Louise has entrusted me with the blog again and promoted herself to editor. So here is Vietnam (minus our Easy Riders motorcycle diaries which will follow soon)

1. Overall impressions of Vietnam

It is hard to ignore one's preconceptions of a country and the more we travel the more I realise that along with the news media many of these preconceptions come from Hollywood – none more so than in Vietnam. For anyone who has grown up in the UK (let alone the US) since the early seventies, more than 90% of their information and experience will like as not have come from Vietnam War films. In fact, it took me a few days to stop hearing the Louis Armstrong ‘Wonderful World’ soundtrack and seeing imaginary napalm flames suddenly rising up from the stunning lush vistas we drove past; or to hear Adrian Cronaur’s Wicked Witch of the West voice screeching “Follow the Ho Chi Minh trail!” each time someone mentioned Vietnam’s favourite Uncle Ho; and of course Paul Hardcastle stuttering S-s-s-s-Saigon. But thankfully it quickly wore off as we settled in.

War has left many echoes in this country. Vietnam has been variously invaded, occupied, attacked and colonized by China, Cambodia, Japan, France and America. In fact what we know as the ‘Vietnam war’, called the ‘American war’ in Vietnam is seen as one phase in a continuing 30 year struggle against foreign armies trying to stop Ho Chi Minh from unifying the country after the power vacuum left by the Japanese defeat at the end of WW2.

Untold numbers of landmines and unexploded bombs still lie in Vietnam; much of the land is still too dangerous to farm. 40,000 people have died since hostilities ended in 1975, and 1,000 to 3,000 people are still killed or injured by mines every year. In some areas, for example around the infamous Hamburger Hill, we were told it was almost a daily occurrence to hear a distant boom as an animal or person triggered a mine.

‘Agent Orange’ – the defoliant that the US used to take away the jungle cover and foodstock from the Viet Cong (VC) has left its legacy of dioxins still swilling round in the food system, and some barren lands where the forests are yet to recover.

But the Vietnamese are a forward looking race. The booms people are talking about nowadays are economic rather than explosive – the people we asked (admittedly mostly from the younger generation) said there was little resentment, it was history and time to move on. One young Frenchman married to a local girl, who was leading us on a bicycle tour, said that when he asked his new grandmother in law what she thought of the French, she had replied that the first time she encountered the French, they had killed her sister, her sister’s husband and their children. Not a good start to a relationship for this poor chap, but it seems they now get on fine. One of our enthusiastic fellow tour members rather tactlessly asked him: “Wouldn’t your wife’s parents have preferred her to marry someone Vietnamese rather than a Frenchman?” I hid my laughter in my napkin as Monsiuer squirmed and politely answered “No, No zey sink I am very nice.”

Anyway Vietnam now has a new invasion force – tourists, and we are still the advance party. From about 4 million today, the government predicts 9 million visitors to Vietnam by 2015 and 15 million by 2020. On our short journey between Danang and Hoi An, we saw literally ten miles of beach front development, giant resorts under construction behind high plywood walls emblazoned with big global brands: Hyatt, Hilton, Intercontinental etc. etc.

People are no longer saying “Go to Vietnam! It is so unspoiled.” because the truth is the tourism has begun to totally define those areas that tourists go to. When a local can earn a few dollars a day weaving carpets, shelling nuts, catching fish or building boats, but can see a similar profit in minutes by selling a few T-shirts, it is not hard to see why. The Vietnamese are known for their friendliness and hospitality, but now that the vast majority of people that tourists meet rely on them for their livelihoods, it creates an odd dynamic. The friendliness in these areas is often with vested interest, occasionally false and even missing. A single tourist purchase may pay for the day, perhaps even the week, so the disappointment and sometimes resentment we saw when a vendor had his big fish on the hook and then it got away was palpable. Also, like pretty much everywhere in the world, us tourists are ferried on organised tours to the same silk factories, ceramic markets, floating fishing communities, and tribal villages as everybody else. So after five to ten years of three tours a day traipsing around their workplace, many of the people you see and interact with are frankly quite bored of tourists (but at least they get a chance to try to sell something!)

