Marriage Counseling

Mr. T had another tour guide with him when he met us in the morning and her name was Miss Soo (maybe, she was very soft spoken) and she was in ao dai, traditional Vietnamese dress for women. These are very long tunic style silk tops, almost floor length, of brilliant fabrics with slits up the sides to just about the mid ribcage. These are worn with loose fitting, slim slacks and were the norm through the late 20^th century but are less popular now. Mr. T said that, in the past, when the children rode their bicycles to school wearing ao dai, it looked like butterflies flapping in the wind.

Together Mr. T and Miss Soo took us outside of Hue for the morning. On the road, Mr. T explained that the divorce rate in the south and the north was very high but in the central highlands it was very low, only 1%. He commenced in giving Chris advice about how to stay married a long, long time and it went something like this: when Sandra gets very angry that you have been out with many women, instead of arguing about it when there is much heat, walk outside and stay away for many days until no one is angry anymore and then come back and all will be fine. Somehow, that’s how they maintain low divorce rates in Hue. He keeps telling us that the Vietnamese don’t look back; maybe this is one example of that,  but I do look back so Chris can keep walking if he has been out with many women. Or even just one. I can use that several days he’s walking around to pack his things.

We visited a morning market at Thuy Thanh village and I realized for the first time on this trip that I hadn’t seen any Vietnamese men at the markets we’ve been to. The vendors are all female and the buyers, as well. Miss Soo said this is because the markets are for people preparing family meals and men do not do that work in Vietnam. This town is also home to the Thanh Toan bridge, a Japanese ^th Century which replaced an earlier monkey bridge and served to connect the rice fields to the town and which is a terrific break from the sunshine, as well. At the bridge, Miss Soo talked through the process of harvesting rice which is done by hand in this part of the country.

styled, ornate foot bridge from the 18

Our next stop was a family garden where we had a cooking lesson and learned (kind of, but not really) how to make the Hue cakes banh beo and banh loc, but Hue cakes are not like… cake. The first was a rice paste spread on a banana leaf and then spread again with a mixture of shrimp and pork puree, then folded into an envelope and steamed. The second was a tapioca paste spread on a banana leaf and then a piece of pork fat and a whole shrimp was added before it was folded into an envelope and steamed. Don’t worry about taking the shell off the shrimp, you hardly notice the shell is on there once it’s steamed if you’ve been eating this particular dish your whole life. If you’ve only eaten it once, then you kind of notice. The man who taught us was taciturn with a wizened face and it was hilarious to watch him watch Chris get rice paste everywhere and eventually he was belly

laughing at the mess Chris made of his cake. His operation is just like the FoodNetwork in that as soon as we had rolled several of each kind of cake relatively successfully, that plate was whisked away and a fresh plate returned with just cooked cakes that had clearly been steaming while we worked.

After lunch, we drove a bit and then stopped at Anh He Café, where the artist-owner has collected memorabilia from the Vietnam War and has repurposed it as furniture in his café. As we sat and sipped our coffee, Mr. T pointed out the difference between Russian and American fuel tanks and talked about which canteens and radios he had used during the war. He says “we” when he refers to himself and the American soldiers and that

is telling about his experience.

 From there we walked a short way to the Tu Hieu Pagoda, built in a pine forest in the mid-19^th Century and known as the resting place of the Nguyen Dynasty’s Eunichs. It is a peaceful, quiet, beautiful place and at its entrance is a large reservoir because there is great reverence for water here; in fact, many Vietnamese people have some symbolic lake in their gardens for this reason. The pagoda counts among its students the famous Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and is currently home to 70 monks, who were singing their mid-day prayers when we were there. It was a holy sound and we were lucky to be there to experience it.

We parted ways with Miss Soo and Mr. T brought us to the Imperial Citadel, where, mostly, photos are not allowed (ugh). It was built in 1804 in accordance with the principles of geomancy and faces east. It is a massive walled fortress surrounded by a moat that is fed through two sluices by the Perfume River. The Imperial City is within the fortress walls and also the Purple Forbidden City, to which access was restricted by all but the Nguyen imperial family. There is a pool in which 400 concubines would have been swimming in the mid-19^th Century and there is a temple with worship alters to all of the kings of the Nguyen dynasty, which lasted from 1802 to 1945. This temple is a long two story corridor of red and gold that reminded me of a Vietnamese Hall of Mirrors for its opulence and scale. The worship altars here are fashioned similarly to the ones in people’s homes: there are two candles, a vessel of water, food as an offering and incense, always incense. This is the best smelling country in the world for all of the incense. These tables are to keep the ancestors close to the living. We visited the throne room and plaza, where the armies would present in formation for audiences with the king and the library, as well. Another World Heritage Site, Unesco is working to preserve what buildings remain and recreate the ones that sustained damage or were destroyed by termites, cyclones and war. Unfortunately, the Citadel was attacked by the North Vietnamese Army as part of the Tet Offensive and the artillery fire damage is clear.  I wish I could use words in a way to do more justice to this place.

It was time for our flight to Hanoi and when Mr. T brought us to the airport it was hard to say goodbye. I will long remember his words and his eyes and his intense life story. 

Snapshots

Mr. T picked us up at 8 a.m. and we headed out of Hue for a day trip. In just a few days, a United States Navy hospital ship offering free healthcare will be arriving in Da Nang with 1000 beds and 12 operating suites. This is something Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain arranged and the people are very happy about this relationship. Unlike Donald Trump, Mr. T uses the word hero when he describes John McCain’s experience as a fighter pilot who was shot down, parachuted into Ha Noi Lake, was hospitalized and then held as a POW at the Ha Noi Hilton for five years.

Mr. T started our day by suggesting a change in the next day’s itinerary. We were scheduled to do a motorcycle tour of the city

, but he believes it is too dangerous and we’re inclined to agree. There are traffic laws here but they are the opposite of everything we know: for instance, all passing is done on the left instead of the right and one yields to the person behind them instead of ahead of them, and I don’t suspect it’s easy to acclimate in a single morning. There is a different speed limit for every type of vehicle, the bigger the faster, and every day in Vietnam there is an average of 35 people killed in traffic accidents. We’ve all decided that using a car is a better option.

We drove through the remains of Camp Evans, a huge airport base that housed 430 planes in its heyday, and which is now nothing but abandoned patches of pavement in the middle of fields and forests. I recently had dinner with my sister and a friend of hers who knows someone who knows someone who lives in the house I grew up in and reached out to ask if my dad could tour the place that he renovated by hand singlehandedly over the course of two decades and it has left me thinking about nostalgia and sentimentalism. We want things to be as we remember them and while I’m excited to tour the house I loved with my family when I get back to Chicago, I won’t like the changes that others have made in the 20 odd years since we lived there. But the house remains, the neighbor houses remain, the corner remains. It’s all still there. Here, nothing remains. Mr. T has talked a lot about what it is like for American vets who book tours with him because they want to go back and see their bunker, they want to go back and see where their friend died, they want to go back and see the setting of the experience that informed the rest of their lives. But they can’t because everything is gone and it’s a strange sensation for them and for him, too. The North Vietnamese Army symbolically tore down every bit of above ground infrastructure that America left behind and sold things off. Mr. T says that sandbags were for sale for a long time and that people wanted every bit of it for their own nostalgia’s sake. In any case, there are tapioca fields where Camp Evans used to be.

