Hanoi, Fri 8/27/99
Hue, Mon 8/30/99
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Hanoi, Thurs 8/26/99 Hanoi, Fri 8/27/99 |
N.Vietnam, Sun 8/29/99 Hue, Mon 8/30/99 |
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| Northern Vietnam, Sunday 8/29/99 | |||
| Spent the day with a tour to the Perfume Pagoda. About a 2-hour bus trip out of Hanoi, then another 90 minutes being rowed up-river (3 gringos to a boat), then a long steep climb up the mountain in incredibly heat and humidity. The countryside and views are beautiful, but the hike is a little much in that weather. | |||
| On the way we passed lots of huts where people live, and these were all trying to sell us something. Some of these had dogs that were just lounging around (unaware of their eventual fate). One of the places had 2 monkeys in small cages. I felt so sorry for them. One of the monkeys seemed so upset, and with nothing else to do, he was sucking himself off. The Perfume Pagoda is a pretty incredible sight, constructed in a cave full of stalactites and stalagmites. The guides on this trip are really great. But they're kind of revealing of the muddled Vietnamese politics. | |
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| We're visiting a holy Buddhist shrine, and the guide tells us that something like 3/4 of the Vietnamese population is Buddhist. I ask if there's any conflict between religion and communism (remembering in the back of my head Marx saying that "religion is the opiate of the people"). The guide launches into a muddled 20 minute talk trying to explain how the Vietnamese communist party made some mistakes in the past, but now their on the right road. | |
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| I think he was half talking about embracing capitalism and only partially about letting people believe in myths. We're also accompanied by a bunch of kids about junior high school age. These kids do most of the boat rowing, and haul drinks up the mountain with us, periodically trying to see the drinks to us. On the way back down, I buy a bottle of water from the kid who rows my boat. She wants 25,000 for it (the regular price is 5,000), but I give her the asking price because she says she's trying to earn money for school. | |
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| But, after rowing back to where the bus is parked, she asks for more money for her rowing, money she can use for school. I tell her I already gave her extra money when I bought the drink, but she gets really upset. After about 10 minutes of periodic arguing in a group, she gets so upset that she storms away misty-eyed. I follow her and try to press money in her hand which she refuses, but I eventually make her take. I feel really bad about it. | |
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| But more than that, I'm really pissed at my fellow travelers, and pissed at the tour company. The tour company lets these kids do all the rowing and all the hauling of drinks up the mountain, and doesn't pay them a dong! | |
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| And there's something very fishy about the fact that the kids didn't start rowing until we were out of sight from the village we left from, and on the way back they handing over their rowing to someone else as we approached within eyesight of the dock. But the only people really bothered by this in our tourgroup of about 20 were this French couple who complained and me. Later that night I complained to the guy who sold me the tour, telling him that they really shouldnít use child labor like that. And that it would be better to just charge a few more dollars for the tour and be able to pay people for work like rowing. But I was really upset at my fellow travelers' reaction to this sordid affair. | |
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| It was this typical type of "backpacker" mentality -- "I'm poor, don't ask me for more money". These poor kids had worked really hard rowing and carrying our drinks, and my fellow travelers' just told them "I already paid for the tour, and I'm very poor." Comparing their so-called "poverty" (in wanting to go around the world for $1,000) to the poverty of the people here in Vietnam is absolutely absurd! But they really do think of themselves as poor, even when faced with such extreme poverty of starving people! This is related to quite an interesting issue. | |
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| People who are tourists in Vietnam are almost exclusively people on the lower end of the income spectrum in developed countries: primarily young people who have middle-class earning potential but aren't quite earning that now. The Vietnamese look at these tourists (who would probably be lower middle-class in the west) as representatives of the westís wealth. But what will happen when much wealthier tourists discover Vietnam? Will Vietnamese change the way they approach tourists? Will they adopt the kind of bifurcating of rich tourists from poor tourists that goes on in many western countries (where street hawkers often snub poorer-looking tourists)? | |||
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| Hué, Monday 8/30/99 | |||||||
| Took a plane from Hanoi to Hué. Itís amazing how small the Hanoi airport is. And the Hué airport is even smaller. Ours was the only plane there. In fact, the Vietnam Airlines crew comes from town to the airport just to meet the few flights that come each day. I was the only one buying a ticket on the Airline shuttle into town from the airport, so I'm riding with the Airline crew. I stay at the Mimosa Guest House, on a small alleyway near a very large hotel on the river. The teenage daughter at the Guest House convinces me to rent their bike ($1/day). | |||||||
| Bicycling is great, and I start to really like Hué. It's a little less humid here than Hanoi or Bangkok (though still very humid). But at least I don't break out into a stickiness as soon as I leave my room. And the bike is absolutely great for the heat -- feeling the wind as I ride really seems to cool me down. Ten minutes after I start riding, a guy on a motorbike pulls beside me and starts to talk with me in English. His name is Vø Kieu, and he's maybe a little older than me. He invites me to his house. He loves Americans (as well as other English speakers), and shows me a collection of photos and letters sent to him by english-speakers he's met. I sit with him in his tiny rural home for more than an hour, and his daughter serves me lunch. |  |
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| He wants his teenage daughter to practice her English with me, but she's really too shy. He drives around tourists with his cyclo, and his wife is a kind of butcher at the big open-air market. They have trouble making ends meet. It costs so much to put their kids through K-12 school. He says they have to pay $80 for school (which I think is something like 1/4 of the average annual income for a Vietnamese). school. |  |
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| Again, I wonder why school isn't free in a so-called socialist state. It seems that they would want both the education and the socialization that goes with The guy wants me to take a tour with him the next day, but I really want to take a boat trip. He makes the convincing argument that seeing the tombs is easier on motorbike than on boat, but I'm much more interested in the actual boat trip than in the fact that the boat goes to visit the tombs. |  |
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| So this guy accompanies me with his bicycle all the way across town to the Walled City, and wants to wait until I get out. I loved his honesty and his hospitality and wanted to repay him, but I didn't want to take his motorbike tour. So I just handed him a large bill (about $4) and thanked him, and told him to definitely not wait for me. I continue to have these traumas of people being really nice to me, and kind of expecting a particular thing in return -- but what they expect in return is something that I really don't want to do. |  |
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| In the evening I end up in a pretty touristy café. It's called the News Cafe, and probably just be chance theyíve hit on what has become trendy in the US -- having recent newspapers available for people to read while they eat and drink. The proprietor (who sells food and tours) really likes Americans (as does just about everyone I've met here), and urges to me see the Vietnamese countryside, as well as some of the sites from the War. He pulls out an issue of Vanity Fair with a very good article on the Zippo Lighters that Gis had engraved during the War. And he shows me several books on Vietnam History, particularly on the War. |  |
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| He spends lots of time with me, telling me how I've got to see the real Vietnam. Instead of taking the plane to Saigon, he wants me to take a bus through the countryside. He's not really pushing me to take his tour and genuinely wants me to see the countryside, but I feel guilty not taking his tour. I'm feeling a lot of this. I finally resolve this the next day by deciding to rent a motorbike from him and seeing the countryside that way. Almost every day on Vietnamese television I've caught this striking dramatic program. It's set during the Vietnam War, and mainly about the relations between one group of Viet Cong liberation fighters. It's amazing to see this soap-opera type drama with heroic machine-gun toting women, and the group hanging out in caves and tunnels. And itís periodically interspersed with them hiding in foxholes while American troops walk above them, as well as occasional funkily-staged battle scenes. Social realism soap operas! These go well with all the social realist billboards around every town. |  |
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