Shops in the same business as each other are identical. They look the same, have identical products and use the same approach. I assume this is because each time someone does something different and successful, everyone else is copying it within the week. Even a row of twenty baguette sellers - evenly spaced every 10 meters alongside half a mile of motorway – all seemed to have an identical number of identical baguettes all stacked up in exactly the same way. In Ben Thanh market in Ho Chi Minh city, the opening refrain from every stall holder was “what you lookin’ for!?” as they grabbed me by the arm; Hoi An was “Buy something! Buy something!” then if you stopped: “where you from” and then “what hotel you staying in” - every time the same phrases. And the sales push was a bit much. Choosing the wool for a suit was made all the more difficult by the assistant holding up a different cloth in my face every 15 seconds. I assume this is learned from the American over-attentive shop assistant culture – but it’s well overdone. I just needed to be left alone, so ran away and hid, and sneaked back to have a browse myself when she wasn’t looking. My four new tailor-made suits I am very happy with (I just hope they (a) arrive home in the post, and (b) still fit after all the wonderful food we are eating).

Back to the tourist-trail, the point is that this slightly negative tourist interaction only really refers to the tourist destinations. It is only Vietnam’s most beautiful, historic or culturally significant areas that have been ‘spoiled’. You have to get away from them and sacrifice a bit of the geographic beauty for some beautiful cultural experience instead. You have to be a bit intrepid to see the real Vietnam, meet real people and discover what the country is really like.

The best way to do this is to set off on your own. A few people we met had done this, bought mopeds in Ho Chi Minh city or Hanoi and set off into the yonder to see the country. For us this was a bit extreme - neither of us ride motorbikes and Vietnam is not the place to start, the roads are lethal to the uninitiated (and besides my wife doesn’t have a driving licence). So we chose the middle road and jumped on the backs of someone else’s bikes and got driven around the less visited parts of Vietnam (a lot more detail on this in the next blog post). These guys from Vietnam’s ‘Easy Rider’ club took us to many of their frequent haunts, but we also visited places they had never been to before; and most of all we had the privilege of seeing so much of the countryside and roadside activity from our little perches behind the drivers.

And so much goes on at the roadside. In most of the villages and towns the agricultural land comes right up to the back door, so the front of the home is where everything takes place. The front garden seems to serve as crop drying space, nursery, kennel, chicken run, wedding venue, bike park, coffee shop, restaurant – you name it; and it usually extends a few metres into the road itself. You can’t tell a child in Vietnam to go and play in the road, as he probably already is. And all the homes are open to the street, no locked doors, people happily wander in and out of each others space. The Vietnamese have a much greater sense of community vs. sense of self than we do in the West, thus relationship and respect within the community is paramount. Elders and ancestors are revered and celebrated, with death-days more important than birthdays, and it is very important to bring the bodies of dead ancestors home so their spirit can rest. Many of the small rice paddy plots had a mausoleum built in the centre, so the dead relative could remain on his or her land, and watch protectively over the living. An important custom indeed for it to take up such valuable agricultural real estate.

They are a touchy-feely race, groups of girls or boys wandering down the street are more likely to be arm in arm, holding hands, or arms around the shoulders than not - the sort of behaviour that is reserved more usually for the front row of the scrum in our own culture.

Historically women do most of the work. In the older generation we saw many petite wrinkled old women, in their timeless conical hats, walking stoutly and assuredly under the weight of two huge baskets of produce balanced on a straining bamboo pole across one shoulder – but very few old men doing the same, and most of the labourers in the rice paddies seemed to still be women. Most were using hand tools and buffalo-drawn ploughs, some had paddle-wheel tractors which didn’t seem a whole lot more efficient than their bovine predecessors. And most processing of various agriculture produce was still predominately by hand, but with some mechanisation, old jury-rigged machines powered by truck engines, moving parts to snag a sleeve in everywhere you looked.

