Hanoi

I took an overnight train from Hue, just south of the former DMZ, to Hanoi. The capital of Vietnam is the first city I've visited in the north.

The country was reunified in 1975 so I didn't expect the differences to be as extreme as they are. I have loved just about every place I've been in Vietnam, except Hanoi. The weather has been terrible, which hasn't helped. Hot and muggy one day, cold and rainy the next. But the food isn't as good and the people are nowhere near as friendly as they are in the south.

I hung out for a couple days with two young Canadian brothers, and by young I mean that I am older than the two of them combined. Sigh... All three of us are fans of the band and HBO show Flight of the Conchords. We were talking about the episode where a vendor refuses fruit to sell Brett and Jemaine because he hates New Zealanders.

We actually had that experience that night. The brothers wanted to buy some mangoes so I took them to a corner where there were a few fruit stalls where I had bought dragonfruit the night before. Two of the vendors refused to sell them fruit! One simply refused to acknowledge our presence and the other angrily waved us away.

But the purpose of this post is not to slag the city, because it's not without its charms. The tourist area is the Old Quarter, snuggled up against Hoan Kiem Lake. In fact, the entire city is dotted with lakes and bordered by rivers. The name Hanoi means "between rivers". The area has been inhabited since around 3,000 BC and the city itself will be 1,000 years old next year.

One of the lakes, Truc Bach, has a small memorial on its west bank. You'll miss it if you're not looking for it, and it's not much to look at when you do find it.


On the right you can see USA. Here's the inscription on the left.



The part that is of interest is "TCHN SNEY MA CAN". It says "Here on 26 October 1967 at Truc Bach Lake in the capital city of Ha Noi John Sidney McCain was shot out of the sky in his A4 aircraft by local citizens militia defending Yen Phu.There were 10 other planes shot down on the same day."

I've received emails asking if I've visited the "Hanoi Hilton", the prison where McCain was kept. There's a museum there now, which I'm told isn't all that interesting, so I decided to pass.

I did visit two fascinating museums. One is the Ho Chi Minh Museum, devoted to the former Vietnamese leader. I've been asked a lot what Americans are taught in school about him and what is known here as the American War.

Answer: nothing.

Things may have changed since I was in school but if I wanted to learn about the war I had to go looking for information. If memory serves the history curriculum stopped at WWII.

It's a shame because "Uncle Ho" is a fascinating man. He traveled the world, visiting 28 countries. The museum has documents he wrote in each of the seven languages he mastered.

His name is actually the best known of 50 or so aliases of Nguyen Tat Thanh. I've seen Ho Chi Minh translated as "he who enlightens" or "bringer of light". He was the president of the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1945 until his death but lived in a traditional stilt house in Hanoi.

He died of a heart attack in 1969, so he didn't live to see the American withdrawal, but he did lead Vietnam to oust the Chinese, Japanese and French. Politics aside, that's pretty darned impressive.

I knew almost nothing about the man so I found the museum quite enlightening. I normally avoid tour guides. If I had turned this trip into a reality show to find The World's Worst Tour Guide it would have been quite a competition. At the museum, though, they have trainees who work for free to improve their English. You tip them at the end if you think they did a decent job.

I'm glad I had a guide because a lot of the symbolism would have been lost on me, such as this giant Dali-esque table with fruit.


Since I had a guide there to explain I ... oh, who am I kidding. I still don't know what it means.

As an American I couldn't help but find this inscription of interest.



It's a quote from Ho Chi Minh: "All the peoples on earth are equal. Each people has the right to life, happiness and liberty." It's a deliberate play on Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence.

I also went to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, a fantastic facility with exhibits on the dozens of ethnic groups and hundreds of subgroups in Vietnam. If I have any complaints it's that it was too much information to digest! It was fascinating seeing all the sometimes subtle and sometimes drastic differences in ethnic groups that often live in the same small communities. Most of the exhibits were behind glass in a dimly lit building so they were virtually impossible to photograph.

One of the things tourists love about Southeast Asia is seeing recounting stories of the amazing ways locals put their motorbikes and bikes to use. People who have only one mode of transportation have to make do. I saw a guy in Cambodia with two live adult pigs strapped across the back of his motorbike. I've seen guys hauling 20-foot-long bundles of rebar or plate glass on a moto.