As a different kind of symbol, the NVA left standing two war-torn structures in Quang Tri town: a school and a church and we visited both.

Quang Tri was the site of 81 days of fighting in 1972 and ultimately led to the fall of the Quang Tri Province to North Vietnamese control. The town was completely destroyed and all that remains from that time period are the Long Hung Church which was only built in the 1950s but which now looks ancient with its open air and bullet torn façade. There is a municipal sign there that explains ity is a site of victory and Mr. T says it is hard for him to read it because it does not describe his experience or his history but that he was there and knows what really happened. Further into town there is the Bo De School which is similarly bullet riddled and in which there is a worship table where Mr. T lit incense for the dead. There is a massive memorial in this town for the North Vietnamese soldiers who died during the 81 days of fighting and people come from the north to honor their dead and it must be terribly painful for Mr. T that it isn’t possible here to commemorate the fallen soldiers of South Vietnam. It forces me to consider the current controversy in the United States about the Confederate flag in a different light.

Mr. T said it was very difficult after the war to keep in touch with his American friends because communication with Americans was criminalized and there were spies everywhere. It has become easier in the last 10 years, he says, but there are still spies everywhere and again he asked that I not use his full name or “they cut my throat.” There is this and then there is his telling me that Vietnam is a very good place to live now and that most people are happy as long as they follow the rules.

We went to the border between North and South Vietnam and stood at the bridge that divided the two—the same bridge that remained open for 100 days while people decided in which country they would live after the Geneva Convention—and Mr. T told us about the heavy artillery fire in the demilitarized zone during the war. The DMZ is now coffee farms. There is a monument at the site: a statue of a woman and child adorned by cocoa leaves. They are waiting for the soldiers to come home safely. Mr. T said Vietnamese people do not look back and remember the past with anger; the war was too terrible and anger is too exhausting. He says it is easier to just be friendly now.

There are water buffalo everywhere, a prehistoric remnant in a modern world. Mr. T says they are still used to harvest rice and for that reason they are not eaten anywhere in this country. The Vietnamese people also do not eat carp because, according to Buddha, in the future the carp will be a dragon. He also said that fewer and fewer people eat dog in Hue because dogs have become friendly with families. We saw many fishing hooches in the waters along the road to the Vinh Moc Tunnels. In Vinh Moc, a small coastal fishing village, the artillery fire was so awful the people built a three-tiered tunnel system and moved their entire village underground for the duration of the war. It took the people 18 months to build the tunnels and the network is large with meeting rooms, family homes, classrooms and an infirmary. All of these are just hollowed out spaces in the earth but, because the war was not so very long ago and the people from the village still live here, it is well documented for what purpose each space was used. During the war, about 250 people lived underground at Vinh Moc. It is very dark and relatively narrow and I’m lucky I’m so short because I was able to walk through them upright most of the time. The steps up and down are steep and the ground is slippery at times because it is dry and dusty and at other times because it is slick with moisture. At one point, the tunnel Mr. T led me through deposited us at the sea and it is because of the tunnels opening to the sea that it remained cool, though humid, inside.  We traveled down and down and down again until we found ourselves (and this should have been no surprise because I didn’t sign up to live in the tunnels myself) at the bottom of a very long staircase that brought us back to ground level and out where we met Chris, who didn’t make the trip into the Earth because of the close quarters and his relative height, but he sat in the jungle listening to a Steve Dahl podcast while he waited for us.  

One of the best parts of this fellowship has been listening to our very different tour guides share their experiences. In the car on the way back to Hue, Mr. T pulled out his phone and scrolled through his camera roll. Time and again he would pass his phone to me or to Chris and then tell us about the people with whom he was pictured. The former GI who had a picture of Mr. T from the war and before he left the States to visit Vietnam ran an ad in the local papers here with the picture asking if anyone knew what had happened to that soldier and then once he was in the country he showed the same picture to everyone with whom he had contact. He asked people working in the hotels he stayed. He asked people on the street. Finally, on the last day he was in Hue, he was outside of town on a daytrip and took the picture out just to look at and remember and he heard a voice from behind him say, “I know the man that was the boy in that picture.” It was another tour guide and she was able to put the two old friends in touch with one another. Snapshot. There was the American general who lost 200 men in one battle and asked Mr. T to take him back to see the place where each of those men had fallen. Snapshot. There was the woman who wanted to see where her husband’s plane was shot down. Snapshot. There was the daughter of the same man. Snapshot. Mr. T helps these people grieve and come to terms with their experience and understand and remember. And it isn’t easy because after 1975, all the towns in the south were re-named and all of the markers of that time were destroyed. He has as many stories about other people’s generosity: the Australian vets who came to Vietnam and were so taken with him as a tour guide that they badgered the Vietnamese government to give him a visa to travel to Sydney and they hosted him there for 32 days. Snapshot.

Mr. T has asked us to find his old friend, an American GI from Chicago who was in the 101^st, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 3^rd Brigade and who clearly meant a great deal to him but who he was never in touch with again after the war. We’ll do what we can to find out what happened to this man and if he’s still alive well, maybe: snapshot.

Our itinerary for our full day in Hoi An said “easy day” and we had this single day in the middle of our trip to do as we pleased and talk to each other and experience quiet. Everything about this trip has been amazing, but it hasn’t been easy. For an introvert to be (trapped) in a car with strangers all day, have dinner every night with people who feel the need to articulate every thought and to have one’s time taken from sun up until sun down is exhausting. I’m trying to hold at bay my idiosyncrasies while we are here but here they are magnified and I realize how rigid I am about how I do things at home. This trip isn’t long enough for me to believe that it will necessarily change my behaviors at home, but I will at least be more aware of the fact that there are so many other ways to do things and life continues apace.

We spent our day wandering in the Hoi An markets by the river and ducking in and out of shops. We found what may have been some terrific political propaganda prints but the woman in the store refused to translate for us what they said, I can only assume because she didn’t want to offend us. It’s hard to explain the purpose of my trip to people who only speak a little English so she couldn’t have known we were looking for something that just might be offensive.

As much as people ask if I have children, people talk to Chris about his facial hair and in the market a tiny woman ran up to him and said she would be happy to give him a shave. She said he would look 10 years younger. We didn’t take her up on that magic trick but it has become clear that his goatee isn’t the norm here and we haven’t seen a single Asian man with any sort of facial hair. I am comforted to learn that when my nail women at home comment on my eyebrows it is a cultural comment because women in the market ran up to me with thread in hand offering to do my whole face. We’re both trying not to let any of this affect our relatively healthy self esteem. One thing happened the other day that I hope to never forget and when something like this happens it’s hard to not be happy despite the obvious implications: two little girls saw Chris and I walking down the street and squealed in delight, first jumping up and down and then running up to us and kissing our big stomachs. So dear and also so different from home where children don’t approach strangers.