And they eat everything. Phuong, one of our Easy Riders, explained that a famine under Japanese occupation in 1942 had killed over 2 million people in Vietnam and therefore the people now eat whatever can be eaten and waste nothing. However, I reckon hundreds of years of Chinese occupation may have influenced this omni-diet too. One rural restaurant where we ate java deer and sparrow amongst other things, had run out of porcupine and you had to give a days notice for the bear. There is a big belief that you are what you eat. Apparently the local Viagra is a healthy portion of goats penis. And animals are fermented in wine to create ‘medicine’ e.g. eagle, snake, porcupine embryo, to treat various different ailments. There is literally a big jar of wine on a shelf with a whole eagle, feathers and all, fermenting away in it. For medicine, the gall bladder is also a very important organ. Somewhere near Hanoi, gall-bladder bile is surgically harvested from living bears as a hangover cure, virility drug and general pick-me-up.

Duck embryo is a big favourite with the kids – sadly we didn’t have any; snake is very expensive ($600 per kilo for king cobra) and we really didn’t fancy dog meat. Apparently, now that dog meat is more expensive than beef, you are much less likely to have your moo-meat surreptitiously swapped for woof-meat as used to happen a lot in the past.

And they have taken coffee from the French and made it their own, including roasting it with nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce) and finally adding thick, sweet condensed milk. My wife went nuts for it. They also have expensive weasel coffee which is shelled, ground and processed by feeding the raw beans to a weasel and then taking its poo and adding hot water! I am told the Laotians do the same with silk worms..

Generally, we loved the food in Vietnam, the tourist restaurants all had menus with pages and pages of dishes any of which would be produced in about three minutes and tasted brilliant – except the java deer which was a wee bit tough. And often we ate at the local street restaurants, serving just one specialty to us perched on children’s little tea-party plastic chairs and tables on the pavement, with pedestrians stepping round and over us, a few feet from the teeming, honking, swerving, massing, beeping, surging, manic city motorbike traffic.

Driving in Ho Chi Minh city was a mad and astonishing experience. I reckon driving a motorbike through Ho Chi Minh rush hour traffic should be on everyone’s ‘50 things to do before you die’ list. Probably near the end of the list though as there’s a good chance you won’t make it.

Imagine Piccadilly circus. Take away all the lane markings and no rules are enforced - except the speed limit, but as will become clear this makes it even worse. Most people drive on the right, but there are generally one or two bikes meandering through head on traffic as they merge onto the wrong side. At one point there was a steamroller driving the wrong way down the fast lane of a dual carriage way – I kid you not. No one looks before pulling out, but this doesn’t really matter because everyone else knows that, so is expecting it. Overtaking is done by liberal use of the horn, and on a basis of he who is biggest and he who has the loudest horn has right of way, so a bus will pull out to overtake into a swarm of oncoming motorbikes, hit the accelerator and the horn and the bikes will all serve off the road and let it through. But again, everyone knows this is how it works so it is usually fine. The problem, is some 'daft as daft can be' decision that buses, trucks and cars have a speed limit 10 kmph faster than bikes. As it is strictly enforced and as everyone is in a hurry (there is money to be made), the buses and trucks are forever in the middle of the road overtaking bikes and with horns blaring. And there is no mercy; in particular the buses, I swear they would kill their own grandmother (that is if she wasn’t carrying half a ton of bananas down to the market over her shoulder). Indicators are used as a warning – e.g. I am slowing down, or there’s a huge bus in the middle of the road, I am not sure if right or left mean anything different – if you actually want to let people know you are turning – it’s best to stick out your arm with a downwards scratching motion.

Sadly, we did see the aftermath of two or three motorbike accidents in our 1200 mile journey, but the system does seem to work about as well as our own heavily regimented, regulated roads. One other essential rule to learn is to just go, to go straight and to not hesitate (or show fear) whether you are a car, a bike or on foot. The locals just wander across the street almost as if the traffic isn’t there. I still have a mental image of three girls gently strolling arm in arm across the middle of a 5-way junction in Hanoi without a care in the world – motobikes screaming in different directions all around them. My best advice to Westerners is to treat it like walking on hot coals - look straight ahead, don’t think about it, and concentrate on the sanctuary of the pavement on the other side. Maybe a small prayer might be in order too.