It's common to see four adults on a single moto. I've seen families of five: dad driving, toddler standing between his legs, older child on the back and mom in the middle with a kid on each knee. I'm pretty sure you could get arrested for that in the US!

This photo is of a bike a man used to sell fishing traps. He could ride it with up to 700 traps.



Also fascinating was a temporary exhibit on Catholicism in Vietnam. Because of the French occupation there is a significant Catholic population in Vietnam. In Southeast Asia the Phillipines (because of the Spanish occupation) has a larger Catholic community.

It was fun reading the way the Catholic traditions and conventions were explained for visitors who aren't familiar with the religion. And I got a real kick out of the differences between the Vietnamese and Western interpretations. For instance, here is a model of the cave in which Jesus was born.



There's also an open-air section with buildings constructed by the different ethnic groups themselves, including this Bahnar communal house, which is over 60 feet tall.


It's fascinating to think that people still live in buildings like this, especially in a country famous for its crazy traffic. As in Saigon the streets are packed with motorbikes. There isn't much in the way of parking space, so they get parked on the sidewalk.



The sidewalks are also crammed with noodle stalls and vendors. This produces a crazy situation in which the sidewalks are so crowded that the only place to walk is in the street!

Crossing a major street in any city can involve walking across four or even six lanes of traffic. But because the streets in Vietnam are crowded with motos, you might have to walk through 10 or 12 lanes of traffic. This intersection is less than a block from my hotel.





At first it seems impossible. Because there are so many vehicles on the street at a given time there is never a big enough gap in traffic for pedestrians to cross. Drivers here are pretty civilized and attentive, which is a good thing, because the trick to crossing streets here is wait until the traffic lessens just a little and then start walking. You keep a steady pace and trust the moto drivers to avoid you.

It's terrifying at first but after a few minor heart attacks it becomes perfectly normal to walk across the street with motos whizzing by inches away on all sides.

Mission Accomplished

It was exciting to sleep in the Sahara Desert, walk on the Great Wall and stand at the foot of Everest. But yesterday I reached a major travel milestone. Now I can return a content and happy man.

I visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi. and thus completed the Embalmed Communist Leader Tour.

Go ahead, admit it. You're jealous.

After visiting Lenin's tomb in Moscow and Mao's in Beijing I owed it to myself to complete the tour. I believe Kim Il-Sung is on display, but I think it's more likely that I'll walk on the moon than visit Pyongyang in this or any other lifetime, so I consider the tour complete.

The first time I visited I went in the afternoon, since the girl at my hotel told me it is closed from 11:00 am to 1:30 pm. She was half right. It closes at 11:00 am. It opens back up ... the next morning. It's not open in the afternoon at all. How silly of me to expect accurate information from my hotel about the biggest tourist attraction in the city...

It did give me the opportunity to take unobstructed photos of it.

And of the changing of the guard.


It looks a little different in the morning. This is the crowd leaving.


Rules for entry are the same as with the Lenin and Mao mausoleums: no shorts, no hats, no talking, no cameras, and so on. There are guards about every 30 feet to keep the line moving and shush anyone who talks. It takes about 20 seconds to walk around the glass case enclosing Ho Chi Minh. Like Mao and Lenin he looks waxy. Every winter he's shipped off to Russia to be re-treated.

Also like Lenin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh is on display against his wishes! Like Mao he wished to be cremated. Lenin wanted to be buried next to his mother.

Mao's tomb was modeled after Lenin's and so was this one, so it was perhaps appropriate that I had to walk past a statue of the Russian leader to get there.

It's good to be the king

I booked a tour to visit the imperial tombs outside of Hue. There are certain disadvantages to being dead. But if you have to be dead, these are pretty good places to rest for eternity. I visited three tombs. This, the tomb of Emperor Khai Dinh, was by far the smallest I visited.


After spending approximately eight kajillion hours on buses during this trip, I'm trying to find alternate means of transportation whenever possible. (I'm sure you'll remember from math class that a kajillion is a million bazillions.) I heard it was possible to visit the tombs by boat. Spending a day on a boat on the Perfume River sounds better than spending it on a bus.