It’s possible to have a dress made from scratch in the market here. There are big dress books that one can look through, pick a style and then there is a wall of fabric to choose from; another woman told me she could make me a pair of leather shoes to fit my feet while I waited. Too late I realized I

probably should have taken her up on this offer, but we moved on.

We were able, finally, to choose our own food for lunch and had bahn my—Vietnamese sandwiches, and it was nice for us to have a simple lunch-sized meal. We walked up and down the riverfront and in and out of alleyways for the rest of the afternoon and it was good to meander.

Our new tour guide for the area surrounding Hue was Mr. T and he met us at 8 a.m. in the lobby of our hotel. I’m honoring his privacy and not using his name in these posts. Originally, when he saw me taking notes he said that was fine as long as I didn’t work for a newspaper. Later, he asked that I not use his name in any publication of any sort because “people still watch” and he could get in trouble with the Communist Party. Mr. T served as a combat interpreter for the United States Army in 1967 when he was 17 years old. He worked in the Hue region and served the 101^st Airborne Division—the Screaming Eagles—until 1972. When Chris asked him how he was treated after the war, he said simply “I am still alive.” He struggled to find work after the war and carried bags of rice for many years to raise his children, all of whom went to school. Now he is 66 years old which he says is very, very old. He has many stories, some heartbreaking and some heartwarming and on this leg of our journey I think Chris and I would be happy to just sit and listen to him and forego seeing any sites because his telling of his own experience is captivating.

That said, he did bring us by small boat to another UnescoWorld Heritage site: the ancient city of Hoi An, an island village called Kim Bong.  About 150 people live on this tiny island and carve wood. It was named a heritage site in 1999 and that has had both positive and negative results. Unesco gave the village $4000 to boost their economy and create wood carving collectives. Before this happened few people had jobs and now everyone does so that is a good thing. The flipside of being an “ancient village” is that the people are not allowed to renovate their homes and perhaps the word renovate suggests some HGTV project that is not what these people have in mind. In order to repair any damage their homes sustained from flooding, for instance, they must get approval of the government in order to do so. It’s kind of like living in a FLW home in Oak Park and wanting a fancier kitchen than you’re allowed to have except that these people are cooking over fire pits so not JUST like that. The boat trip back and forth from the village was eye opening. We saw ferries on which people were loaded with their motorbikes and also boats full of chickens and other products being carried back and forth. Almost all of the buildings here have shrines right outside the door, including businesses, and Mr. T says that is an area in which the spirits of the dead can stay close to the living and that most homes also have a worship table indoors at which ancestors are honored. Incense is lit everywhere in honor of the dead here.

We left Hoi An and traveled by car up the Central Coast along the South China Sea to the Danang province. I have to say in print that I never in my life thought I would be anywhere near the South China Sea. Dana Delaney fans who were watching soaps in the late 80s will know this area from the American television show China Beach and now I know this area from having actually visited China Beach. It is breathtakingly beautiful, with the Marble Mountains on one side and the sparkling blue sea on the other, and as a result it is being built up now as a resort community. Airplane hangars are still present and empty, which is extremely unusual but have been kept for the possibility of future use. They are surrounded now by golf courses, casinos and resorts and Malaysians, South Koreans and Japanese people vacation here with increasing frequency in addition to it being a disembarkment port for cruise ships. We were lucky to see China Beach from two vantage points, from sea level and from high above. We continued up the coastal road to a pagoda on Monkey Mountain, from which ^th of June according to the lunar calendar and that is a prayer day, many, many people were on their hands and knees, foreheads kissing the stone in front of them to honor the Buddha. The plaza in front of the temple looks down to China Beach from above and it is equally stunning from both points.

towered a 67 meter tall statue of the female Buddha. This is visible from far afield and reminded us of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer (which we’ll have to go and visit next, I guess, to compare). This is the tallest Bodhisattva of Mercy statue in Vietnam and inside a different Buddha is worshiped on each of its 17 stories. The interior was, unfortunately, closed while we were there but we did enter the Linhh Ung-Bai But Pagoda and because it was the 13

There is very much industry and construction in Da Nang and Mr. T believes that in 20 years it will look like Hong Kong. There are buildings going up everywhere so it’s easy to imagine a neon lit city here soon, but, at the same time, there are rows of men six deep standing at what looks like 45 degree angles from the sand hauling in fishing nets by hand. We crossed the famous Dragon Bridge of Da Nang, which I had seen in pictures the last time I had my nails done because my manicurist is from Da Nang. We were there during the day, but at night, the head of the dragon at the end of the bridge breathes fire. Da Nang currently has a population of 1 million people and is growing faster than Hanoi and Saigon. We stopped for lunch there and had My Quang—chicken and noodles.

We continued along to the Hai Van Pass, where we climbed up to what remains of a French bunker just above what remains of an American bunker and from which it feels like you can see the whole coast line and all of the South China Sea. Before we arrived here, many people asked how we thought we would be received because of the war. Now I think that question was asked through the lens of imperialism, by citizens of a super power. It is hard for us to understand what it must be like to live in a country that has had so little autonomy for so long. Also, Chris and I knew next to nothing about the history of this place and now know that the Vietnamese—if they looked back, which Mr. T says they do not—have many people to resent: the Chinese who were here for a thousand years and with whom there is still tension at the northern border, the French who were here for 100 years, the Japanese who were here for only 18 months but in that time 2 million Vietnamese starved to death. The 1954 Geneva Accords separated Vietnam into two countries: North Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh and South Vietnam led by Ngo Dinh Diem, divided at the 17^th Parallel. A bridge between the two new countries remained open for 100 days so the Vietnamese people could decide in which country they wanted to live. Mr. T keeps reminding us it was a civil war before we arrived and that we arrived to help the South Vietnamese army protect their country and their democracy from the North Vietnamese Army and it was a civil war after we left.

Mr. T sometimes talks about the war and sometimes talks about what things are like today. For the last 20 years, Vietnam has been the number one exporter of rice in the world and is the second exporter of cashews and coffee (behind Brazil). Their other big industry is rubber and Vietnam is the third highest producer of latex in the world.

We drove past the former site of Camp Campbell, where it not possible to walk because the United Nations is still looking for landmines there, and made one last stop for the day at the site of Camp Eagle, in use from 1968 until 1972 and then abandoned. It was occupied by the 1^st Cavalry Division, the 3^rd Brigade of the 82^nd Airborne and 101^st Airborne Division. This is where Mr. T served during the war. Nothing is left, it is a quiet place and the land is now used as a cemetery which seems fitting as he stands and looks in the distance and says “here, friends died in my arms.” Each of our tour guides has had a rich personality in different ways and I’m sure there’s a work of fiction in my future about them intersecting in some way, but I’m so glad we have this time with Mr. T. He has been witness to so much and it is a gift that he is willing to share what he has seen with us. 

If you like that kind of thing

We met Owen and his friend for breakfast at the restaurant across the street from the hotel where we stayed the night and had traditional Vietnamese steak and eggs. In this cooking process, the cast iron dishes are baked to an extreme temperature and then the eggs and steak and vegetables are added to the dish and it all cooks on the table in front of you. It was very good and Chris had Vietnamese coffee with it, something that also cooks at the table.

