Just a few kilometers out on Route 22, and I know I have made a mistake. The battered Renault with a hole in its bare metal floor and no side windows is cramped and sweltering as we weave along the crowded, potholed roads.
In mangled French, my volatile driver insists his vintage vehicle is superior to the comfortable, air-conditioned Japanese models cruising past us. Still, the excursion to two of the Mekong Delta’s more unusual attractions, one a haven of peace, the other a memorial of war, is worth the ordeal.
In rural Vietnam, women in black pyjamas and classic woven cone hats squat at the side of the road selling long, golden baguettes, packs of cigarettes, car and bicycle parts, fruit and vegetables or fresh young coconuts for drinking. Water buffalo work the rice paddies, and ancient, wood-hulled supply barges drift slowly down placid rivers.
Even away from the city, traffic never lets up in this crowded country. Although prosperity has brought new Japanese vehicles to the highways, immense, battered museum-piece American trucks, remnants from the war years, haul huge logs, families of four or five wobble along on small motorbikes and plodding oxen pull creaking two-wheeled wooden wagons. And everywhere, countless bicycles.
Several hours in this rolling oven, 100 kilometers northwest of Saigon, near the Cambodian border, we reach the town of Tay Ninh, site of the Cao Dai religion’s major house of worship. The elaborate Great Cathedral, the most prominent structure in a complex of pastel yellow buildings in Sino-Vietnamese style with European elements, looks like a holy place designed by a 1960s acid head.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it. More garish and ornate than even a Taoist/Confucian temple, it is like a religious theme park, with gaudy adornments, splashes of bright color and multicolored dragons entwined around pink pillars. A busy mural depicts French author Victor Hugo, Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and Vietnamese poet and prophet Nguyen Binh Khiem, while statuary of Jesus Christ, Lao Tse, Confucius and Buddha completes the ensemble. A great, luminous sphere, the Divine Eye, hangs over the altar overlooking worshippers.
Through good fortune rather than planning, I arrive on time to witness midday prayers. At the great door (women and men must use different entrances), a member of the congregation summons me upstairs where a dozen foreigners observe the service. The atmosphere is vaguely medieval with the priests’ outlandish costumes and murmured prayers.
Seen from the balcony, it is like a scene from some fantasy adventure movie as hundreds of squatting supplicants in white, and priests clad in brilliant red, yellow and blue ceremonial robes form a geometric pattern on the stone floor below us. In the cool of the huge temple, voices chant while an orchestra all in white plays eerie, sacred music with skrawky er-hu (Chinese-style) stringed instruments.
As I observe this mysterious scene, a sweet, tiny old nun with a doll-like face approaches and attempts to explain the basics of this strange creed in hesitant English. Then she hands me a piece of paper, hand-written in English, outlining the founding of this strange theology, which amalgamates ideas from many different religions and beliefs, East and West.
Founded in the 1920s by Vietnamese government official Ngo Van Chieu, Cao Daisim is a bizarre synthesis of all existing religions, including elements of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Vietnamese spiritualism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, even animism spiritual seances and occult rites. Its eclectic ecclesiastics have communicated with, and sanctify, such a mixed group of improbable spirits as Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Louis Pasteur, Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Despite the bizarre setting in what may be Asia’s strangest holy place, the chanting and music imbue the ceremony with a mysterious sense of serenity. It is as moving as any cathedral or temple I have seen.
Outside in the hot sun, as I sip a soft drink bought from a bicycle hawker wearing a cone hat and pyjamas, my pestiferous driver urges me to move on, even though I have paid him for the whole day.
Returning home along the same crowded highway, about 36 kilometers outside Saigon the driver, with a predetermined itinerary for Western tourists, detours to Cu Chi district. As we bump along in the flat delta country, he points to the rice paddies, exclaiming “VC, VC, VC” (Viet Cong). “Boom-boom. B52 bombers,” he shouts with elaborate gestures, taking his hand off the horn for the first time today.
The Cu Chi tunnels are the most accessible part of the infamous, elaborate tunnel network the Viet Cong built over decades of war. Communist guerrillas started digging the tunnels in 1948. Later, they became a refuge from the constant bombing and operations of American troops in the Iron Triangle and War Zone C. The ornate tunnel system was a logistic center as well as a Viet Cong hideout and, in 1968, the staging area for the deadly Tet Offensive against Saigon.
