10/30/11 Vietnam

We are back on the ship after spending 6 days in the beautiful country of Vietnam.  It really is beautiful.  It's green, lush, tropical and vibrant.  People really do work in the rice paddies with their conical Vietnamese style hats, and the women look elegant in their traditional dress of a fitted floor-length tunic, cut on both sides all the way to their waists, with pants underneath. The people are, almost without exception, small and slender.  Their diet consists mostly of rice, fish/seafood, vegetables and fruits.  Fruit was the only dessert served to us. The people were very friendly and seemed happy to host our big ship full of Americans.

Ho Chi Menh City (Saigon), is a thriving, modernizing city, where you can find most anything you wish.  I was hard-pressed to find anything to remind me that this city exists in a communist country, except I didn't see any homeless people on the streets. I'm told that certain internet sites are blocked or limited by the government, and that government corruption is alive and well here, but the people seem quite content with their lives.  I still don't quite understand the arrangement between the government and all the privately-owned businesses here, but I think the limitations on owning a business are mostly related to politics; specifically, not compromising the Communist political party.  Vietnam is a 90% cash economy, so what people report to earn in a year is often vastly different than what they actually earn. This county is very tolerant of religious differences. Although the majority of people are Buddhist, it seems that you can find a large number of people who are involved in a large number of different religions.  We saw temples of all different faiths in our travels across Vietnam, some of them ancient.

You can not travel to Vietnam without revisiting the horror that was the Vietnam war (or American war, as the Vietnamese, call it).  We were reminded, time after time, how there really are no winners in war.  The Americans lost about 56,000 soldiers in the war, and then another 60,000 veterans to suicide in the decade that followed. The Vietnamese lost between 5 and 10 MILLION soldiers and civilians in that war, depending on where you get your numbers. The average age of the American soldiers was 19!  These boys were asked to hike through jungles that were filled with landmines and the most horrific, violent, spiked traps you can image.  We visited the Cu Chi tunnels, where the Vietnamese spent weeks and months, in a 300 mile long tunnel network under the ground, in order to keep from getting killed and to sneak up on the Americans.  They buried their dead in the walls of these tunnels, in addition to urinating and deficating in them.  The tunnels are small (you have to crawl in most parts of them), dark and hot, and I just simply can not believe that people were able to keep their sanity, having to live in those conditions.  One of the worst parts of the whole thing for me, is realizing that we are currently involved in another war, killing more innocent civilians, and losing more of our own young men and women. It's hard for me to believe that humanity has still not been able to declare war obsolete, and find humane ways to deal with our differences. I guess the only person whose attitude we can change is ourselves. I'm reminded of the quote, "be the change you wish to see in the world," and the line in Michael Jackson's song, "I'm looking at the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways, no message could have been any clearer, if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change."

On to more pleasant subjects... Ha Long Bay was gorgeous. We boarded a wooden boat that had an open top deck complete with lounge chairs and potted plants, and a window-filled lower deck with tables and benches for eating. We spent the next 4 hours exploring the bay. It is a body of water with wonderful, green rock formations jutting out all over the place.  Some of these islands are big and contain huge caves full of stalagtites and stalagmites, which we were able to explore.  After this little sunny taste of paradise, we were fed a huge seafood lunch. There were whole shrimp (yes, removing or eating their heads and legs was required), crab cakes served in crab shells, and various types of fish, along with fried squid.  Along the way, families who lived on boats on the bay would hop on our boat and try to sell us all kinds of things.  Sometimes they would just put their 3 year child on our boat, armed with a bunch of bananas for us to buy.  I guess they have figured out that it's harder for us to resist those cute little kids. I couldn't resist, and ended up with more bananas than we could eat.

One of the more unique cultural experiences we had in Ha Noi was seeing the water puppet show.  On a stage next to the water sat an orchestra made up of traditional Vietnamese instruments and the narrators. In high-pitched, squeely voices, 2 women provided the voices of the puppets. The puppets were plastic figures of people and dragons and such, and were attached to long sticks controlled by people in tall fishing boots, standing in the waist-deep water behind a back-drop. Although I wouldn't characterize this play as great, it was certainly unique.

I do hope that I can spend more time in this part of the world. It's just a nice place to be, full of nice people. Now on to China...