Vietnam is Gorgeous

We ate a late lunch in Long Xuyên before touring a Cao Đài temple that Tiger knew something about (Tiger knew something about nearly everything). He summarized the beliefs and traditions of a sect that borrows bits and pieces of dogma from lots of religious and philosophical thinkers, including Confucius and Jesus and Victor Hugo. We walked into the place unannounced, but were warmly welcomed by a guy who appeared to be a Cao Đài elder.

Tiger (tigernguyen2407 at yahoo dot com) walked us through the architecture (heavy on both sculpture and neon) of the structure, as if he did it every day. Even the elder seemed impressed, deferring to Tiger’s explanations rather stepping in to correct him on the fine points of Cao Đài theology. No doubt it is a complicated subject even for experts.

We then continued driving in the direction of Cambodia until we were about midway through Châu Thành district. We turned left and switched back to bicycles on road number 941, a long, straight ribbon of two-lane highway with water on either side of us. Like lots of the roads in the Delta, this one went for miles without any way to turn off of it other than by boat. Once you’re moving in that direction, you’re likely to stay in that direction until you get where you’re going.

This setup is great for riding, especially if you don’t really know where you’re going, and especially late in the day, when the sun isn’t too high and the glare off the water on either side isn’t too bright. We cruised along, enjoying the light motorized traffic that characterized all of the country roads we traveled during this trip. There were lots of bridges to cross over as we passed perpendicular canals. The houses were close to the road, often on stilts above the water, and were full of waving kids. Behind them were endless flooded rice fields. It was hard to know where the paddy stopped and river began.

Eventually Road 941 becomes surrounded by land again on both sides as it enters Tri Tôn. The town is medium sized, a pleasant change from the straight line and the nonstop horizon. On the public propaganda loudspeakers announcements are made in both Vietnamese and Khmer.

The road forked and we curved to the left, eventually finding ourselves on Road 955B. Here the landscape consisted of mountains, broken forests, and, because it was the season when the rice had just been harvested, large congregations of ducks in knee-high pens. I gather that the ducks feast on the rice chaff and help fertilize the next crop in the process.

An hour or so earlier, with the five-o’clock sun sparkling off the Mekong-flooded fields, I had thought that the biking couldn’t get any more effortless nor the scenery any more agreeable. Now, taking in the smell of evening cooking fires and the sounds of neighbors shouting across pastures to one another, I wanted the road to go on forever.

The road ended, of course, and the sun set. We stopped briefly in the gloom to swing through a museum (Nhà mồ Ba Chúc) dedicated to atrocities carried out by Khmer Rouge in that part of the world during the late 1970s. Even that ghastly memory couldn’t spoil our delightful afternoon. Our van turned right onto Road 955A, another long straight ribbon surrounded by water that would have also made a great ride if it hadn’t been dark. On the left was the 100-kilometer-long Vĩnh Tế canal, paralleling the Cambodian border.

We drove on in to Châu Đốc, the first big town that the Mekong meets as it flows out of Cambodia and prepares to splinter before finally arriving at the sea.

Vietnam is Ghostly

My friends Vinnie and Tina and I weren’t afraid to visit Vietnam. Just the same, we were haunted by ghosts familiar to most Americans of our generation. As children during the '60s, we heard about Saigon as a scary place. We arrived for the first time at Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport and instantly had flashbacks to news footage narrated by Walter Cronkite. This airstrip is of course the same one where so many American soldiers formed their first impression of Southeast Asia forty years ago.

Our first impression was of motorbikes. The streets can’t hold them all. People drive them as if they were boats. They flow onto the sidewalks, in all directions—upstream, downstream, into the eddy—as if following the tide or the current rather than the painted lines on the streets. We saw no sign of anyone in uniform; there were only people who tried their best to make some order of the chaos by standing in a central place and making what looked like tai chi movements.

Prayer helps when crossing the road on foot. “Just be Moses,” advises one guidebook. You have to trust that the surges of helmeted riders will part and pour around you. I’m told that in Hanoi things are even more chaotic.

We exorcised our ghosts with a visit to the War Remnants Museum and some walks along the wide boulevards. The old notions didn’t take long to break down: watching people walk their dogs or play hacky sack in the park made the place feel anything but war-torn. Just the same, we didn’t stay in town long. The hum of Hồ Chí Minh City wasn’t what we had come for.

Soon we were in the countryside, bicycling along long straight riverside roads on which motorbikes were in the minority. In an hour I estimated we saw something like 500 bicycles, 200 motorbikes, a dozen trucks, and only three passenger cars. This was the Mekong Delta, where waterways are much more common than pavement.

Two of my stereotypes did hold up in this part of the country. First was the cone hat. It was nearly universal among people on the road. It wasn’t our bikes that made us stand out—it was our bike helmets! The other stereotype was the áo dài, or traditional women’s costume. They were everywhere, especially on teenage girls biking home from school.

Our guide, Tiger Nguyen, provided the bridge between the Vietnam of our imaginations and the genuine article of today. He was born after the war ended, but both his father and grandfather were veterans of the South Vietnamese army, and he wasn’t shy about echoing their anti-communist rhetoric. Tiger wasn’t shy about much: he loved to talk and had an amazingly wide English vocabulary.

Over the course of two days, from Saigon to Châu Đốc, Tiger shared his opinion on subjects ranging from government corruption to the superior play of the national soccer team. He also loved jokes of all kinds, and had great comic timing. We came away with many new impressions of modern Vietnam (Cần Thơ seemed to me more capitalist than Chicago), as well as countless glimpses of the timeless (at the Cái Răng floating market, the produce du jour is hung on flagpoles in the bow of the boats that sell it).