As my irksome driver parks and squats in the shade of a tree, lighting up a cigarette, a small man who resembles a VC guerrilla in his camouflage uniform bicycles up to meet me. Like it or not, he is my guide.
The ex-soldier leads me down an embankment to a big, empty building, like a classroom inside, and escorts me around a series of photographs and diagrams showing the intricate underground systems. He explains, in halting English, the self evident pictures along the wall showing soldiers living in the caves and a diagram of the intricate system.
The 250-kilometer complex eventually spread like a spider’s web under an area from the Cambodian border to within 32 kilometers of Saigon. The underground passageways joined villages and linked dormitories, kitchens, conference rooms and classrooms, hospitals and schools, ammunition dumps, escape hatches and propaganda lecture halls where cadres from the north passed on the word of Comrade Ho. But despite the facilities, life in these dark tunnels must have been a form of hell.
Outside the building, the guide leads me to a clearing in the jungle to show me a bombed-out tank lying in the undergrowth, a vicious bamboo trap with stakes at the bottom of a pit, and a nail trap sprouting wicked, sole-destroying hooked spikes. Then, kicking a few leaves aside, he reveals a small gap in the ground about the size of a coffee-table book, he pauses for dramatic effect as I determine that I can barely get one foot into it. Then, lifting the cover, my tiny guide (a full-grown Vietnamese perhaps half my body weight) sits on the edge of the tiny hole in the ground, holds his arms over his head, and slithers into it, disappearing like a snake.
I follow him into the heart of darkness. This 50-meter stretch of tunnel has been enlarged for Western-sized physiques so I can crawl awkwardly after him for a short way through the hot, sweaty and claustrophobic tunnel, and immediately appreciate the VC’s appalling living conditions.
Then my guide, who might have been one of the tunnel rats, crawls into an even smaller shaft, with no light at the end of the tunnel. The cave gets smaller, hotter, dirtier, until we turn a corner and face total blackness. “Fifty meters more,” mumbles the disembodied voice ahead. But this is far enough for this large foreign body, and I already have my notes from underground, so I scuttle back clumsily, surfacing into the tropical sunlight sweaty and dirty like a bedraggled ground hog. There are snakes, spiders and cockroaches down there.
Brushing off the yellow dirt, I pay the guide 12,000 dong (about US$1) and he gives me a receipt on a rough brown sheet, like European toilet paper. Then the souvenirs come out: a lighter made from two M16 shells, an anti-aircraft shell lamp, some American GI dog tags.
As I fight off the souvenir salesmen, shots ring out from a nearby rifle range where would-be soldiers-of-fortune squeeze off a few rounds of an AK-47 or M-16. At about a U.S. buck a bullet, this real life shooting gallery is expensive.
Instead, I repair to a thatched-roof shack for a quick three-pack of canned 333 beer. It is necessary, as a matter of face, to drink in Vietnam, or risk being tagged “Papa limp flag” (as a teetotal friend was once maligned). This is another endearing aspect of the exuberant spirit of the people that makes Vietnam so enjoyable to visit.
I am washing away t
he cave dust with a 9,000 dong beer, when a group of backpackers arrive. They pooled their money and spent only $20 for the day for their more comfortable vehicle. And they wangle the beer down to 8,000 dong. I’ve been had twice in one day.
But once more my driver is agitating to move on, so we head back to the big city. For an hour-and-a-half, we bump along the rough, dusty road in the French wreck, back to Saigon, and a shower. It was a great trip, one that I would do again. But next time, I’ll get a proper car and driver.
CENTRAL VIETNAM
The Way to Hue
August 1994
WHEN our so-called guide asks, as we approached Vietnam’s legendary imperial city, “Why you come to Hue?” we know we are on our own.
Too late, we realize that the driver and guide we hired in Danang for a day’s outing to one of Vietnam’s most famous sights have never been to Hue. We will have to rely on our guidebook and map.
Our hapless quest started in the country’s northern gateway, Hanoi, an exceptionally gracious city considering its recent war-torn history. The Vietnamese capital is suspended in an age between the jetliners flying in to Noi Bai airport and the oxcarts and bicycles that clutter the long, dusty road through the shambling suburbs to the city center.
