01.05.09 – Huê, Vietnam

It was a very peaceful night of sleeping on the junk. The water of Ha Long Bay, which is protected from the sea by the islands, is almost always very calm. In the morning we took the small launch boat into a lake that can be reached only through a rock opening when the tide is low. It is called No Way Out Bay because when the tide rises there is no exit.

On the drive from Ha Long to the Hanoi airport we passed girls going to a school for teachers. Most of them were using umbrellas to shade themselves from the sun. When I saw this in Korea during the summer three-and-a-half years ago, I had assumed that it was for protection from the heat. But it wasn’t hot today. Ngoc told us that the purpose is to keep the sun from making their skin darker. It seems that it is a status and class thing. They want to keep their skin “white” to show that they do not work out in the fields. Of course people who are working in the rice paddies have to be out in the sun and use both hands; they cannot hold an umbrella to shade themselves and their skin gets dark. Very interesting class distinctions in this “communist” country.

We saw a very few women in the countryside wearing silky Vietnamese tops, but almost everyone there, as in Hanoi, in dressed in modern Western clothing. We have yet to see a single person wearing the “black pajamas” that most Vietnamese seemed to be wearing at the time of the American War.

Another interesting point about dress: we have seen virtually no women wearing dresses or skirts. They all wear pants, usually tight jeans. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that most people get around on motorbikes.

Ngoc told us that Chinese tourists don’t want to hear about culture and history or see sights; they want to drink, gamble, spend money, and sing on the bus. They ask for female tour guides and expect them to sleep with them. He said that some prostitutes become travel guides and make a lot of money.

Driving outside the city is much like what I remember in Indonesia. There are only two lanes, but drivers create a half lane in the middle to weave in and out to pass. They blow their horns constantly. In the countryside, people carry almost anything, from stacks of wood or baskets, to carcasses of cows, pigs or buffaloes, on their motorbikes or bicycles.

We stopped at a government-run center where all sorts of artworks and other stuff are created and sold. Artists sit side-by-side painting. Outside stone carvers make sculptures. It is all individually handmade, but by people working long hours next to others doing the same sorts of things. Among those crocheting, I noticed a few girls who appeared to be at the most 12. This center was set up to make money to assist victims of Dioxin poisoning from the Americans’ use of Agent Orange during the war. Prices were high. We didn’t buy anything.

The domestic flights section of the Hanoi Airport isn’t much bigger than the Jackson airport, though it services a city of 4 million.

Christmas decorations are everywhere. Ngoc told us that about 10 to15 percent of the population has reverted to Catholicism since it became tolerated by the government.

We arrived in Huê after 8 PM, having wasted most of the day traveling and sitting in the Hanoi airport.

We were met by our new guide, Nguyen Duc Phu, at the Huê airport. He is adamantly pro-South Vietnam-US in the war. His father and uncles were high ranking people in South Vietnam and were sent to reeducation camps after the North Vietnamese takeover in 1975. Phu asked us if we were for Obama and was delighted to find out that we were. He said Obama is “president of the world.” It’s finally again nice to be an American abroad.

Everything in the Camellia Huê Hotel is pink. After our late arrival, George and I went to the restaurant upstairs in the hotel. At the next table, the only other diners there at a late hour were five loud, obnoxious people from Brooklyn. We decided against introducing ourselves as Americans from New Jersey.

Busy day tomorrow. Off to bed.

— RSM