Driving South

As we continue our way south the trip continues to provide challenges and surprises. We have recently been in Hue, a place that I recall was quite heavily mentioned during the 1960,s particularly during the Tet Offensive.

We stayed in a huge hotel on the edge of the Perfumed River, one of the many that cross Vietnam owing their origins to the mountains of North Cambodia and Laos. We had a very nice room (again) in a huge hotel which for the first time was pretty full with noisy Japanese and Korean tourists. Breakfast was a real bun fight at 6 am!

The city was full of students as it has seven universities so had a fun element to it. Perhaps, fortunately, they tend to be hard working all of the time here as attendance is a real privilege with maybe only 3% of young people having a place. Thus we are told that Hue shuts down at about 11 pm and their is no late night partying or other high jinks. It seems that university courses require attendance at a far higher level than in Europe, maybe because thinking independently is not encouraged as much and following the party line is more important. But I guess a little here. What is clear is that if you get to University then you are perceived to be a potential party members in the future. Duc tells us that party members have to be quiet, sober people who set a high standard of morality and behaviour. Mind you, since being a party member endows one with access to many things not available to everyone else then its not that simple. Bigger houses, more money and salary, and so on is just the tip of the iceberg he suggests. And no, this is not just an anti-party swipe as I am a member of the cynical western world who does not believe everything one is told. Anyway, History suggests that those in power in so many regimes in the past say one thing and then the members do not so much the opposite but believe that having 'arrived' they have a lot of immunity form the normal laws and mores of the country.

In Hue the tour was concerned with the past and in particular, its royal past as we visited the Forbidden City or Citadel. This huge complex is/was extraordinary. Lavish, large buildings and an exclusive resident for the kings it was badly damaged in the Tet Offensive. The USA decided to bomb it because it thought there were Vietcong soldiers hiding in it. Maybe, but it visited extraordinary cultural vandalism on the city and country.

However, what surprises me to some extent is the fact that the state is clearly investing lots of money in its refurbishment/ reconstruction/ Now clearly they are getting lots of support from institutions like UNESCO as well as many of the pacific rim countries (maybe the USA is conspicuously absent from that?). However, whilst the protection of their historical and cultural past is very important maybe there are more important things to be developing than the protection of a monarchical past. On the other hand, the development of tourism will help their economy, I guess, but there is so much here that makes tourism difficult and unattractive unless you stay in the truly luxurious end of the hotel market, and that immediately excludes you from the majority of the people of Vietnam.

Too many examples abound but getting home to our hotel last night (26th), we passed the street people, living under plastic roofs. In towns all over the country, we have seen people who are selling simple things on the street rather than beg. Whilst we sat in a bar having lemon tea (yes indeed) the notice on the menu asked us not to give children coins if they came in as this would discourage them from going to school. This was not the first time I had seen this notice. In Siem Reap we were told at Gracehouse that a mother with a youngish child/baby would not send him to school because he earned too much money for her when they were begging in the town.

Anyway, perhaps as visitors we cannot dwell on that too much at this point.

The trip has a quite good balance to it in terms of what we see. After a day looking at the war remains we then have a day of old culture. In this case, we go and visit the tombs of the old kings as well as a monastery. This involved climbing many steps and looking the vast wealth expended on carvings and wall decorations for the benefit of the privileged few. I doubt if they saw it as contributing to tourism many years later!