Michael Batson

The usual tourist trail along the length of Vietnam takes in Hoi An and then Huế if going south to north. Most visitors with time go by road or rail while others, on tighter schedules, fly. My first trip to the country saw me travel the 1700kms by land from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi (Ha Noi) by bus and by train. Hoi An to Huế is just 120kms but the bus trip took in Marble Mountain and a lunch break so took five hours. The hotel in Hoi An arranged for their Huế establishment to pick me up from the bus, so for the first time I didn’t have to head off and find accommodation surrounded by touts. It offered the same facilities as Hoi An, though in reality was nowhere near as good value. There was no satellite TV, the hot water ran out on the second day, and it had no fridge or view and no balcony. They offered tours of the former De-militarised zone (DMZ) and were eager to sign me up as soon as I set foot in the place. I agreed to go the next day.

That afternoon on my first ever trip to Huế I went for a walk around the new town, the old town being across the Perfume River (Song Huong) around the massive citadel. The river is just 30kms long beginning in the Annamite Range that separates Vietnam from its neighbour, Laos. The river basin has the highest rainfall in Vietnam and gets its sobriquet from the autumn flowers from orchards upriver from Huế falling into the water, giving the river a perfume-like aroma. I needed to find a tailor, which is ironic, having just come from a town overflowing with them, I suddenly couldn’t find one for love nor money. A cyclo rider trailed me down the street, and of course knew where one was, which turned out to be some distance away. After paying for the tailor’s professional services, the cyclo offered me the tour for “whatever I wanted to give him”. I only wanted to go to the railway station to buy a train ticket to Hanoi, the prospect of 600-plus kms on Vietnamese roads was too much, and besides train travel has a motion all its own and is better than a bus any day.

I knew I would save money buying at the train station, but also knew from previous experience that whatever I saved on the cost of a ticket would be spent paying for the transport that got me to the station and back. The ticket cost me 260,000 VND (about 13USD) and the man at the ticket counter appeared delighted to help me, asking me to check the ticket and make sure all details were correct. Ticketing of train services in Vietnam is computerized, and this time I got my correct seat. Unfortunately, the cyclo rider wanted 180,000 VND for taking me about 3kms and when I showed him the cost of getting to Hanoi as being not much more than that, he insisted I pay what he demanded. Which is strange as for when we started the cost was “whatever I wanted to offer” I seem to recall. I refused and got out. After some discussion which irritated me I wound up paying him about half and feeling thoroughly ripped off in the process.

It was the first and last cyclo I ever hired. In Huế I considered them a nuisance, having a nostalgic appeal, but unwilling to enter into another opportunity to be conned into some tour and for some outrageous price, I avoided them. As far as I was concerned, the first one had done a disservice to the others. It’s amazing what can be carried in a cyclo, several crates of beer for a start, a large sideboard from someone’s living room for another. Later in Hanoi I saw a large television and its owner being transported in one direction and then several minutes later they returned with a new and improved model going back the other way, all the while negotiating frantic traffic at intersections.

I went for a long walk around the city. At the back of the football stadium, I bought an ice-block for 5000 VND and paid with 6000 VND. Instead of change they gave me another ice-block, which I thanked them for. Walking down the road a woman sat in a shop with her young child. As I was still eating the first confectionery, I offered the second to her – passing on the goodwill. I drank ice tea in a corner café and watched the traffic go by. Vietnamese traffic is noisy and entertaining and I find watching the people go by and how they go by, fascinating.

The tour of the DMZ began the next morning at 8 o’clock. I was joined by James and Sara. He told me he was from the north of England, which turned out to be Hull, but he had no accent. She was from Birmingham and had no accent either. Being graduates of Oxford and the London School of Economics respectively may have explained this. They were young and extremely thin. He was off to teach English in some Chinese industrial city for the British Council and she was off to work in Georgetown, Guyana for two years. So, on three motos we headed north out of Huế to the old border country that once separated Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the north) from the Republic of Vietnam (the south).

I was relieved to see my rider had attached an extra padded seat to the bike, one on top of the other, for added comfort, perhaps he had read my mind. We headed north on the main route towards Quang Tri, the capital of the province of the same name. During 1972, Quang Tri saw much heavy fighting as four divisions of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) poured across the DMZ and laid siege to the town in what became known as the Eastertide Offensive. During the next four months the town was almost completely obliterated by South Vietnamese artillery and massive bombardment by US bombers as they sought to remove the NVA forces.