A city of lakes, parks, tree-lined streets and colonial buildings in various stages of deterioration, Hanoi is the only major world capital where the leisurely cyclo-pousse (peddle rickshaws) provide the main public transportation -- and a relaxing way to explore. The streets will inevitably become as busy and traffic-congested as Saigon’s, but there is still time to savor the easy tempo before the invasion of the Hondas.
For now, in this unhurried city, citizens still linger for hours out on the sidewalks sipping coffee. The miniature, child-sized bamboo chairs are Southeast Asian, the delicious, slightly chocolaty coffee, served in demitasse cups with condensed milk, a legacy of the former French colonialists.
The sign at one such cafe catering to foreigners, the Home Away From Home across the street from the Ministry of Defense Guest House, promises “Cold beer, superb coffee and good friends! English sometimes spoken!” It is a forewarning of our problems.
Local English takes even more intriguing turns. Sitting out one afternoon at the Giang Vo Lake Floating Restaurant and Bar (a makeshift raft on pontoons), while cooling breezes ripple the water, we study the menu with quiet trepidation: “Frog stir-fried with little water, duck simmered with 8 Chinese medicines, beef fired by skaking the sancepan, boneless tig’s trotters farced with mushroom and hopch totch, beef processed and roasted with five spies, fried snake pies, beef testicle stir fried with hotch-potch.”
Much of Hanoi’s outdoor amusement revolves around several lakes, with city-center Hoan Kiem as lively as Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park. Hawkers sell parachute-nylon hammocks, woven plates painted with comic faces, lacquerware bowls and plates, tortoise-shell work, silverware boxes and jewelry. Instant entrepreneurs set up bicycle hand pumps or weighing scales, selling their services for a few dong (the local currency). Professional photographers with ancient cameras snap stiff portraits with a temple background. One at a time, several girls in flowing white or yellow ao dais, the women’s national dress, pose under the trees. The models take turns wearing the only pair of high-heel shoes.
The locals are friendly, but aggressive and on the make. When my somewhat smaller companion and I hire two pedicabs, my driver tries to hustle some extra dong. “Madame small, sir very big,” he argues. “Three Vietnamese, sir, same-same. Sir 100 kilos.”
There will be no gratuity for you, my good man, I mutter, climbing aboard. But he proves a congenial enough guide, and the leisurely roll through the quiet streets proves a soul-soothing experience.
Still, the remnants of ancient Vietnam we seek are a long day’s rail journey to the south. Because the train arrives in Hue in the middle of the night, we decide to take it on to Danang, and backtrack by road to the ancient capital the following day. So at 8am on a chilly Hanoi winter day we are aboard The Reunification Express as it departs on the million dong (about U.S. $50 each) ride. The train is shabby, but passable, and with only four to a compartment provides space to stretch out at night.
Grubby industrial Hanoi crowded with the masses, mostly traveling on two wheels, soon passes into rural Vietnam. It is the classic, unchanged, Southeast Asia of cone hats and water buffalo, of villagers knee-deep in mud making bricks and women ankle-deep in paddy fields planting shoots of rice. This is not all a carefree Eden, though. The pretty, perfect circular ponds are craters from bombs aimed at these railway tracks long ago.
At frequent intervals, a train attendant comes by with buckets of chilled soft drinks and cans of Ba-ba-ba (333 beer) that we buy to go with our baguettes and runny French “Vache Qui Rit” cheese.
“A loaf of bread, a 333 and thee,” I toast my lady.
Sometime in the night, we cross the old DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) and enter the former South Vietnam. It is still dark out when the train attendant announces “Danang,” and collects the bedding. Gritty-eyed and yawning we step out on the platform, where a few pedicab drivers wait in the shadows. Dawn breaks as we glide quietly through the streets to the hotel.
Da Nang (Tourane to the French before 1954), in the densely populated central coastal lowlands, was the center of the Cham civilization long before the American military built a major base here. Renting a motorbike for US$7 for the day from a passing teenager, we set off on it to explore the environs.