He was served something that looked like an individual percolator and he said the coffee was very strong. Iced coffee is popular here, too, and is made using the same process although the coffee drips into a glass that has already been coated with condensed milk and then ice is added.

We drove through the small city of Duc Pho and Owen said you can tell when a city has grown up over an American base because the streets are perfectly straight and the roads are very good. Owen had given us a bit of choice about how we wanted to spend our day and outlined for us several possibilities, including visiting the My Son ruins “if you like that sort of thing.” Owen prides himself on his tours being off the beaten path, which we have appreciated until this point, but we wouldn’t skip a Unesco World Heritage site just because it’s listed in guide books and others will also be there.

The only rule was to stay on the path because this is an area where there could still be landmines, and we hired a Vietnamese guide, Duyen, to walk us through the Sanctuary and tell us about the ruins. Her English was very good; she had studied at university in Saigon and said she liked to speak it very much. The ruins were discovered in modern times by French archaeologists and are located in the ^th and 13^th centuries are striking against a jungle backdrop. While all that remains today is a small ethnic minority group, the Champa were Indian Hindus that settled in the region: a valley surrounded by a ring of mountains, including the Holy Mountain. Under this Hindu influence, temples were built to Shiva, Vishnu and Krishna. These tower temples are what is left of the My Son Civilization. There

were 70 monuments in(relative)tact before World War II, the Indochina Wars and the Vietnam War but bombing in this area reduced this number to 20. As one walks the site, bomb craters are clear in the landscape. There has been a concerted conservation effort, as well as reconstruction that has been supported by the Polish and French governments, among others. Duyen was able to show us different bas-reliefs of Shiva, the goddess of destruction, and also explain why she was so celebrated. Like the Vietnamese attitude about the floating season, Shiva’s destructive powers were held in very high regard as destruction was necessary for rebirth and new growth. The brick work was unbelievable. It doesn’t appear that there is mortar between the bricks they are so tightly connected and when asked to identify which parts are original and which are renovated, it is easy to mistake the old for the new. There are temple altars representing the joining of male and female throughout and there are stones with Sanskrit carved into them. Duyen mentioned several times she believed it to be a peaceful place and I think it must be lovely to work there, deep in the forest with the sunlight falling on the temple towers and the mountains as a regal backdrop.

Champa Kingdom region and the remains of temple towers built between the 4

On our walk away from the site and back through the forest, we chatted with Duyen about this and that. Almost every day a Vietnamese person asks me if I have children. When we had dinner in Saigon with Mrs. Chi, she asked me and when I said no she thought she had translated poorly and asked again. It was incomprehensible to her that I didn’t and she eventually dropped it. Mr. Hung asked me and when I said I did not, he said he was very sorry. Yesterday a woman in the market asked me and when I said no, she looked at my hips and said I should be able to with hips like mine. It is clear that having children is very important here and it is hard for the people we have encountered to understand that I am happy and, more importantly, not ashamed of being childless. On our walk, Duyen also asked if we had children and when I said no, she said we seemed like happy people anyway. We asked her if she had children and she said no, she wasn’t even married and she was very old. In follow up we learned that she was only 28, but it was clear that 28 was very old to not be married with children here in Vietnam.

We met Owen for lunch on the grounds of the My Son Sanctuary property and had something that was either called Slippery Noodle or Slimy Noodle, I cannot remember which and it was noodles with beef in broth that was quite good. It is hot here, more hot than I could have imagined and it is also humid, more humid than I could have imagined, and this isn’t a caffeine free kind of culture and I’ve taken to drinking the occasional Fanta or 7Up or weird Vietnamese canned non-carbonated orange drink.

My Son is just outside of Hoi An so it didn’t take long for Owen to deposit us at our accommodations for the night: the River Beach Hotel, which is situated along the river and beautiful. Our room had sliding wooden doors that opened onto the river and a good bed, a much better bed than we’d had for days. Before we could commit fully to that relationship, we had agreed to meet Owen for dinner with his new tour group as our time with him had come to an end. He was taking an Israeli family of five back along the same route he had just taken us and suggested we all have dinner together. We met at an East Indian restaurant downtown called Namaste and which I would recommend to anyone visiting Hoi An. We’ve had so much excellent food, but this is the first restaurant whose name I recognize well enough to recommend because it isn’t a Vietnamese word. Dinner was hilarious. Father, mother, 16-year-old, 14-year-old and 6-year-old. The 6-year-old wanders and tinkers with electronics. One minute he was at the table, the next he was out on the street, the next he was playing with the restaurant manager’s laptop. He only eats fried foods and it was interesting to see Owen process what his next seven days would be like. I sat and chatted with the 14-year-old, Maia, about her experiences in school and traveling and in her family. She knows Hebrew, English and Arabic and would like to know French because she cannot imagine it not being fun to learn anything. She appreciates that her parents have given her the opportunity to see parts of the world. They most often go to Europe because it is very close and less expensive than some other places, like the United States. She said she likes to travel because then she can see that there are so many different ways for people to be good in the world and hearing that, my heart melted. While I was talking with her, Chris was learning that in order to get to Vietnam, Israelis must travel north to Moscow and connect there because El Al doesn’t fly over the Middle East for safety and security reasons. As much as travel enriches us, so do does meeting other travelers. It was a raucous, long dinner but it was a delight talking to Maia and her family about their lives. It gave me much to think about when I laid my head down on that excellent bed. 

This changes my idea of shelter on Maslow's hierarchy of needs

We met Owen for breakfast and had the infamous pho that everyone said we would have at every meal and which we haven’t yet encountered. Ours was pork pho with big leafy greens that Owen said “should be okay” to eat so we did. Maybe what everyone meant was that we would want to have pho at every meal because our meal was delicious. As we were leaving Kon Tum we saw school children in uniforms on their bicycles en masse. They were in white shirts and red ties and Owen said the red tie indicated they attended Communist school and that it must be the first day of school. Children typically go to school for several hours in the morning and several hours in the afternoon, but schools follow the same schedule as workers and there is a kind of Vietnamese siesta mid-day when the heat reaches its peak.

Our first stop of the day was at the Cathedral of Kon Tum which was built by the French at the start of the 20^th century and is unusual in that it has clear windows rather than stained glass that look out over the lush green grounds. It is a wooden structure and the altar is in the center of the cross rather than at the far end. Whe

n we arrived a woman was in the confessional, which Chris later took a picture of, because it was so unadorned: a simple wooden chair for the priest on one side of a wooden divider and an area clear for a kneeling penitent on the other. The church is an active one and hosts a rotation of French missionaries and social workers who come to work at the orphanage attached to it, which mostly caters to the Ba Na tribespeople.

This was a long day of being in the car as we moved further and further into the mountains towards Kham Duc and Owen indicated that in this part of the country there were search and destroy missions during the war but less fighting than in other parts of the country because of the difficult terrain. Despite what we may think from basically every Vietnam War movie ever, most of the fighting took place in agricultural areas and not in the jungle. He did make clear to us that part of the struggle for Americans in this region was that they were allied with the South Vietnamese but there were, in fact, South Vietnamese Communist sympathizers. It was these people who joined the Viet Cong and supported the North Vietnamese Army using guerilla tactics. Because they were an unauthorized militia group, they didn’t have uniforms and it became impossible for the Americans to know who was friendly and who was not. The Cu Chi Tunnels—which existed long before the war because they were built to fight the French but were never needed—were then used by the VC.