After a couple tourist trap stops we visited the Thien Mu Pagoda, a truly beautiful site overlooking the river from Ha Khe Hill about three miles west of town. This is the entrance, looking up at the seven-storey tall stupa, the tallest in Vietnam.


You can see quite a few tourists here, but you ain't see nuthin' yet. I enjoyed strolling the Imperial Palace partly because there were so few tourists. No such luck here.


I was able to capture a few glimpses of what the place might have looked like as a place of quiet meditation after it was built in 1601.


I was on a cheapie tour so we didn't have a lot of time to stroll the grounds. It was only after the visit that I learned that supposedly on the grounds is the car to which Thich Quang Duc was driven to his self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, as seen in this legendary photograph.


From there we traveled about an hour to the foot of Mount Ngoc Tran, about six miles from Hue, to visit Hon Chen Temple, built by the Chams about 1,000 years ago. The site sits on a hill with an impressive view of the river, but the temple itself is small and has an intimate feel to it.


From there we went to the tomb of Khai Dinh, as seen in the top photo. It's a stone edifice built into the side of a mountain, which to dorks like me calls to mind the city of Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings. The weather was overcast that day and lent a gunmetal grey aspect to all the photos, as seen in this spectacular view from the tomb overlooking the surrounding countryside.


You can literally see the air. But even the weather couldn't diminish the almost ridiculous grandeur of the place, perhaps best seen on this particular day inside the tomb.


Ever wonder how incense is made? Yeah, well, me neither. But here it is.


After the tomb we stopped in little village where the stuff is produced. The street is lined with shops that sell incense. The finished products are displayed like floral bouquets.


In the distance are two other shops selling incense on the other side of the road. These same shops sell something else Hue is famous for, the making of the famous Vietnamese conical hat, or non la.


I had seen tourists in Southeast Asia wearing these hats, which struck me at the time as a little silly. Imagine my delight, then, when I arrived in Vietnam and discovered that people here actually wear them. It makes all the sense in the world. They are virtually weightless and block all sun from the face and neck.

It's one of the things I love about this country: It looks exactly the way I imagined it. Parts of Thailand, by way of comparison, look like Myrtle Beach. Nothing against Myrtle Beach, but if I want to see it I'll drive to South Carolina, not fly halfway around the world.

From there we went to the main stop of the day, the tomb of Tu Doc. All constructions on the grounds include the word Khiem ("modesty") in their names, which couldn't be more ironic considering there are nearly 50 buildings on a site the size of a small town. The surrounding wall is more than a mile in circumference.

This building would make a decent-sized house, but Xung Khiem Pavilion is where the emperor would go to write poetry.


On the right is a small island that was stocked with game for the emperor to hunt. I couldn't help but laugh imagining the emperor sitting in quiet contemplation, spending hours crafting a poem, then grabbing his gun, crossing the lake and blowing some poor monkey's head off.

Obviously if the emperor was writing poetry and hunting he wasn't quite dead yet. It was his final resting place, but he started planning the tomb long before his death in 1883. The site served as a retreat during his lifetime.

The history of this tomb is quite interesting. The king had over a hundred wives and concubines but no children! He may have become sterile from smallpox. Or he may have been cursed. That apparently was his opinion, which is part of the reason he wanted another palace to live in.

He required so much labor and increased taxes so much to build the tomb that he had to suppress a coup.

With all the buildings and lakes and gardens and canals and islands and so on and so forth the actual tomb was a bit anti-climactic.


Maybe that's because he's not actually buried there! After building this elaborate resting place the king was buried somewhere else. No one knows where. The guy definitely had a flair for the dramatic, as seen here in this building. It's called the Stele Pavilion for the giant stone slab in the center, which is about twice as tall as the tourist standing next to it.


The stone is inscribed with the king's epitaph. Normally it would fall to his heir to write it, but because the king was childless he had to write it himself. He wasn't the most subtle guy, so of course the stele is the largest of its type in Vietnam. The stone was brought from a quarry over 300 miles away and took four years to complete the trip.

To the right is a type of tree I'd never seen before. The girl at my hotel told me it's called a su tree, although that's not a very good spelling, because to pronounce it in Vietnamese requires using a vowel sound that doesn't correspond to an English letter. The trees only have leaves and flowers at the tips of the branches, which are rounded on the end like stubby fingers.