Little remains of the town from that time, it having been largely rebuilt. On the outskirts of the town is the skeleton of a Catholic church, heavily pockmarked with bullet holes, the blast patterns of several rockets are clearly visible. The brick work can be seen, with the manufacturer’s name as the concrete has been stripped away through war damage and 30 years of exposure to the elements. Next door a family was repairing the roof of their house, set among a carefully tendered vegetable garden.

At Donh Ha we turned west on Route Nine towards the mountains, on the road to the Khe Sanh firebase, the scene of the largest single battle of the US-Vietnam war. To the south of the route is the site of Camp Carroll, named after a fallen US marine captain. Established in 1966, the US army positioned several large “Lords of the Battlefield” artillery pieces to shell Vietnamese targets, some as far away as Khe Sanh, over 30kms distant.

In late 1967, US intelligence detected large detachments of NVA regulars near Khe Sanh, leaving the US army commander, General Westmoreland, to presume they were planning another Dien Bien Phu, the decisive battle which saw the French vanquished in Vietnam, an entirely inaccurate analysis. The US president, Lyndon Johnson, became obsessed with “Din Bin Foo” as he famously referred to it, and in order to follow the battle he had a model of Khe Sanh plateau installed in the White House situation room. Westmoreland assembled a force of 5000 planes and helicopters and increased US forces at the firebase to 6000. He even ordered a feasibility study to consider use of tactical nuclear weapons at the site.

The NVA laid siege to Khe Sanh for 75 days beginning on 21 January 1968. The siege attracted worldwide media attention making the front pages of newspapers around the globe. During the next two months the US dropped 100,000 tons of bombs on the area adjacent to the Khe Sanh Combat Zone. The siege of Khe Sanh, which cost the lives of at least 10,000 NVA soldiers was merely a diversion tactic designed to draw US and South Vietnamese Army forces (ARVN) away from major population centres ahead of the Tet Offensive planned for the end of January 1968. After the siege, US forces trucked every piece of equipment away and burned or blew-up what they couldn’t carry, not wishing to leave anything for North Vietnamese propaganda to use. US policy decided that holding the position for which so many had died was no longer necessary.

At Cam Lo we turned north, our destination the National Cemetery at Truong Son. My rider had to stop for repairs at a roadside workshop in what proved to be a day of mishaps. I sat on a tyre rim as a youth Vietnamese whipped off the bike’s front wheel to administer some running repairs. The shop was a basic structure with a plastic tarpaulin covering a small dusty forecourt. Within minutes the job was complete and we set off again. We traveled down country roads lined with rubber trees in massed rows on both sides of the road. Groups of blue-uniformed rubber workers were having morning tea under the shade of a building next to three trucks used to transport the collected rubber in large silver tanks. French Indochina by the late 1920s, became the third largest rubber exporter after British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.Like the commercial rice economy, the rubber plantations ran on cheap, mainly ethnic Viet sweat. Twelve-hour days were common, pay was pitifully low and housing conditions miserable. Abuses were legion and death from exhaustion and mistreatment was common. “Men leave their corpses, women depart as ghosts.”

Just short of our destination we ran out of petrol. I was struck by the irony of the situation. For the first time since I had entered Vietnam there wasn’t another soul to be seen, we were completely alone. We pushed the bike to the top of the next rise. Carrying a motorcycle helmet and running along behind a motorbike under the hot Vietnamese sun is hard work. Eventually we could coast down the decline on the other side. One of the other riders returned and gave me a ride to the entrance to the cemetery, which sits on top of a small plateau. As you come up the drive there is a statue of a woman and a soldier, designed to acknowledge the role of women in Vietnam’s struggle for independence and unification.

The graves, thousands of them, are laid out according to geography, not where the soldiers died, but where they were born, in five zones, each subdivided in smaller zones. A busload of visiting Vietnamese were laying small wreaths and burning incense in the Hanoi section. On the road near this section is a large hexagonal remembrance monument with the names of many of those buried listed with their birthdates and the date they died. Some buried are among Vietnam’s soldiers missing in action, over 300,000 Vietnamese are still unaccounted for. The remains of soldiers interred here were originally buried near the spot where they were killed and their remains transferred here after 1975. One of the moto riders said to me the soldiers buried here all died young. I replied soldiers normally die young, wherever they come from.