We visited the Kon K’Tu village, the oldest cultural village of the Ba Na people. This was the most primitive of the villages we’ve been to and the people did not have electricity or solar polar of any sort. Some of these stilt homes are wide open and it is easy to see that while the people are sheltered they do not have any furniture inside their homes. Owen shared with us a common colloquialism here: same, same but different and in some instances I feel that; in this town, however, I could not imagine what life would actually be like. And I had a lot of time to think about that because Chris and I got lost. You wouldn’t think it was possible in a one road village to lose the way but somehow we did. We’ve been lost before: once when we were in a rented car looking for a finca in Yucatan, once in Oaxaca when a cab dropped us off at a deserted stretch of beach and motored off before we could get our bearings.

This time though there was nothing to be nervous about because the people in these villages have been nothing but welcoming and kind and we knew Owen would eventually come to find us. And he did, although we had already re-routed ourselves by the time we encountered him.

Along the roadside in the middle of nowhere are Communist billboards with messaging that roughly translates to “Everybody is one big happy family” and the image is of villagers, military personnel, laborers, students and police all standing together under the Vietnamese flag or the sickle and hammer. Owen suggests that this is to drive Communism home for the ethnic minorities who may live communally but have little regard for the political structures of the larger country.  Each of these villages has a

town hall and Kon K’Tu is no different. It is easy to identify because it is the largest structure in town and is two or three times as tall as any other thatched roof and it is the seat of the elder.

We visited several air strips, including the first at Rocket Ridge which was built in 1964 and remains today, an incongruous site: an airstrip length of pavement in the middle of nothing but vegetation. It was hammered during the war and fell out of use relatively quickly. The second we visited lasted the majority of the war and you can see where mortar holes in the strip were filled in with concrete. It’s kind of creepy.

We traveled along the former route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail which no longer exists because, you know, it’s 2015 and now Vietnam has actual roads, but you can still see tributaries where bits of trail run off into nowhere on either side of the pavement here and there. In fact, you will occasionally see two or three houses on a bit of the trail that doesn’t connect to anything at either end. Owen is also a motorcycle enthusiast and says there are stretches that are still passable by bike but they would not  would support a car. There is more of it to travel in Cambodia and Laos and we stopped for lunch at the intersection of these three countries. We had beef with fried noodles and Chinese celery. It was a good meal and my first encounter with a Vietnamese pit toilet which is a toilet seat flush with the edges of a hole in the ground.

Once we were back on the road, we were fortunate to see a roadside sign in English, Vietnamese and Cambodian that remained from the war, which Owen says are extremely unusual. This one said

“Entering Frontier Area” although only a little of it peeped past jungle growth. It is easy to imagine why so many of our soldiers were MIA; finding bodies in jungle so dense must have been nearly impossible. Owen says that it only takes three days for jungle overgrowth to reclaim its path even if it’s interrupted by something as large as a fighter plane.

The next village Owen encouraged us to visit we only got half way to on foot and had to turn around. It required crossing an old monkey bridge that has probably seen a lot of vertigo in its career and possibly has also seen some people falling to their death in the waters below and it was so rickety and the weight of humans caused it to waver back and forth so violently that no. Instead, we continued to Scorpion Falls, so called because the rock formations force the water to fall in a shape that looks like a giant version of the insect. Owen told us to watch our feet for snakes and that in this area in particular locals feared the two-step snake. He said it wasn’t true that you only had two steps of life in you after you had been bitten but that you didn’t have too, too many more than that.

We arrived to Kham Duc just before dinner time and met Owen at a restaurant across the street for a meal after resting up a bit. We had lau, a Vietnamese soup that one prepares at the table. First a pot with stock over open flame arrives and then while it boils other ingredients arrive: a plate full of leafy greens including morning glory and fresh herbs, a plate full of mackerel, beef, squid and shrimp, and finally packs of ramen. Once the stock has come to a boil, the fish and shellfish are added. Once it comes to a boil a gain, the greens are added. Once it comes to a boil again, the beef is added. Finally, once it comes to a boil one last time, the ramen is added. It wouldn’t be possible for all of the ramen and greens to fit in the pot at once, so this continues throughout the meal until everyone is done. It was so good, but I do appreciate how in our culture shrimp is often peeled before it is cooked so it isn’t necessary to do that while it is piping hot and making a soupy mess all over the table. Owen said to go ahead and just eat the shell but I couldn’t get past that crunch.

Earlier in the day, Owen had told us a story about his tangential involvement in the finding of the remains of a U.S. soldier who was listed MIA. A year and a half ago, he was on the same tour we are today but using motorcycles rather than a car and he came across a young man who was dressed in fatigues from head to toe (many, many people wear camouflage and/or fatigues here) and who rode a fancy Chinese motorcycle. Most of the bikes here are Hondas and left over from the 1950s so this man’s ride was distinct. At some point in their conversation, a “lucky” bone fragment came out, as did a picture of an American soldier’s dog tags. Owen and the young man exchanged phone numbers and eventually it was possible for Owen to meet the tribal hunters who had found a partially burned aircraft in the jungle near the Laos border and the remains of a body that had been thrown from it. The artifacts they carried with them as good luck charms gave Owen the information he needed to investigate the soldier and ultimately report the finding to the United States government.

As we passed through the place Owen had first met the young man, he thought he spied his motorcycle again and sent him a text asking if he wanted to visit sometime in the next few days while he was in the region. Instead, the man showed up to the restaurant where we were sitting after dinner. What a sight: he was still dressed in camouflaged fatigues from head to toe, including his bike helmet and he wore black combat boots. He was dark, much darker than the Vietnamese, and now I know this means he is probably from one of the ethnic minority groups in villages we have been visiting which would explain his involvement with the tribal hunters. He was small and sinewy and had a girl on his arm and he ordered 12 beers at once and an order of squid jerky that blessedly comes with a sauce so hot you cannot really taste anything else but it’s so chewy and hard that the sauce dissipates before your mouth is empty. Chris has, on occasion, been accused of being a drink pusher when we have parties, but only because he usually makes a cocktail and wonders if people would like to try it. He does not open beers or pour drinks for people and put them in their hands when they say no. This man does. Owen has told us that drinking with Vietnamese men is rather like a contest and now I see how this is true. He drank six beers in less than a half an hour and didn’t seem to understand our reluctance to do the same. As travelers, we do not want to offend anyone we encounter and we do want to honor local customs. That’s part of the reason I have now put squid jerky in my mouth, chewed and swallowed. These people are very generous and it is difficult to say no to them, but I had to keep turning the beer cans that the man opened and set in front of me around and back towards him. Eventually, we were able to pull ourselves away and head back to the hotel for bed when we promised we would have breakfast with the man in the morning. To be clear, he spoke no English so it was only being near us that was the thrill. And truth told, it was kind of a thrill for us, too. 

