explosive in the only digger bomb to score a direct hit never exploded and the Viet Minh used the hole as a ventilation shaft.
Hi,
I’m the CEO of Ruba.com. We’re building a website to highlight some of the most interesting places travelers around the world have discovered. We’ve read hundreds of blogs about Vietnam, and we think that yours is awesome! We’d love to highlight excerpts from blogs like yours (assuming it’s OK with you of course) and to discuss other ways of tapping into your expertise if you are interested. I’m at mike at ruba.com.
Thanks! :)
Posted by: Aragorn | February 12, 2009 at 06:12 PM