Miền Trung

I just got back to Hanoi from a trip to Central Vietnam. Funny how I am either coming back from somewhere, or going somewhere, every time I write... :)

We took the train from Hanoi to Hue, a nice neat overnight ride of about twelve hours. Hue (that is with a 'hat' over the 'e' and an up tone... pronounced like /H-way/) is a quite nice town on the mouth of the Perfume River. It has about 300,000 people, as opposed to Hanoi's 3 million. Hanoi still seems pretty relaxed to me most of the time, after China, and well, Hue was positively asleep. Like I said, quite nice! My language tutor came along with us on this trip, so I got to wander the town with him for the first half a day. Then we visited the Citadel, some kind of military thing along this river, I believe built by the French. Behind that, was Vietnam's version of the Forbidden City. Hue was the capital of Vietnam for the whole Nguyen Dynasty (maybe 1600 something to WWII). Most of the Nguyen Dynasty was more theory than actual rule, but anyway, this is where they lived. The gate (which is more complicated than it sounds) and a couple other buildings were restored, the rest was just ruins. This place was damaged somewhat during the war with France, and bombed to pieces during the American War. It was good to see, though, naturally a lot of similarities to the Forbidden City in Beijing.

The next day we took a boat trip up the Perfume River. We stopped numerous places to see stuff, the first being a famous pagoda (they call Buddhist temples here 'pagodas', as opposed to temples, which involve sort of local spirit cults). It had a neat tower, and one of the more interesting things there was an old car that was driven by a high monk when he went to Saigon to burn himself as a protest against the South Vietnamese government in 1968 I think. It got a lot of news coverage. The other three places we went to were all burial sites for Nguyen Kings. These were big elaborate compounds that were pretty amazing, again not really restored (and somehow more amazing because of that), but these places were not as damaged by the war as the place in Hue.

The DMZ is north of Hue not too far. After a rather long bus ride up the coast and then inland and up into the mountains we got to Khe Sanh - an airfield during the war that was the site of a big long extended battle. There was a small building with a couple displays, and you could walk around and look at the old air strip and some bunkers, a rusting tank and a broken airplane propeller. The remaining bits of some massive chaos. The captions in the museum were propagandizing to the extent of being almost funny, but the whole place was just sad. I guess this battle was later seen as representing the whole war in that, both sides kind of took a stand here, lots of people were killed (many more Vietnamese of course, that not even including civilians) and when the battle was all over everybody kind of left and no one really wanted the place, it was just an effort to save face or something. The area was really beautiful; this was quite close to the Lao border, a kind of high drier climate than on the coast. After this we went to Vinh Moc - a little village on the coast, just north of the DMZ, where they give tours through a maze of tunnels that were used to hide and move weapons, and for several hundred people to live in for numerous years. So that was interesting, and I stuck my feet in the South China Sea. And we stopped at a memorial right on the river that was the dividing line between North and South Vietnam. It was a really little river, they said you could walk across - and there were peaceful water buffalos waddling in the middle.

The next day, we rode a bus south to Hoi An. There is a section of town called the 'Ancient Streets'. It was full of shops selling Tet masks and clothes and jewelry and lanterns and whistles and all varieties of everything available, any actual connection with Hoi An or even Vietnam seemed to be peripheral. There was a tourist festival, which involved big lit-up animal sculptures on the river and various sorts of pageantry and crowds of people and merriment in general. And there was a nice beach there, I went and sat in the sand writing postcards and drinking coconut water. Really the most enjoyable part of that place was all the nice cafes that I could go to and practice Vietnamese with people. In spite of there being many tourists, there were many more cafes, and tourists like sheep tend to all go to one place, leaving all the rest of the places for me to find unsuspecting people to practice language on! Most people working in cafes or restaurants in this part of town knew at least a little English, so I could help them and they help me. There were also loads of tailors in town - that is a Hoi An specialty I guess, they can make you clothes in three hours before your bus leaves. So that was Hoi An - fun, relaxing usually, met some really interesting people there, but I wouldn't want to stay too long.

Da Nang is the biggest city in central Vietnam. I guess it is more a sort of industrial place and less touristy. I liked it! We visited a Cham sculpture museum. Champa (kingdom of the Chams) was around in what is now central Vietnam/Laos from maybe the early 1st millenium to about 1400-1500. The sculpture was mostly Hindu stuff, as Champa was strongly influenced by India. The next day we went out to My Son (I know that looks funny in english, but it really sounds like ME SUN), the site of many Cham temples. That was really cool, and also kind of sad because a lot of these temples had been in relatively good condition until the war. The VC used them to hide in, so they got bombed all to pieces... It was super hot, but I enjoyed wandering through the jungle a bit again, and the ruins were really fascinating. There were stones there with writing on them - Champa had the same style of letters as modern Thai/Cambodian - based on Sanscrit. It reminded me of Tibetan, but anyway. As far as Da Nang itself, I wandered through a couple markets, looked at two Cao Dai temples (I'll explain that some other day), sat in the shade, ate seafood on China Beach, made friends with a couple of cyclo drivers who had worked for the South Vietnamese army in the war and thus can't get jobs now, so they drive cyclos... And I found a restaurant with really good hamburgers.

Then I came back to Hanoi. And slept, unpacked, drank coffee, and wrote email. That's it!