Wedding Crashers

We started our day using a new free app that everyone should have: Magic App. I was able to download it to my phone here in the highlands of Vietnam and with it one can call anywhere in the US for free. I remember my first trip away from home on my own: I backpacked through Europe with a girlfriend a few years after high school and in 1992 I hoped to be able to figure out how to use international calling cards at payphones on the street to let my parents know what country I was in and that I was still, in fact, alive. It is amazing to me that in 20 odd years everything has changed and it is possible for Chris and I to send emails and make phone calls and Skype and blog from these tiny villages and yesterday when we got lost for just a little while on a dirt road and hadn’t seen a soul for ages I knew that if we were really, really lost someone would be able to locate the GPS signals on our phones eventually.

We had a quick breakfast of eggs and bread in a dining room that looked out over Lak Lake and then got back on the road. One of the bureaucratic difference that we’ve faced here is that people must turn over their passports at every hotel they stay. For me, who has always traveled by only a few rules but the first of which is “know where your passport is always” this feels like giving away my security. Mr. Owen explained that hoteliers are required to pay tax per head and the must collect passports because occasionally the police will raid a hotel in the evening to guard against tax evasion and the hotels must pay a heavy fine if there are more bodies than passports and/or if the passports do not match up. Fancier hotels in larger cities sometimes have computers and maintain a computer log of passport numbers but where we are staying you pass over your book or you are denied a room.

The drive would be from Buon Ma Thuot to Kon Tum. Buon Ma Thuot is the central hub for agriculture in the highlands and there are still frequent reports of farmers finding and/or being injured or killed by mines in their fields. There are large areas of the country that are still restricted to tourist travel because they have been deemed unsafe as a result of undetonated devices. It’s hard to match that kind of stress with the simple hammock cafes that string the road. We listened to Mr. Owen talk as we drove and stopped in towns and villages periodically. We were able to go to a small street market that catered to people preparing their dinners and there we saw all kinds of fish, some living and some not and some filleted and some not. There was a lot of mud fish and some catfish and tilapia. We’ve been told that the Vietnamese will eat anything and any part of anything and, walking through the market, this seems true. There was every source of protein from chicken to duck to pig to beef to goat to snails to land crabs to frogs to snakes to grubs. Vietnamese recipe: fry grubs and eat. Chris and I like to wander a market and were glad to have this chance; we probably would have stayed much longer if we could have.

We are striking to the people living in these towns. Chris is very tall and I am very round and we are both white and wealthy and people stare and smile and take pictures of us. In the market, a woman came up to Chris and put her hands around his wrist and pulled at him and asked him something, but we’ll never know what it was she wanted which is weird and sad and kind of great, too. When you are startled to be touched by a stranger you realize how very private Americans are and how distant we are from the sensation of touch. That was never clearer than at our next stop. As we drove, we transitioned from jungle to pine forests and back again. Mr. Owen is a good guide because he is willing to deviate from the itinerary for an excellent experience and as we passed another road side wedding he suggested we stop so Chris could get a few photos of the bride and groom and “wedding hall.” Chris was only able to get a photo or two before the wedding party descended on first him and then both of us and instead of our taking pictures of them, they were taking pictures of us. The unspoken goal (or possibly it was spoken, who knows: the language is very different) was for as many people to lay hands on us possible and if there was kissing involved all the better. Their grips seem very strong, but again I may just think that because no one every grabs my wrist and drags me into a wedding tent at the side of the road and then uses both hands on my shoulders to force me to sit down. Mr. Owen tells us that our presence was taken as a sign of very good luck for the bride and groom and that people at the wedding would talk forever about how we had come to the party. Beers were poured into used, dirty glasses and there was no saying no. It was frenetic and loud and hectic and intense and wonderful and we had to tear ourselves away, but people thanked us for coming—saying “com on” over and over—and took photos of us all the way out and as we climbed into the car.

On the road again, Mr. Owen fleshed out the details of the Tet Offensive for us. Tet is a national holiday here that moves in the calendar year according to the lunar calendar. It is a 10 day event and businesses shut down during this time so that people can travel to be with their families and celebrate. Traditionally and throughout history, Tet has been honored as a time of peace even in times of war. In 1968, the Viet Cong broke the unwritten rules and attacked on the first day of Tet just south of the 17^th Parallel. While the Americans defeated the VC in this battle, the horror of it—according to Mr. Owen—was the beginning of the end of things for American troops here in the war. There is so much I don’t know. While my questions reveal my ignorance, I won’t know more unless I ask them so I asked Mr. Owen about the relationship here in Vietnam between religion and Communism. He suggested that my understanding of Communism was probably largely informed by the Cold War and that Stalin was anti-religion but Communism is not. He said there are four primary religions in Vietnam: Buddhism, which is the largest, Christianity, Islam and a relatively new religion called Kao Dai.

Mr. Owen wanted chicken for lunch and we talked a bit about American franchises here in Vietnam. He said there were very few but that Kentucky Fried Chicken had been here longer than any other chain restaurants. The laws here require that businesses use Vietnamese products and chickens are easier and cheaper to come by here than anything else so it was a more natural fit for KFC than some other chains. The first McDonald’s opened here only four months ago. In any case, the chicken he had in mind was more traditional. We stopped in a small place in a small town for it and were served kim chi, bitter melon soup which was exactly as advertised and a fried chicken leg with rice.

As we neared Pleiku, Mr. Owen told us that most Vietnam War movies were filmed in Thailand and mostly they were filmed on rubber plantations.  Pleiku was the largest American presence as it was the American and South Vietnamese strategic base. The Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers takes place in and around Pleiku. This was chosen as an operations base because of its geographic significance: it’s flat, close to Cambodia and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 30,000 American soldiers were stationed here, but there are few landmarks left from the war because when the US withdrew their forces, the North Vietnamese Army came and destroyed the base. Years later the city was rebuilt by the Russians and is now a bustling area. In fact, there aren’t a lot of landmarks from the war that remain anywhere for several reasons: American hooches were built from sand bags and canvas and were temporary shelters, American bases were commandeered and many are currently in use by the Vietnamese Army, American air strips were converted and now serve as domestic airports and, finally, the jungle reclaims everything. Agent Orange might have had a horrible effect on crops and forests and jungle brush at the time it was dropped, but the country is so wet and lush everything grows and regrows quickly.

Further down the road, we stopped at Sea Lake, a fresh water lake that was and remains the water supply for the whole region, on which remains a single American bunker, though it has been repurposed and looks a bit like a summer home now. Near Sea Lake, Mr. Owen dropped us off so that we could walk through green tea fields. The green tea leaves are still being picked by hand and the leaves are so fragrant it seems as if the tea is being steeped while it’s being grown. It feels like it might be the quietest place on earth and, at the same time, the most beautiful and then the lane ends at a pagoda and it’s hard to imagine you ever thought anything was beautiful before you entered it. The gardens were lovely and maze-like leading visitors from one statue to the next before depositing them at the main entrance, though all throughout it was possible to hear the woman inside singing her prayers while beating her drum slowly. The pagoda is cavernous and there is a multi-tiered alter on which sits the Buddha and atop him is a dragon. I have insufficient words to describe the space, the scale or the spirit of the place. Perhaps for those of you who know me it will be enough for me to say that I burst into tears when I entered because it was overwhelmingly peaceful and, for me, that’s beautiful.

