Journey to the Imperial City

Travels in Vietnam, Part 2

Part One: Travels in Vietnam
Part Three: ‘I say the Americans really won the war’

Vietnam seems like a normal country with a normal – ie liberal - economy. There are also hammer and sickle buntings everywhere, communist cartoons on walls celebrating the triumph of Marxism, and the occasional mural by one of Hanoi’s few Stalinist buildings.

This seems obviously incongruous with streets lined with clothes shops selling everything from high quality local fabrics to the tourism tat found almost everywhere, much of it marketing communism as an edgy fashion statement to western travellers. People everywhere are selling things, and I was tickled to find a man cheerfully trying to flog vapes to our 10-year-old. Worth a try, I suppose.

The country is famous for its food – the cuisine is saltier in the north and spicier in the south, a guide told us, although I can’t pretend to know much about the food except that I liked everything that didn’t actually poison me. Vietnam is also a big coffee culture, and Hanoi has everything from bog-standard coffee shacks where a bunch of old guys stoop while it’s ladled out – everyone smoking, obviously – to hipster places where westerners on laptops take work calls and order egg coffee, the big local thing.

Tourism in Vietnam increased ten-fold in the first two decades of the century, before taking a huge hit with Covid from which it has yet to fully recover. Hanoi is especially popular from September to April, when the muggy heat is more bearable, and visitors are so numerous that Train Street, where a railway line goes through a densely-inhabited alley, has signs warning them to avoid over-congregating. (Although I feel that getting knocked down trying to photograph this to post for the Traditionalist Urbanism Twitter crowd would be a very on-brand death for me.)

Among the country’s most popular spots is Halong bay, a jewel that has become an example of the mass tourism phenomenon that horrifies the adventurous and concerns environmentalists, but which for tourists like us offers something quite special. Foreign travel also brings in a lot of money to the locals, and on board our boat we were served a dish called the Obamam, named after the US president who visited the country in 2016, a trip which helped boost the country’s tourism industry.

We met our coach party by Hanoi’s central lake, which in the early morning and evening is filled with people stretching, and close to where the previous evening we’d seen a bunch of poodles in cages outside a restaurant (which I tried not to dwell on too much).

After being taken around Hanoi by a man called Wind, our guide in Halong Bay was called ‘Sea’. Sea was from the south, and commented at length on the differences between the two regions, their cuisine and their characteristics. He was warm and likeable, and in the evening showed our children how to fish - although I noted with some sadness the rubbish in the sea.

On the deck we watched the lights come on in the other pleasure boats as the sun went down. While I read Graham Greene in the fading light, I eavesdropped on a group of young English lads bantering: they were listing all the drugs they’d taken and asking each other what was the maximum age for a woman they’d sleep with (I think 60 was the consensus).

In the morning we visited Ti Top Island, which looks like the kind of place Mr Scaramanga would set up home. Named after cosmonaut Gherman Titov, it features a beachside statue of the Russian, the first man to photograph the earth, and who visited North Vietnam in 1962.

The island is famous for its caves, accessed via a modest hike which starts with a climb up a hill for the Instagram-perfect shot. One of my daughters was already sick by this stage, with some food poisoning from Hanoi - you can’t really say you’ve really been to south-east Asia without contracting some hideous bacterial infection, and this wouldn’t even be her last. At the top of the mountain she vomited into the bushes below as some chubby Aussie boomers beside her took photos of the gorgeous bay, oblivious. There is a misanthropic tendency in many to despise mass tourism for its impact on the local culture and the lack of genuine insight gained by the visitor; while environmental concerns are real, I feel that this sort of abundance is positive, and that most people would rather their countries were wealthy rather than ‘unspoilt’. Sure, tourists are annoying, and later on the walk, I heard an exasperated local sales assistant arguing with Indians, snapping at them furiously: ‘Government shop! No haggle!’

Vietnam is long and slender, over a thousand miles from north to south, and at its narrowest point just 31 miles from sea to border. The Vietnamese originated in this northern region, slowly making their way south and displacing both Cambodians and the Montagnards or Highlanders, mountain-dwelling indigenous people who call themselves đồng bào. During his time in the war, my father spent much time with the Montagnards, whose lifestyle was far more threatened by Vietnam’s communists than by European colonialists, and who often hated the Vietnamese intensely (he had to protect a Vietnamese taxi driver at one point from a furious mob of highalnders). Even the area around Saigon was once Cambodian, until Vietnamised in the 17^th century, and the two people have a history of enmity that long predates the 1970s, when Cambodia’s insane communist regime whipped up racial hatred against the lighter-skinned Viet.

After first returning to Hanoi, our next stage would involve a night train south. Dad had taken the same route, forty years earlier, and recalled the experience of using the ‘Reunification Train’ with horror: ‘It had to be the world’s worst and poorest train, unlit, unheated, filthy and decrepit,’ he wrote: ‘passengers squatted on the floor with the children, belongings and livestock. The carriages gave off rancid smells of sweat and effluent.’