Eleven kilometers from downtown Danang, China Beach, of U.S. military R & R and later TV war soap fame, and the site of Vietnam’s international surfing championships last year, is a long and lonely stretch of sand and sea inhabited only by beach urchins peddling seashell souvenirs.
A pack of aggressive waifs hound foreigners around nearby Marble Mountain, five marble hillocks pocked with natural caves used as Buddhist sanctuaries. One persistent, precocious miss hawking crudely carved elephant paperweights tags along as we climb the steep steps of Thuy Son, the largest “mountain,” pointing out rock formations and bullet holes in ancient temple gates. At the top, she looks out at the view of China Beach and the surrounding hills, and informs us, “Americans always say: ‘Totally awesome.’”
Hue, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest over mountain roads, is too far for the clapped-out little rental bike. So, avoiding the roadside hustlers offering us their run-down cars, we play it safe by commissioning one through the hotel. The receptionist explains that although the driver doesn’t speak English, his friend, who does, will go along as a guide.
At dawn, our confidence is shaken when a shabby, barefoot man leads us to his old beater, which smells of gas and leaks exhaust fumes through a hole in the floor. His middle-aged companion introduces himself as Mr. Tan. “I am a student,” he announces, a suggestion belied by his disheveled appearance.
But it is a fine morning, with a soft, yellow light reflecting on the rice paddies where farm boys splash and play on their water buffalo. Rows of ducks waddle across the roads, old women carry huge bundles of wood or produce balanced on shoulder poles. Girls in colorful pyjamas outfits, long black hair streaming from woven hats, flutter through the fields like flocks of tropical birds.
National Highway 1 soon leaves the plains for one of Vietnam’s most scenic drives, a steep, winding road up Deo Hai Van, the Pass of the Ocean Clouds. At the summit, we pause at the Cafe in the Clouds for strong coffee served in tiny aluminum cups. From this 496-meter peak, it seems we can see all the way back to Danang and forward on to Hue.
Outside Hue, our old clunker weaves precariously through two-wheeled and four-legged traffic hazards, nearly running over peasants wobbling along on rickety bikes. Two bicycles with a hammock slung on a bamboo pole between them to make a basic ambulance are reminders that roadside medical service here may not be up to international standards.
Only now, approaching Hue, do we realize that this is our escorts’ first visit here. The historic city
was the imperial capital of Vietnam from 1802 until the French took control in 1883, and the provincial capital of South Vietnam from 1954 until reunification in 1975. But I don’t think Mr. Tan knows this.
Although severely damaged in the decisive Tet Offensive (1968), much of the imperial relics outside town remain intact. Our companions grin at us vacantly when we ask about the sights so, map in hand, we direct them along a dirt road to the 19th-century Thien Mu Pagoda. Indifferent to the charms of one of Vietnam’s most famous buildings, our Danang escorts merely glance up at the towering symbol of Hue, then return to the gasoline-reeking car to light up cigarettes.
The 21-meter-high octagonal pagoda overlooks the Perfume River, where boats marked “Tour ist” unload visitors from Hue. They’ve come to see the bronze Buddhas, the ancient stele set on the back of a massive marble turtle and the giant bell supposedly audible 10 kilometers away, and to chat with the monks tending the extensive gardens.
In this haven of peace, we happen on a bizarre reminder of more brutal days, the little blue Austin car that took monk Thich Quang to Saigon in 1963 to stage his famous self-immolation in political protest. The car is now parked in a shed, with a copy of one of the most famous photographs of the war -- the flaming bonze with the Austin in the background.
Back outside, we wake our driver and direct him to the extensive citadel in the town center, scene of bloody battles during the Tet Offensive. The US$3.50 entrance fee for foreigners is a sizable sum in Vietnam. Local officials have already learned to get the guests.
Not much of this fee seems to have been spent renovating the expansive, walled ruins surrounded by a weedy, lotus-filled moat. The ornately embellished, Chinese-style Ngo Mon Gate leads to the Imperial City and Forbidden Purple City, now a hushed, abandoned area largely overgrown with vegetable patches and grass. It is a smaller, quieter Vietnamese version of Peking’s Forbidden City, with the Halls of the Mandarins and the Tha Hoa Palace. But the library has been renovated, to house a gift shop.
The Peace Correspondent Page 16