Next Stop is Vietnam

"1 – 2  – 3
What are we fighting for?
You know, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam…."

I have rarely been as curious and expectant about a country as I was crossing into Vietnam. For which I blame Hollywood - I can't believe how much I knew about the place through music, movies, books, TV and the news of my childhood. The Doors, Hanoi Jane, CCR, Guthrie, Platoon, Oliver Stone, Baez, Guthrie (see above),Kubrick, Coppola, Coming Home, the DMZ, Alice, the Rockpile, My Lai, China Beach - Vietnam's recent history is so weirdly familiar to this Saskatchewn farmgirl. And the songs and scenes kept following me all the way of the nine weeks it took Chris and I to work our way across the country, from top to bottom.

Then there's the incredible influence of all those cool draft dodgers who ended up so completely imbibing Canadian culture (and particularly my Art Department at University). with an anti-war, anti-authority, free-living, psychedelic kind of vibe that is still percolating around. Thank you, Sam the Record Man, Waffle Party founders and gay marriage advocates that crossed North instead of fighting, I salute you.

So, crossing the Chinese-Vietnamese border was fraught with big expectations for me. And it was also, for me, the biggest transition at a border I have seen for ages!

Borders are usually bogus, really. In an artifical construct of nationhood, defined by invisible lines drawn in the sand, you pass over a line, and things somehow change, just on the other side. Of course, really, they rarely actually do.

But this time, I thought it was radical. Maybe it is not the best idea of try to compare China and Vietnam, but of course we couldn't avoid it, crossing that border. One side, frenetic buzzy, loud, chaotic, bustling China. The other, a desolate wasteland with streets that are suddenly wide, dusty….and empty. Vietnamese women in those iconic palm hats, bringing in impossible loads of cheap consumer goods on their backs, with absolutely no curiousity in the big white backpackers. The silence was shocking...as was the immediate, blatant and indiscriminate overcharging.

China made me crazy in many ways, but I can count on one hand the times we were blatantly ripped off without any shame on the part of the ripper offer. That ain't the story in Vietnam, man. I could count on two hands the number of times people would try  - or would succeed - in taking us, in one day. They make ripping off tourists a national sport and have absolutely no guilt or problem with it at all. It's really fukken tiring and was really a shock to the system.

Every single traveller I talked felt the same: they liked the country but got tired of the incessant gouging. The locals have completely taken to Party condoned entrepeneurial capitalism, but most don't get the big picture - the concept of service, or encouraging return trade or word of mouth. Across the land, they just don't seem to give a sh*t about the tourists.

We spent over nine weeks - really taking our time and seeing the sights (we only cut Sapa out of the itinerary because we were rice terraced out after China) but, well, I just never fell for it. I mean, Halong Bay is beautiful – even if they weren’t actually from the James Bond film. Hanoi is great, a fun buzzy city - my favourite place. Ninh Binh was cool, and Dalat pretty but Vietnam is not  - heresy!! - that beautiful really.

People used to rave about the beaches, and some were pretty damn nice (and empty). But too often the water is a floating mass of plastic and garbage (in the locals defense, usually washed over from the big neighbour up North). Or they are ‘living’ beaches, used by the villages for both latrine and landfill. In many countries I have been, that are a lot more ‘developing’ than Vietnam, I have never seen that level of just plain lack of care.

Off the coast are some of the last great dive sites on the South China Sea, a mecca for tourists and a money spinner for locals. But this is Vietnam, the last country on the coast to allow commercial dynamite fishing and reef trawling. Greenpeace reckons more coral, marine habitat and reef has been destroyed in Vietnam in the last 3 years than in the last 30 prior.

So, yeah, it’s developing, but it’s developing stupid.

The food was fabulous, the level of comfort and sanitation was great (thanks to the rebuilding in the 70s), the people were often super sweet and just lovely, and it's pretty enough, but....I don't know. There's a very thin layer of bad history there, there's a big dose of sad and a bigger dose of bitter. Maybe it's just too thin a Thin Red Line between today and recent history....