The ‘reunification’ message was optimistic communist branding - just as Tito’s Yugoslavia had the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity linking Zagreb and Belgrade - and it went largely ignored by southerners, he noted, who barely used the train and took out their frustration and anger at the visitors from the north. ‘Soon after crossing into the old South Vietnam, at Đông Hà, a place I remembered from 1966, the first stone slammed heavily into our carriage – clang – and looking out I saw the scowling face of the youth who had thrown it.’

An hour later, and his train came to the province of Quang Tri and the start of the Street Without Joy, or Highway of Horrors, a notorious stretch where many people, including some of dad’s friends, were killed in the area of heaviest fighting. Visiting again after the war, many locals mistook him for a Russian, whom they despised and nicknamed ‘Yankees without dollars’.

The train today is somewhat grimy, although it’s obviously a more recent rolling stock than dad had endured. It wasn’t quite the Caledonian Sleeper, and smelled rather like the old British Rail trains of the 1980s, but we all felt a sense of excitement as we tootled out of the suburbs, edging past the moped riders on the road beside us.

Foolishly, we had booked five beds in a six-bed berth, rather than paying for the extra bunk, and were woken up at 1AM by the charmless guards barking demands for our tickets, who first tried to kick us out before accepting our reservations, and then pushed a 30-something man into the carriage. My son started crying, worried the stranger would kill us. The man lay down quietly on the bottom bunk, looking at his phone, a rather awkward scene, before departing in the early hours. Before he left, he asked my wife whether we were Russian - Yankees without dollars.

Dawn was just about upon us when we arrived in Đông Hà, where no one threw stones at us, and took a taxi to Phong Nha. The centre of the country and the most battle-scared, it is also among the most Catholic, and dad recalled here that ‘the sight of a gutted church brought home more starkly than ever the grossness of the American bombing.’

Phong Nha is essentially a road with hostels and modest restaurants on either side, many decked out with crucifixes and statues of Christ and the Virgin; as we had arrived at Easter, the main street was entirely lined with Vatican flags.

Our hostel had our names in chalk outside, as it does for every guest, and through a courtyard one finds oneself on a spot overlooking a river and verdant forest beyond - not a bad spot to have breakfast. The fridge was open to everyone on the assumption they’d be honest, and even the owner’s laptop was left lying around, as was his cute toddler who ran about and insisted our children play with him.

Most of the other travellers were British, German or French, usually couples or women in pairs or alone, able to stay in the town for just 6 euros a night. Some were on long travelling excursions lasting months, while there were also some older couples whose kids had left home.

There are children everywhere, either playing or sleeping (in restaurants, you may find a child fast asleep outside the toilets). They were even playing football in the middle of the street, with sandals for goalposts, despite the constant movement of scooters and cars; it made me feel uneasy about the way we coddle our children in Britain. The local boys seemed to idolise our son, and whenever he walked past tried to get the young westerner’s attention.

The area is famous for its caves, including Son Doong, the world’s largest. The owner of our hostel gave us a lift to a tour we’d booked, and along the way explained that his brother was a priest in New Zealand. As he drove, I noted a man asleep on a water buffalo in a field; I guess you just grab the chance when you can.

During our jungle trek, we passed by one big cave filled with leftover from the Viet Cong, including discarded shells and boots; there were also bomb craters, which had been cleared of ordinance by Norwegians volunteers in the 1980s. We had lunch in a clearing, making our own spring rolls, after a swim in a lagoon.

We then donned life jackets and headed deep into one flooded cave, swimming in the luxuriously cold water and, turning off our lamps, appreciating the pitch black and the sound of bats. I couldn’t help think about all those boys who got stuck in a cave in Thailand, which I remember reading and thinking ‘I will never in a million years do that’.

The next stop was Hoi An, where relative to the rest of the trip, our $50 a night hotel - the Ancient House Resort and Spa - was like the White Lotus. Again it was full of our hereditary frenemy, the French, who seem to be everywhere. My father found them ‘conspicuous’ in Saigon’s Majesty hotel even in 1990, noting that ‘The French… unlike the English do not suffer from guilt about their colonial past’.

Hoi An is very tourism-orientated, feeling very much like a resort, although across the road from our hotel was another of the austere government buildings with hammer and sickle murals outside, from which a man was busy shouting something from a loudspeaker, presumably something communism-related.

The centre of town is a taxi ride away, although the hotel will let you borrow a bike and they won’t get stolen, and no doubt deserves its UNESCO status; framed by the picturesque Japanese Bridge with its parade of Chinese lanterns, the riverside is lined with restaurants, Irish pubs doing karaoke, and little meat kiosks selling skewered frogs, various animal intensities and squid, one enticingly called ‘BBQ Fucking Good’. Hawkers struck up conversations and, when identifying our nationality, wanted to talk about the Premier League (curiously, Man United shirts seem to far outnumber any other in Vietnam).

We looked around for places to eat and found an outdoor kitchen with some plastic chairs outside which, in retrospect, looked like it might have had rather dubious hygiene standards. The next morning, my younger daughter was throwing up all over the bathroom, while next door the shrieking man on the loudspeaker started up again.