After we left the cemetery we headed down several country roads towards the coast. Children came to the roadside to wave and say hello. Back on the main highway we turned north to cross the 17th parallel, the formal border designated at the 1954 Geneva Accords as the limits of the Republic of Vietnam (the South) and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the North), though it did not formally constitute an official border under the agreement. From 1954 until reunification in 1975, the Ben Hai River served as the demarcation line between the two nations. On either side of the river was an area five kilometers wide known as the DMZ. Ironically, as the Vietnam War intensified, it became one of the most militarized zones on Earth.

As we approached the bridge over the Ben Hai River, our bike developed a puncture in the rear tyre, it just wasn’t our day. My rider urged me to keep walking, while he took the bike into one of the houses along the roadside, which just happened to fix flat tyres. So there I was on the 17th parallel, carrying a motorcycle helmet, walking down the main road in Vietnam. It was the French who constructed the land transport links connecting north and south Vietnam, though the Vietnamese supplied the labour. The French came to call this stretch of National Route One from Huế to Quang-tri “la rue sans joie” or in English, “Street Without Joy” as Vietnamese nationalists constantly sought to disrupt colonial supplies and troop movements.

Vietnamese came out of their houses to witness this new sensation, tourist on the highway. “Buddha” they shouted, at least that’s what it sounded like. As I bear little resemblance to the great Lord Buddha, I can only assume they meant “Buda” the local brew, bottled and canned in Huế on the banks of the Perfume River, but unfortunately there was none to be had.

I crossed the motorway bridge, all 186m of it, much to the curiosity from passing motorists and accompanied by air horns from several trucks. On the other side, the north, I bought a small bottle of water and studied the old police station that had sat here for years during the conflict watching activities across the river. It stood at the northern end of the old bridge, still intact. Until 1967, when the US bombed the bridge, the northern half was painted red and southern half painted yellow, representing to colours of the respective halves of Vietnam. Nearby was an old pill box, partially buried in red clay, its thin gun slits giving it an altogether sinister appearance.

Lunch was fresh seafood at Cua Tung Beach near the mouth of the Ben Hai River. This is where the Vietnam’s last emperor, Boa Dai would holiday, when he wasn’t at his various other villas or in some European spa. Several Vietnamese holidaymakers were on the beach or lounging on deckchairs. Sara, one of my tourist companions that day was an economist, who after three years in her job in London had decided enough was enough and was off to South America. She was impressed I knew Georgetown was the Guyana’s capital, well they play cricket there, even so, none of her friends had known where it was. Most of Guyana’s 800,000 or so population live in and around Georgetown, as does the small ex-pat community, many of them aid workers.

James and Sara had only a few days in Vietnam and had flown north to Danang (or Da Nang) from HCMC to save time. We briefly discussed Cambodia and they asked me what it was like. I said it was much poorer than Vietnam and that the country had many problems most of which would not be solved in the near future. Handicapped by poverty and disease, and the residue of years of conflict, Cambodia was not bouncing back in the way Vietnam was, not least because of its government, which is inept and corrupt. Aid is not tied to any improvements in the governmental systems in the country, so rather than develop social and economic infrastructure, Cambodia’s politicians sit back, collect the aid packages and let the NGOs fill in the void.

Sara explained a current school of thinking among donors was not to “interfere” in the cultural integrity of sovereign states when providing aid, but I failed to understand how then corruption and nepotism would be reversed, for this just perpetuated the status quo in countries like Cambodia. It was a conversation that failed to reach any conclusion. Anyway lunch was expensive and not included in the price of the tour, a nice earner for the restaurants.

According to the moto rider, the tunnels at Vinh Moc took 200 workers two years to complete and extend for 40kms to a depth of 23m. In 1966, US forces began massive bombing and artillery attacks of North Vietnam, and the people of Quang Tri Province and Vinh Moc village found themselves living in the most bombed and shelled places in the world. The moto rider also told me it took either seven bombs or seven tons of US bombs to kill one Vietnamese, I’m unsure which.

National Liberation Front of South Vietnam forces, the NLF, needed to maintain supply lines in the area and encouraged the villagers to stay. The NLF, which the communists organised at the end of 1960 formed from the nucleus of Vietminh veterans, Diem’s publicists gave it a pejorative label the Vietcong, or Vietnamese communists, and the name stuck. In order to supply the observation post on Con Co Island, just off the coast, Vinh Moc moved underground for protection from the US onslaught. Other villages built tunnel networks in and around the DMZ though none were as elaborate as those found at Vinh Moc. The tunnels at Vinh Moc remain pretty much as they were, though some of the entrances have been boarded up others are still visible in the sand dunes at the local beach.