Hue Imperial City

The main attraction in Hue is the Imperial City, a walled enclosure that was home to the Nguyen Dynasty. It was modeled after the Forbidden City in Beijing and so the inner sanctum, where only the royal family was allowed, is called the Purple Forbidden City.

The entire complex is inside a bigger enclosure called the Royal Citadel, with a perimeter wall almost five miles long.

One of my goals on this trip was to lose all the weight I gained after my second back surgery. I hoped to lose 40 pounds. By the time I left Nepal I'd lost 60! But since I came to Southeast Asia all I've done is sit on buses and chow down on the wonderful (and cheap) cuisine. I wanted to do a walking tour of the Citadel and try to burn off some of the weight I've put on since I left Nepal.

Sudden changes in the weather tend to aggravate my old back injuries. The weather in central Vietnam had been surprisingly cool before I got to Hue. But I awoke on my first full day here to a hot, humid and smoggy day. My back was acting up, so I was feeling creaky and grumpy when I left my hotel.

I walked for a while before I realized I was not in the right frame of mind or body for a long day of walking in the hot sun. I'm glad I waited to tour the Citadel. This is the Thuong Tu Gate on my first day.



Here it is the following day.



I'm glad I decided to take a rest day. I spent a full day walking, which is really the only way to get to know a city.

The main entrance to the Imperial City is the Ngo Mon Gate, on the southern wall of the city, just opposite the flag tower.

Above the stone wall is the Belevedere of the Five Phoenixes, where the emperor would sit for official functions.

Once through the gate you cross a bridge over to the Thai Hoa Palace. I enjoyed touring the grounds partly because, unlike the Forbidden City, the place wasn't mobbed with tour groups. This photo was taken from the main entrance and there is exactly one tourist in the picture.



This palace has been completely restored. There's a short video with a really cool digital re-creation of what the complex would have looked like when it was used.

Which wasn't that long ago. It's tempting to use the word "ancient" to describe the grounds, but it was all built in the early 1800s. It looks old, in part, because it was allowed to fall into disrepair when the Communists took control of the country. It was neglected as a symbol of Vietnam's imperial past.

But now the city is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Much of the palace is being renovated. Those areas are not off-limits.



It's okay to see areas that are under construction, but it's sad to see areas of the complex that are neglected, including some places that are literally used as trash dumps.


Just to the right of this is an abandoned garden. I walked in and found two elephants.


I felt a little bad for them. They were chained in place with no food or water. I could see scars on this guy's back from the howdah, the chair that is strapped to his backs for tourists to sit in. I could have walked right up to him but a couple guys in a nearby hut, who I assumed to be the mahouts, or drivers, waved me off. It probably wasn't too smart to stand next to an unhappy bull elephant, even if he was staked to the ground.

In some places the unrestored, weatherbeaten buildings had a fun, haunted house kind of look.


In other places there were gardens and canals where, with no other tourists present, it was easy to imagine the emperor strolling and enjoying the peace and quiet.


Other buildings showed the French colonial influence. I didn't realize until I looked at this picture that there's an elderly woman sitting in the hut on the left.

Hue

After Hoi An I took the train to Hue. As your excellent host Wayne Campbell would say, it's pronounced hway. Yes, hway. Party on, Garth.

In one of those "I can laugh about it now" stories I took a taxi from Hoi An to Danang and then the three-hour train ride to Hue because I heard the route traces the coastline and the views are spectacular. Unless, of course, you're sitting on the aisle seat, facing backwards, next to a girl who is apparently the only one on the train not interested in the scenery.

People on the other side of the aisle were standing on their seats trying to see the view down the precipitous hillsides to the ocean crashing on the rocks below. I saw almost nothing, because the girl next to me closed the curtain as soon as we left the station and promptly fell asleep against the window.

Hue is perhaps best known to Americans, if at all, as the sight of a furious battle that began as part of the Tet Offensive in 1968. The city was important for geographical and historical reasons. Hue is just south of the DMZ, the line that split Vietnam into the US-allied south and Communist north. It also had symbolic importance as the spiritual center of Vietnam since it was the imperial capital of the Nguyen Dynasty from 1802 to 1945.