It’s a horrible feeling when your children are sick on holiday, even worse when it’s in a far off, developing country, and it’s very hot and you wonder if you’ll have to visit a hospital because they’d eaten some prawns washed in a toilet. It was at this point I’d really wished we’d gone to France, or even the ferry to Dún Laoghaire. Both my daughters spent the day vomiting, white as a sheet, while the screaming next door continued unabated, presumably about capitalist running dogs and the like.

At the pharmacy across the road, the old woman in charge was around the back having a nap; I could have just taken anything, including the drugs in a dispensary left unlocked, or all the cigarettes on the shelf – which in Vietnam are sold in pharmacies. I was brought to mind Lee Yuan Kew’s reflection on seeing an honesty box in the middle of London: ‘this is a civilised country’.

Everyone was fine… eventually. But, as someone once said, it’s always best to avoid prawns in any country below a certain UN Human Development Index rating, just as one should always avoid spirits in any country which doesn’t use the Latin alphabet.

We took a taxi to Hue, which was unbearably hot and I spent my time dodging between shadows like I was avoiding sniper fire. The downtown area looked very prosperous, all modern shops with glass fronts; we also saw monks for the first time.

The Imperial Palace is imposing, flanked by a square fortress and gigantic in scale. Inside the complex, red and gold lined corridors lead visitors beside huge courtyards and gardens designed to provide space enough for all the royal concubines. One king here apparently had 800, which seems excessive.

In 1802 Nguyễn Ánh, a lord from this region, took control of the country after a century of division, proclaiming himself Emperor Gia Long. He moved the capital from Hanoi to Hue, which better reflected the country’s new centre of gravity, and modelled his fortress and palace on Beijing’s Forbidden City. Work began on the Imperial City the following year, but it wouldn’t be long before Vietnam found itself rather as an imperial subject - not, as has traditionally been the case, at the hands of China but a new menace from far away.

Dad wrote that: ‘Hue has always been xenophobic; not without reason. It was a hotbed of rebellion against the Chinese occupation. As Vietnam’s capital in the nineteenth century, Hue led the resistance to French encroachment, and it was here that one of the Catholic missionaries met his death on the scaffold. When the French finally conquered Hue in 1885, they indulged in an orgy of killing and looting… They burned the Vietnamese imperial library, with its ancient scrolls and manuscripts, and stole from the palace everything down to the toothpicks and mosquito nets.’

Our guide here had much to say about the French and their rule, as well as the Chinese, pointing towards the sea and a disputed island chain the Chinese still occupied; but it’s hard to discern whether the tone of these historical accounts of wrongdoing are genuinely bitter or merely factual. Notably, he had nothing bad to say about the Americans.

Sadly, much of the palace was destroyed in fighting during a six-week battle between the French and communist rebels in 1947. The French had also built a European-style palace full of gold furniture: yellow on the outside, it looks like a version of Versailles painted in the style of John Lennon’s Rolls Royce. I found the garishness almost irritating, but I appreciate that might be unfair on the palace and the heat was getting to me.

Dad recalled the intense summers here, and how people went down to the sampans to get the benefit of the river breeze. The climate obviously got to many people. He described on one occasion travelling by a boat from Danang to Hue with American troops in a scene which feels very Apocalypse Now (not a coincidence, as he believed that Francis Ford Coppola had read some of his accounts). ‘It was a squat, flat-bottomed, ugly vessel that did not inspire confidence. Nor did its crew. Except for the worried Negro captain, myself and [Australian journalist] Murray Sayle… there was not a sober man on board when we left Danang beach in the evening. Indeed, some of the crew had arrived so drunk that they could scarcely board at all.’ Many were also high.’

They came across a Buddhist festival: ‘“The fishermen are not hostile,” I was told by one of the crew who had come on deck for air to relieve his hangover, but shortly afterwards he and another sailor went to the lengths of manning one of the heavy machine-guns with which the vessel was armed. The first sailor took aim at a group of old women plodding along the northern bank and muttered a “rat-a-tat-tat” from behind his teeth.’

Returning to the city many years later, he wrote: ‘The melancholy from which I had always suffered in Hue took hold of me once again on this visit. After the apprehension and suffering of the war years, most of the Hue people I knew were killed, imprisoned or driven abroad… Even though Hue was said to have the most Stalinist Community Party in South Vietnam, the populace did not conceal their enmity to the system.’ Much later, on a post-war trip, he spotted some local students doing arms drill; again, they took him for a Russian and yelled ‘goodbye’ in a hostile way.

Our next stop was Danang, where we would take an internal flight to Saigon, and I could not help dwell on another of dad’s terrifying air journeys: ‘During a flight to Danang on a C130 troop plane the pressurisation failed and most of the young GIs collapsed or fainted from lack of oxygen, and I too felt weak, when Murray [Sayle] came up, smoking a big cigar, and asked what was wrong with all these fellows.

‘Ten minutes later I was aboard a much bigger helicopter which set off in a westward direction as a half-witted officer announced that he could promise us a “real good fire-fight” and added that eight American helicopters had been shot down that day round the place to which we were going.’

Our journey with VietJet, it’s safe to say, compared favourably to this. We were off to the city which dad loved more than any other, and which is at the heart of Vietnam’s economic miracle.