SAIGON
Linda and I got to Vietnam on Japan Airlines. A luxury even if it was economy class. Great aircraft. Pretty, gracious flight attendants and good food, especially for an airplane! I’m 65, and as we changed planes in Tokyo I took my first-ever footsteps on Asian soil. There was a great crowd at customs in Saigon.
In our taxi to the hotel Linda asked the driver about traffic in the city and he responded lyrically, saying “the flowers are blossoming all year long.”
Saigon is a thick bustling metropolis. This is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam where billboards of communist propaganda, outlined in red, contrast with the many more commercial signs. Motor scooters are the way people get around, including Linda’s cousin who came to greet us at the hotel. We had to run some errands the first day and I rode on the back of a scooter taxi twice, hanging on while the drivers wove a quick path through and around the traffic. It was fun. A bit a thrill ride, though the first driver gave me a helmet way too small for my huge American head. It ended up just hanging from my neck, giving no protection.
We had dinner with her cousin Tom (sp?) and his family that night. He lived in a modest apartment in Saigon. The front door emptied into an alley, and the flat was occupied by him and his wife, two grandmas and their 19 year old son. Some neighborhood kids were playing badminton in the street… they had a birdie, two racquets but no net. The son was studying robotics in college. A math equation he’d written on the wall long ago in black marker was still there, on an old coat of paint. Fook (sp?) was a smart kid who spoke good English and followed NBA basketball. He hoped he could study and live in the U.S. some day. I hope he can too. Fook has his own motorbike and I rode with him one time to the mall.
Something I observed about traffic in Vietnam is how it is both chaotic and well-regulated. Everybody looks and avoids other vehicles. They’re a lot like pedestrians sharing a sidewalk. I also noticed a lack of road rage. Sure, people lay on their horns but it’s communication, not a display of anger. And as a pedestrian you have to learn this and just cross the street at a zebra stripe. Don’t worry. They’ll stop for you. Though most people ride motorbikes, parking is a problem. Most bikes are parked on the sidewalk, which makes walking on it difficult.
SAPA
We came to Sapa after an early morning flight to Hanoi and a five hour bus ride to the furthest point North in Vietnam. Sapa is in a mountainous region with breathtaking views and many terraced farm fields. It is home to the Hmong ethnic community that assisted the U.S. in the Vietnam war effort. Cat-cat Village near a waterfall is a tourist destination where young women wear Hmong dresses and have their pictures taken. The Hmong are poor. They come downtown at night to sell native garments. I saw girls barely older than toddlers in Hmong outfits dancing for tourists. Some, the same age, carry infants on their backs, looking for handouts.
The night before we left, Linda and I got a back and foot massage, leaving my chronically sore feet quite free of pain. Like so many Vietnamese women, the girls who gave the massage were very beautiful.
HANOI
In Hanoi, we stayed in a hotel near the city center and I walked with a small group at night to an ice cream shop. Hanoi looked wealthy, compared to Saigon. I’m told a majority of its 12 million residents have a family car. Being the capital, in the north, it had many more displays of government propaganda and also a large military presence. The highlight of our visit was seeing Ho Chi Minh in the flesh.
In the tradition of Vladimir Lenin they preserved him, and put him on display. We joined a long line of people that led to a one-man mausoleum where Uncle Ho lay in state, guarded by four motionless soldiers standing with rifles, clothed in dress white uniforms. Vietnamese are mostly short people but all of these guys were over six feet tall.
HA LONG BAY
Ha Long Bay is an amazing natural beauty. It’s a multitude of tall rocky islands in a bay leading to the Pacific Ocean and it’s very well known, though not on the list of the Seven Wonders of the World contrary to some claims I heard. Of course a career in journalism has taught me that those lists people come up with are mostly bullshit. This world has a lot more wonders than seven.
The night before, we saw a performance of traditional music and water puppetry. It was fantastic! Puppets emerge from a shallow pool on the stage and, with the voice of an actor, tell simple comic stories of village life, starring people, snakes, ducks and foxes. The music is very rhythmic and expressive, a little like a distant foreign cousin of Rhythm and Blues, played on traditional Asian instruments.
The next day we did a boat tour of a few of the islands in Ha Long Bay, all of them ruggedly beautiful and uninhabitable. After that we traveled to Ninh Binh, a little ways south of Hanoi. We drove through a flat, low plain of river deltas. It was carpeted with farm fields and dotted with farm workers in cone hats as you peered over the distance.
A note about dining on Vietnam’s splendid cuisine. I’m thinking about giving up on chopsticks. A long career of using a computer mouse has given me a repetitive stress injury in my right hand, which makes my hand shake when held in certain positions… like holding chopsticks.
I’m bad with chopsticks anyway, being a white man and I frankly consider a knife and fork to be superior technology. I still use chopsticks sometimes but I always ask for a fork. One problem is on our tours they serve us food, family style. And that means I have to reach across the table, and fellow diners, to serve myself stuff. It’s hard and sometimes embarrassing when my hands shake and I cannot make those sticks work!
Some tour demographics: Linda and I are the oldest couple in the group, making me the oldest one of all. About half of our group were young adults from Montreal, Canada, who were fluent in English and spoke to each other in French. Most were also from Vietnamese families and were TRI-lingual, and a lot better with chopsticks than me. The Northern Vietnam tour group was a very fun group.
TRANG AN & HANOI
Trang An was the next tour destination and it’s a landscape of lakes, tunnels and rugged bluffs that we explored in canoes, paddled by locals. I did some paddling also, which might have helped our canoe captain. Not sure. I did it because I find it hard to sit still.