Because of its importance it suffered mightily during the wars with the French and US; because of its location near the coast it has taken a beating from Mother Nature's occasional typhoon; and because of its imperial past the Communist government essentially left its historical monuments to rot when the country was reunified in the wake of the withdrawal of American forces.

Recently, though, acceptance of the city's historical importance (and the tourist dollars at stake) has led to something of an official change of heart and restoration of the city's monuments.

The most notable of which is the Citadel, the walled inner city that was home to the royal family, which I'll cover in a separate post.

I did a walking tour through the city, which took me past the Military Museum, where US weapons captured during the war are displayed.



There is an understandable bias to the signs. This one says:

M48 TANK WITH ARTILLERY OF THE US EQUIPPED TO PUPPET SOLDIERS FOR RAIDING AND KILLING THE PEOPLE. IN THE SPRING 1975 CAMPAIGN, CAPTURED BY THE LIBERATION ARMY AT PHU BAI ON 25 MARCH 1975.

After passing the Military Museum you come to the Ngo Mon Gate to the Imperial City, from which there's a nice view of what is probably the city's most iconic sight, the Flag Tower. This is part of the Citadel wall and sits right on Song Huong, the impossibly poetically named Perfume River.


Because of its position on the river the flag is visible from all over the city.

After visiting the Imperial City I walked around the footpath that follows the moat around it...

... and down to a canal to see a sampan village. Sampans are traditional Vietnamese house boats. A sampan village then is a neighborhood where everyone lives on these boats.


As I walked down the canal I passed this striking sight, which reminded me of sea urchins I've seen while scuba diving.


This is another thing Hue is famous for: incense. The sticks are drying in the sun just above the bank of the canal. Everywhere in the city I saw these juxtapositions of old and new, traditional and modern. Here is a garden on one side of the canal. with a man paddling a boat in the canal, and motorbikes whizzing by on the opposite side.

Change of itinerary

I'm at the point in the trip where the money I planned on spending is basically gone. I need to make some Hard Decisions. I had planned on spending the last few months in South America. Traveling there is cheap but the airfare to get there and then home is prohibitively high.

I decided to continue hopping around Southeast Asia for a while, until my friend Scott emailed me a link. I don't care what it costs, my next stop is Switzerland.

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2009/03/coed-naked-hiking-switzerlands-new-national-sport.html

I'm joking. I've been hiking in the snow and I always wish I had more clothes, not less. I'd rather be half-naked on the beach in Vietnam than naked in the snowy mountains.

My Son

The title of this post is the name of a site of ancient ruins in Vietnam. I have not become a father on this trip. That would require a certain amount of, um, participation on my part.

My Son is the site of Hindu temples built by the Champa empire, which flourished in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 7th to 15th centuries. They vied for control of the region with the Siamese and Khmer kingdoms. In the early 1600s the Champa king converted to Islam, and thus most modern-day Chams are Muslims.

They didn't build monuments on the scale of those found in Thailand and Cambodia. The Thais and Khmers built using cut blocks of sandstone and lateriate. The Champa ruins are of interest partly because they were built with brick.



The site is about an hour outside of Hoi An and is still mostly unexcavated. The site is poorly organized so that lots of walking and shuttling about in beatup minivans is necessary. Once at the ruins themselves they can be visited in less than an hour.

The temples were built in the hilly jungle, at the foot of Cat's Tooth Mountain. I visited in mid-March. The heat was suffocating, the humidity so thick you could literally see the air. I can't imagine what it's like there in the summer. Or what it was like having to bake the bricks, hack away at the jungle and build the temples in the tropical heat.


I love the dash of color added by the Buddhist monk's robes. Again, these are Hindu temples. He was there as part of my tour group!

Excavations are underway, but I think there's a certain charm to seeing the ruins in situ and reclaimed by the jungle.


The ancient Cham language, as seen on this engraving, was derived from Sanskrit, but looks similar to modern Thai, Lao and Khmer.


If my guide was correct (and this is a big if!) it's a dead language, and even modern-day Chams can't read it.

And what would a Southeast Asian historical site be without a few craters from US bombs?



The US bombed the site in 1969, destroying the two largest temples and damaging 16 others.