Asian Explorer

Vietnam is the first of our Asia Adventure visits. It is an oddly-shaped country rather like a large ‘S’. The most vivid description we heard was of it as a yoke. Of course, these are everywhere in this still relatively poor country. Most frequently, we saw them in the cities where they constituted a means of transport of goods from the country or outskirting slums as well as often the stall on which these goods were offered. Most frequent amongst these pannier-carrying street vendors were the lotus flower sellers and an amazingly wide range of fast food offerings including, surprisingly we thought, ready-to-eat waffles. Before setting out on this trip, we had as usual tried to do a little background research including some literature checks in the form of fiction: The Quiet American and The Boat (we enjoyed the first but not the second) and movies including: The Scent of Green Papaya, Heaven and Earth directed by Oliver Stone and Cyclo. All of these seemed to portray a rather desolate peasantry still somewhat focussed on a war-torn past although hardship is being borne with stoicism verging on heroic determination. In these, we also saw many lotus flower scenes and realized how important this plant is to the Vietnamese psyche. On our second night in Vietnam we all watched The Quiet American as we were spending much of our time walking along the street in HCMC where the book and film are set. Speaking of the streets – the electric cables and phone wires suspended everywhere were BEYOND belief!

The geography of Vietnam can be envisaged as two large baskets (in fact literally grain baskets since the fertile flood plains around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are luxuriant rice-growing areas) suspended on a very thin and rather bendy bamboo stick. Now you may visualize the bowed Vietnamese worker carrying her country on one shoulder. The two fat and productive flood plains around the major cities we visited divided yet joined by a very thin sliver of land (47 km at its narrowest point) constituting the yoke rod. In this sliver of land we glimpsed the future of tourism in Vietnam – and it is not very pretty. Around the area of Hoi An and particularly China Beach made famous (apparently) in the US by a television series based on the frontage to the beautiful East China Sea once the home of the US military’s main rest and recreation (R&R) facility. Here, the long preserved concrete helicopter hangars now moss-encrusted which line the pristine sand are being bulldozed wholesale to create a 30 or 40 kilometre stretch of tourist resorts. In another five years, the world will be able to fly into Danang, take a bus or cab to their resort and never see the Vietnam that we sampled.

A fascinating feature of Vietnamese cities is their very peculiar architecture. Almost all buildings are surprisingly long and thin as if they had been put on a rack (a local torture feature we were to meet in person). This peculiarity derives from the Vietnamese land tax system which charges building owners for the width of their street frontage. Thus, while it is essential for a shop keeper to have some street entrance to their premises, this is often not much more than a doorway and narrow window with the shop itself stretching very far back off the street. Everything else the shop or home needs is piled vertically above this on five or even six storeys. Although we first noticed this very fascinating architectural peculiarity in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), we found the most extreme example of it in Hanoi, where a single entry to the street (known very aptly as a tunnel entry) is shared by five or six vendors. As an aside, we completely misunderstood our Saigon guide, Huy’s, explanation of this to begin with because, due to the Vietnamese softening of all consonants (and swallowing of many), we thought he called the building design a bunny front. Only later did we discover that he had said money front as a descriptor of the relationship between street frontage and wealth. We smiled at bunny fronts for the rest of our trip.
Bunny front