2. Where we went and what we did:

Hanoi – Stayed in a lovely little hotel, wandered around the crowded city trying hard not to get run over by motorbikes. Both got haircuts and sampled both the street food, and the posh restaurants. Went to see the tiny house on stilts where Ho Chi Minh both lived and worked.

Halong Bay – 3 day cruise around the stunning limestone islands, including a lovely sunset kayak and a touristy but fun dinner party in a cave.

Hoi An – Pretty seaside town, but extremely touristy. Had suits made, ate very very well, did a cooking course and some cycling, lay on the beach and relaxed

Then came the highlight – The Easy Riders journey - see next blog

Ho Chi Minh City – went to the dentist, bought a new camera, and caught up on our big city needs

2 day Mekong Delta tour. Terrible tourist tour – I thought we’d learned our lesson – but lovely boat trip up the Mekong from Vietnamese border to Phnom Penh, very much made up for it.

3. Other bits and pieces on Vietnam

Treat their bikes like their grannies loading them up with all sorts of cargo. Things we saw on the back of a motorbike (or back front and sides in some cases): 50 feather dusters; 4 dead pigs, 1 live pig in a basket, 4 smiling kids, a family of 7!, 1 full length mirror, 1 bright green tree snake, 1 huge wide screen TV, 3 dogs in cages, 50 dead chickens, 50 live ducks, the entire contents of a small shop tied all round the bike like a snail’s shell with a small window for the drivers head to see out, about 10 big bags of cement, a 1000 litre water tank, and basically anything that can physically be tied, heaped, held and supported by a driver and a bike.

Uses we saw for bamboo: spear, construction beams, scaffolding, bear trap spikes, xylophone keys and sticks, roof tiles, carrying poles, boat building, basket weaving, joss sticks, pipes – not just Panda food then.

There’s only half as much school space as there are kids, so they share it by going to school either in the morning or the afternoon, 6 days a week. A melee of bikes waiting to pick up the kids at going home time.

We saw many western backpackers traveling with young kids – and the Vietnamese love to touch children – so be aware of this if you are bringing yours – and give them a full briefing.

Flooding often ruins one of the two or three crops per year

The Vietnamese squat rather than sit – sumo style - which means you get super-flexible wrinkled old grannies squatting with their heels under their bums and knees in tight (I am not sure my Granny could do that).

Saw one of the last remaining soft shelled giant turtle grumpily come to the surface of Hoan Kiem lake ('The Lake of the Returned Sword') in the centre of Hanoi. Apparently there are 3 known to be left. This one is somewhere between 300 and 800 years old, and it was either him or his Dad, who rose to the surface and with its mouth grabbed the magic sword from Lê Lợi which had brought him victory in his revolt against the Chinese Ming Dynasty in 1427, to return it to the turtle god. A sort of reverse ‘lady of the lake’ – but in a shell suit.

Government has protected forestation, but there is a lot of illegal harvesting. One trick is to saw the tree trunk half way through, just before a typhoon, and then pick up the wood after it has ‘naturally’ blown over in the storm.

Cyclists – the one getting a backie shares the peddles and the work – very cute to see

Little kids riding adult size ladies bikes, sitting on the base of the frame hands high above their heads on the handlebars

Girls sitting very upright on their bicycles, wearing the elegant long flowing white "Áo Dài" dresses, not much could look more elegant on a bicycle

Vietnam’s favourite song around TET and the Western New Year is Abba “Happy New Year”- we heard it everywhere we went

The houses are mostly very narrow and deep – a hangover of a land tax based on street front size. Also a good tax dodge was the basket boats. The French decided to tax boats, so the Vietnamese waterproofed their big baskets and went off fishing in them instead.

We loved the way whole leaves of herbs are put into soups (e.g. basil, mint, coriander, lemon grass and a sort of fishy-tasting spinach) instead of just a sprinkle here and there

Favourite expressions:

1. For what we call a Sugar Daddy: “Old buffalo eats young corn”

2. Wedding night: “night of the broken gall-bladder” (we’ll have to tell you that one in person)