In the car park near the ticket office a Vietnamese man approached me and said he had seen me at Son My. I said hello, though failed to recognize him as the man who had quizzed me about my note taking, something I only realised later in the afternoon. I did remember him saying he was making his way north and I regretted not taking the time to talk to him more.

The museum at Vinh Moc is approached along paths that run through the trees. Everywhere there are reminders of the war. The ground is pitted with bomb craters. Spent shells and unexploded ordnance litters the garden near the entrance to the tunnels and museum. Inside the small museum are the words “Ton Tai Hay Khong Ton Tai”, “To Be Or Not To Be” is the English translation. Photos line the walls and there is a large model of the tunnels’ infrastructure in a display cabinet. There’s a wall chart of the construction plans and a photo of the Vinh Linh Special area team leaders group, sitting as if for a team photo and seemingly taken after the war, all smiles.

One of photos carries the title “Heaven Devastated” showing the fields on both sides of the river heavily littered with bomb craters. There are pictures of villagers filling-in bomb craters in rice fields with hand-held implements as obviously they still had to eat somehow. Some 17 babies were born underground during the war in the tunnel nurseries. There’s a photo of the well, or one of them, and meetings between villagers held in the common rooms underground. They watched films and listened to music and an operating theatre was built to treat the wounded. Cabinets displayed the tunneling implements and weapons of the Viet Cong from the period. There was picture of a captured US airman with several Viet Cong looking somewhat demoralized. During the day and sometimes at night villagers would carry supplies across the fields through a series of trenches carefully concealed from the air. The entrance to the tunnel is narrow and dark and unfortunately, being claustrophobic, I chose to forgo my visit. So I went for a swim instead at the white sand beach below one of the camouflaged exits to the old tunnel system while a woman walked behind a small herd of cows along the path above.

The Vietnamese practice of overtaking on the inside often squeezed between a truck and crash barrier on small motorcycles does not fill me with confidence I’m afraid. What if something goes wrong? They also have the habit of hesitating half-way through the manoeuvre so momentarily you are suspended centimetres from both. When the back tyre went flat for the second time on the way back to Huế, we were fortunately on open road. The bike quickly becomes unstable and difficult to control. The others continued while we pushed the bike to a shop fitting truck tyres.

A young Vietnamese in shorts and flip-flops set about replacing the worn inter-tube with a new one. This being a truck shop all the tools were too large so he hopped on a bike and rode down the highway to get some the right size. The family’s living room was above the tyre bay. Nearby sat an infant girl with either her grandmother or great grandmother, as there was another woman older than the boy but younger than the older woman also nearby. Perhaps four generations of the family lived here. The infant pointed in my direction and called out something that caused the two women to laugh.

Soon the young man was back. A woman, I could not see her but she was harvesting something from the bamboo grove next door, would move around in the undergrowth, distracting me. It took an hour to fix the bike and replace the inner tube with a new one – hopefully this would get us back to Huế. My rider had no money so asked me to pay 50,000 VND for the repairs. We got back to the hotel at seven o’clock at which point they asked me to pay for the tour, US$15 in VND for which I paid at the highest rate and was given change at a different and lower rate, the proverbial tourist tax. Immediately they asked if I wanted to go on a city tour the following day, after several days sitting on motorcycles I declined, which didn’t stop one of them asking each and every time they saw me. The next day I just wanted to walk at my own pace and in my own time around town.

Crossing the Trang Tien Bridge over the Perfume River I saw some men diving off narrow boats with outboards for what looked like scrap metal, war junk. One of them saw me watching and motioned I join them, but as I had my bag with me and it’s at least 20m to the waterline I laughed and declined. The narrow entrances into the old city allow for no footpaths, there’s no room, so you’re on the road with the traffic. Just inside the Thoung Tu Gate is the museum complex containing the Fine Arts, Natural History, Military and General museums. They were all closed, I’d come on the wrong day. Never mind. There’s so much to do and see in Huế. At just over 600kms from Hanoi, its about two-thirds of the way along the route between Vietnam’s two biggest cities and you cannot beat a place with so much history sitting as it does on a river of perfume.