I shared a canoe with Pervis and Teen, a Canadian couple. He’s from Mississippi. She’s from Vietnam. Teen was funny, providing a constant narrative of translation for her English-speaking husband. This time she was translator AND tour guide. In her heavily accented English she told us questionable stories about Chinese military invasions, and how the Vietnamese would retreat through tunnels before the water rose, which would subsequently drown the invading Chinese forces.
Whatever.
Trang An, BTW, is where they shot the movie King Kong, Skull Island. The movie starred Samuel L. Jackson, the actor Pervis described as the “Motherfucker” guy. They used computer graphics to show King Kong scaling the rocky cliffs in the area. Actually I’ll have to watch it. Never have.
We returned to Hanoi for our flight back to Saigon and spent another evening on the busy streets. The main attraction: Seeing a heavy rail train slowly wind through a dense commercial district filled with coffee shops. As the train approached we’d be shooed off the rails so the train could roll by. People lined the tracks holding their iPhones, making videos of the train as people on the train would point their iPhones out the windows, making videos of the people outside who were filming them.
DA NANG 
Wasn’t there a TV show a long time ago called China Beach? About the Vietnam War? Well, China Beach is in Da Nang and that was our first destination when we toured Central Vietnam. The central region had just been battered by cyclones that caused terrible flooding and killed 100 people, by one account. When we got there the water had receded and some damage was repaired. It did rain when we got there but it was not torrential and our tour went on. We started at a place with a bunch of religious statues and shrines, including what looked like a five story tall female Buddha.
Most of all, they had wild monkeys! I’d never seen monkeys anywhere but a zoo and here they were, adults and small ones running around, climbing the trees and hassling the humans. A couple of juveniles jumped on me and started climbing up my back before I swatted them off. A demonstrative Asian American family was there and the kids were terrified of them. Oh well. As far as I could see, they were harmless, though they will steal your stuff if they see something they like, such as jewelry or glasses, or so I’ve been told.
HUE 
That night we saw a performance of traditional music on a riverboat, and Linda and I ended up having a rickshaw ride through the streets of Hue, though I wasn’t sure where we were headed or when it would end. This is what happens when you’re part of a tour and you don’t speak the language. Stuff is planned by others and you don’t know what they’re saying. Linda, BTW, said the rickshaw drivers were calling me “The Frenchman,” because I was white and foreign. None of the other people on my tour lived in Vietnam but they all came from Vietnamese families and spoke, or at least understood the language.
If I’d been on my own, of course, I would have been forced to communicate with the locals in some way. It’s easier these days than in the past, thanks to Google Translate. Just dictate a message in English into yer phone and it’s immediately translated into Vietnamese, which you can show to the person yer trying to talk to.
The next day our visit to the Golden Bridge atop a mountain was nothing to speak of. The weather was cold and so foggy you really couldn’t see anything, and there were throngs of tourists. Best forgotten. 
That night we went to the river in Hoi An, famous for its floating lanterns and it was very pretty, seeing many colored lanterns on boats, slowly moving and bobbing. I’d seen this in a video before, and the dark and tranquil scene I imagined was in reality a party scene with loud music prevailing along the riverbanks. I spent 50K dong on a floating candle that I pushed into the river current with a stick.
BACK TO SAIGON & GOING HOME
My last night in Vietnam was in Saigon – best I can tell, still nobody calls it Ho Chi Minh City. Linda and I went to the “Walking Street” in District One. Earlier that day Linda and I found her a rooming house in District One, the most central and fashionable part of Saigon, where Linda could spend the month of December. In the District, near the Mekong River, hotels like the Saigon Hilton house wealthy tourists at prices you expect to pay for American hotels, but which seem outrageous by local standards.
Getting back to the Walking Street, it was a couple of blocks flooded with flashing neon lights that made you think you were in Vegas. The streets weren’t blocked to traffic but pedestrians took it over at night. Hucksters approach you with sales pitches in English, selling merch or trying to lure you into a club or restaurant. Sexy girls in tight skirts danced to music on make-shift stages. If you wanted to get laid in Saigon, this was probably a good place to go. Linda and I found a restaurant where we could sit outside and have a good view of the parade. I told her this scene wasn’t quite what I expected. She told me Hanoi was stuck up but in Saigon people knew how to cut loose.
I did give in to one sales pitch. For 100K dong I bought a green ballcap with a red star on the front. It’s the communist symbol you see on the country’s flag and you see it everywhere, even though it seems somehow distant from the people and culture of Saigon. You had a feeling businesses put up the flag, usually along with a hammer and sickle flag, to keep the government off their backs, not because it means much to them. All countries have contradictions and Vietnam is no exception. I’m not sure what to do with that hat, though I’ll probably give it to Nicholas. For some reason I just wanted to buy one.
I don’t know the secrets of Vietnam, though it does have a north-south division, dating back to the war. Not so different in the US maybe, where we’re also divided between North and South. Now the woman in my life – maybe my life partner – is as Vietnamese as she is American, and maybe more so. So I’m tied to a country that I first knew as nothing more than a strange place for America to fight a war. I’ll be back, I think, and on my way to learning what it means to me.
Postscript: After two weeks of being very careful not to consume food or liquids washed in or made from tap water, I blew it at the last minute. At the Saigon airport I ordered a smoothie. A smoothie! I don’t even like smoothies!! But I had one that was made with ice, and on the second leg of my China Airlines flight, from Taipei to LA, I had diarrhea and was shitting my brains out across the Pacific Ocean. Damned good thing I had an aisle seat, because I needed the bathroom a lot.
CUL-DE-SAC 