As we were leaving the area, Mr. Owen pointed out the loudspeakers on poles and said that an air raid siren blasts at 7 every morning and 4:30 in the afternoon, marking the start and end of the farmers’ work day and that at around 6:30 all through the country the speakers broadcast Communist messaging.

Originally, this area had only small tribal villages. Where there are cities today it is because there were American bases in the region and cities grew up around them. There are 63 ethnic minority groups in Vietnam, the M’Nong the largest of them, and most descend from Mongolia, China and India. Each village is distinct from the last and I would have to be here a long time before I became accustomed to seeing people live like the people in the central highlands do. We stopped once more and Chris and I were able to walk through a village, delivering candy to children, and barely blinking in order to take everything in, before Mr. Owen brought us to our hotel in Kon Tum which he characterized as the closest thing he could find to a motel in Vietnam and which was nothing like a motel I’ve ever been in. We went into town with him for dinner and ate in tiny chairs out on the street (poor 6+ foot Chris: all of the furniture here is made for the very small!) at a place that grilled meat. We had rice, as always, skewers of spicy squid, pork ribs and frog. The squid was the best I’ve ever had anywhere and the frog, well: we had the frog because it was clear Owen was going to encourage us to have something we had seen at the market that morning and frog seemed the easier choice than grubs or snakes. Every night we fall into bed exhausted and the only thing in that last moment of wakefulness that I miss about my bed at home is top sheets. It just doesn’t seem to be the custom here and thankfully I’m so tired that thinking about it doesn’t keep me up long.

Prostitution, pepper vines, elephants and Vietnamese karoke

We started our day with a Vietnam Airlines flight from Saigon to Buon Ma Thuoc which meant having to navigate the airport for a domestic flight which wasn’t as hard as I expected. Thank God for English being the universal second language of all airports… it doesn’t help as much as one might think, but it does help. Ours was a small commuter plane with propellers, but it kept us in the air the entire time we were supposed to be in the air and got us back on the ground at the right time for that, too. Our new tour guide, Mr. Owen, was waiting for us at baggage when we arrived.  Mr. Owen is a Canadian expat who married a Vietnamese refugee in Canada and later they moved here. He now owns a tour company, owns and operates a hotel and contracts with V’explore.

Buon Ma Thuoc was the site of an American logistics base during the war and the town emerged and evolved to support the activity at the army air strip, which has now been turned into the commercial airport we flew into. In fact, most of the domestic airports in Vietnam today are former American air strips.

Mr. Owen prefaced our time together by telling us that tours with him would be very different from anything else we experienced while in Vietnam because he is a foreigner who speaks Vietnamese and because he’s unlicensed. All Vietnamese tour guides are required to attend Communist school to learn what message to share with travelers. This synced with things Mr. Hung and Mr. Hao told us in Saigon. Mr. Hung sneeringly mentioned Communist propaganda several times and Mr. Hao told us that there were rules about where licensed tour guides were able to take tourists.

As we drove, Mr. Owen talked and talked and jumped from one subject to the next, often without segue. For instance: (1) Streets in Vietnam are all named after Communists in the north and all cities throughout the country share the same street names. Each city also has one street that has a number for a name: the number is the month and day the Communists entered and occupied that city. (2) His assessment of the people is that they do not have a strong concept of the future and it is a culture that engages in an immediate fix rather than a long term solution. One small example of this is that merchants do not think it necessary to have change when they open for business in the morning. (3) We passed a number of open air store fronts that were draped in red and white fabric and Mr. Owen said that it was a numerologically significant day and so many people would be married during this weekend and that you could tell a wedding from the road from the number of vehicles parked at the side of it all in a cluster and from all of that fabric flapping in the breeze.

We asked Mr. Owen how well he was received in Vietnam and he said that when he first started traveling here 20 years ago they liked him here in the south when they thought he was American because Americans came to their assistance in the war. When they learned he was Canadian, they had a negative response because of the United Nations position on involvement in the war. In the last 10 years—as we move farther and farther away from the war in the history of time, he says attitudes have changed and he is accepted despite being Canadian.

While almost none of the land in Vietnam is protected for preservation, we stopped at a national park to visit the Drak Say waterfall which reminded me of the falls at Cumberland Gap, but set in a jungle rather than a forest. Beautiful. There were locals grilling whole chickens at the water’s edge and I was reminded again that while there are certainly tourists in this country, with the exception of visiting the War Remnants Museum and Reunification Palace in Saigon, we haven’t been surrounded by them and/or if we have, they’ve not been American tourists or even white. After wandering the area near the falls for an hour, we had lunch in an open air structure that served hot and sour soup with pork chops and rice. Mr. Owen explained that the norm here is to do something as a specialty so often a restaurant, particularly a small restaurant, will only serve one meal or a street vendor will only sell one type of fruit. He showed us signs along the road for restaurants that said things like “duck seven ways” or “chicken legs” or “dog meat” and that was their complete menu. In the last six months as I told more and more people about my upcoming PD trip, many said “they’re going to serve you dog and say it’s something else.” Untrue. Dog is a specialty and only served in dog restaurants and in private homes is usually only cooked by Christians at Christmastime. For future travelers wishing to avoid it, the signs say “Thit Cay” or “Thot Cai”; spellings vary. In any case, there was a hunting falcon sitting on a table in the restaurant a few feet away from us and our waitress was carrying a tiny (Tiny! Three inches long at most!) squirrel around with her in the palm of her hand while serving. She was enamored of its size and that it was sleeping.

Back on the road we peppered Mr. Owen with questions and he either answered them or told us something he thought was more interesting than whatever we had asked about. When we parted ways with Mr. Hung, he gave me his business card which read “Hung, Phan Ngoc” so I asked how names worked in this culture. Your name indicates your position in the family and sometimes names grow to be very long. Mr. Hung’s last name is Ngoc and Phan is likely the name of one of his parents and his given name is Hung and probably his real name is much longer. Mr. Owen said that sometimes a person’s name would literally include all the other people’s names in the family first so that, again, name indicated position in family.  My name, for instance, would be Shimon Wencel Sandra Susan Kristen Sandra and if my name were written on a card like Mr. Hung’s it would read: Sandra, Shimon Wencel. Women do not officially change their names with the government when they marry and, at least in the hill tribes, these societies are matriarchal.

Most of the highland hill tribes converted to Christianity when the French missionaries came through to save Vietnamese Buddhists from themselves and we stopped at an old Catholic church in the hills, only the façade of which remains after being hit by a VC aircraft during the war. It’s an eerie site out there in what feels like the middle of nowhere and seems like a truer war remnant than anything we saw in the museum in Saigon.

Mr. Owen would periodically jump out of the car to show us different plants and fruits and flowers, including something the Vietnamese refer to as a candy tree because the tiny berries on it takes just like coconut caramel. He also pointed out cassava, the largest source of carbohydrates in Vietnam. My favorite thing I faithfully put in my mouth that came from the side of the road was a tiny green seed that I couldn’t identify with my eyes but as soon as I put it in my mouth I thought “this is as familiar as every day to me” and it was black pepper. It grows here on vines everywhere.

