Glacial Tourism

Some days I remember what it is like to be a tourist here. A couple weeks ago, on a touristic sort of impulse, I decided to go an visit "B52 Lake". I had heard about this place since I first came to Vietnam, usually in underwhelmed reports of people getting lost in the back alleys of Ba Dinh looking for the lake (pond) where the remains of a B52 shot down in 1972 are still there sticking out of the lake. I say Glacial Tourism because it took me so many years to get around to stopping by this place which is less than 10 minutes from my office, not because the B52 crashed on a glacier or anything like that. In fact, the day I went there was a proper Hanoi summertime scorcher, which just made the iced coffee taste that much better, at the "B52 Cafe" which you can sort of see in the picture back there behind the trees.

And in fact it is a small lake, even by Hanoi standards, and there is indeed a piece of airplane, including a set of wheels, sitting out there in the lake. It's a little hard to know what to make of it - there is a sort of marker at one corner of the lake noting it as a historical site. The 'Christmas Bombings' in 1972 are, at least in the government press here, referred to as "Dien Bien Phu in the air" - drawing the parallel between Vietnam's decisive victory in the battle of Dien Bien Phu which effectively ended French colonialism here in 1954, and the 1972 American bombings of Hanoi and the north. The Vietnamese, to the surprise of everyone, succeeded in shooting down a number of the B52 bombers, though casualties and damage from the bombings were very high.

The "Museum of Victory over B52" is just a block or two away from here, although there is not a direct path between the two places. I have probably gone past that museum at least a hundred times on the way to work, perhaps I'll actually stop in and see it one of these days...