Mr. Owen takes back roads and this allows travel through ethnic minority villages. He handed us each two bags of candy and then dropped us off at one end of the road and told us he would pick us up at the fork in the road after the second left and he drove off to let us to wander. There was no fear of getting lost. These are not towns as an American would picture them, but clusters of open-air houses along the side of a dirt road running through the middle of time. The homes are built on stilts and the area beneath the house serves as a barn, although we did see goats in the houses proper, as well. They are mostly wooden structures but the walls and rooves are thatched or just open. It is stunning to see what seems like primitive ladders made from logs with notches carved in them leading up to these thatched buildings only sturdy enough to have a satellite dish suspended from it: incongruous. We were not out of the car long before people began to emerge from these houses—very young children and very old women and the bold ran up to us and the shy watched from the crook of a tree. These were M’Nung tribes people, likely Mongolian in origin and much darker than the Vietnamese with slightly different facial structures and a completely different language which was not a particular problem since we have only successfully picked up two phrases at this point; “an” which means “mister” and “com on” which means “thank you.” We gave candy to the children and the elderly which at first felt strange because of the single western idea ingrained in every child’s mind about taking candy from a stranger but quickly felt like a nice exchange. It clearly made them happy to receive and it made us feel less like voyeurs as we walked through their part of the world taking pictures of the pumpkins growing in front of their houses and pigs rooting through those vines and chickens and ducks and cows and water buffalo.  What a gift to have been in this place and with these people even for only a short time.

We continued on the road to Lak Lake where we would stay the night and where we would tour the village and lake by elephant. When I was arranging our itinerary for this trip I worried that there might be moral implications about this and wondered if we should skip it, but I’m glad we didn’t because it was amazing and, in the end, I didn’t feel it was cruel or unusual. Well, maybe unusual. One has to climb a tower to embark an elephant and it’s kind of surreal even to be that close to such a bizarre and majestic animal. Her hairy hide felt like wet steel wool and her ears were pink, almost translucent in places and polka dotted the grey that the rest of her body was. Elephants are very tall and I am not so it was an interesting perspective as we moved throughout the village and this isn’t a Disney ride so trees are not cut back out of the way of the riders. Instead, branches just hit you in the face if you aren’t paying attention. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that the cars and motorbikes and scooters share the road with cows and chickens and water buffalo. Add elephants to the mix and it can be slow going and exhilarating at the same time. In addition to walking through the village, the elephants head straight into the lake and the lake is deep enough in some parts that her ears dip in the water and she is able to submerge her snout from time to time and then spit water out in front of her. Chris isn’t a water person but he felt confident about his safety on the back of that beast; I am a water person and loved it when my feet trailed along in the water as she waded across the lake. I’m sad that my piss poor writing will never be able to capture what exactly this experience was like but it did make both of us laugh out loud from sheer joy.

In our history of travel, we have stayed all kinds of places. About 15 years ago, we stayed at the scariest hotel I’ve ever spent a night and I’ve spent the night al fresco in Amsterdam and in a room in Antigua that fit only a bed that you kind of fell into from the door which opened out into the hall rather than into the room and closed only with a hook and eyelet screw. What exotic locale did we find this most frightening hotel in? Gettysburg. We stayed there on a road trip to Philadelphia and if any of the soldiers in the Civil War had stayed there they would have decided the war wasn’t worth the fight. I can’t put my finger exactly on what was wrong with that place but the door didn’t fit properly in its jamb and the lock didn’t catch and there were some distinct and grotesque features of the room and bathroom that made me believe strongly that if no one had been murdered in that space, it was only a matter of time. I was immediately reminded of Gettysburg when we arrived at our Lak Lake accommodations. The grounds were lovely and all the cabins had views of the lake that were incredible, but when your “bellhop” says your room doesn’t have electricity yet and then leaves, you wonder when that yet will be. It wasn’t bad really, just full of bugs with some creepy smears of dirt on the walls and a metal and glass door both to the outside and to the bathroom and mosquito nets—which are great but then they make you think you’ll probably really need them. Once the electricity came on, about a half an hour later, I felt much better about the place. Until later when I didn’t.

We met Mr. Owen for dinner at 6:30 and two of his employees—Mr. Tinh and Mr. Hao (a different Mr. Hao)—had also arrived to the lake with their group, a man named Claudio from Italy and his girlfriend Anushka from Germany, so we all had dinner together. Mr. Owen ordered for us and a friend of his who joined us and we had French fries (!), salad with fish oil and lime dressing, fried rice, tilapia in a hot red sauce and chicken stir fried with vegetables. It was nice to talk with other travelers over dinner and Anushka is also a teacher so we compared our circumstances a bit. After dinner, we went to Vietnamese karaoke, which is different in some ways from American karaoke. Mr. Owen explained there are three ways to do karaoke here: family style, courtship style and prostitution style. To be clear, we did family style. We arrived to a place that looked like a house and went into the first room which was like a fevered dream. It was the type of space that might inspire David Lynch or Ed Paschke to some of their best work. It was a long room with a wall mounted television at one end and speakers attached to the walls above. The rest of the walls were busy. At first I thought it was wall paper but then realized it was a hand stamped bluish floral pattern from floor to ceiling on the walls, which were institutional green. There were huge bas relief decorations of random shapes and fruits. There were drapes hanging from the ceiling in decorative patterns, mostly hearts and the ceiling was high making the space seem cavernous. It was weirdly dark though the lights were on. The couch was a low slung sectional sofa in red and black zebra from which it seemed possible to either pick up an STD or a pregnancy without much effort. A woman came in with a bucket filled with ice water and a dozen 333 beers and then it got loud. They do both Vietnamese and American music and it is funny to listen to Mr. Tinh sing “Let It Be” in his Vietnamese accent and the whole thing was surreal. Chris is a great sport and did a terrific rendition of both “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Jambalaya” and Anushka had quite a nice voice, too. I’m sure I’m not getting across how much this was like a scene from a Fellini movie, but take that and the reference to Paschke and Lynch and roll them into a ball and you’re only half way to understanding what Vietnamese karaoke is like.

We walked back down the road to our cabins and a rat the size of an opossum ran across our path along the way and Mr. Hao shared the same story Mr. Hung had about rats being a delicacy here and went on to talk about eating monkey brains. Despite this, we fell asleep almost immediately when we returned to our room, and I slept soundly until about 5 in the morning when it was clear to me that something was trying to get into our room. In Gettysburg, I would have assumed it was a meth addict.  Here the scratching and grunting called up images of that rat in the road. I didn’t love it and it was loud enough to eventually wake Chris who threw his shoe at the door of room and then eventually his other shoe. Between that racket we made on our side of the door and the sun coming up on the other side, whatever it was that was so anxious to get in wandered off which was reassuring but I didn’t fall back asleep. Onwards and upwards.

I don't think I ever thought that i'd be in a rowboat in the Mekong

Mr. Hung picked us up at 8 a.m. to travel out of Saigon to the Mekong River. It’s about an hour and a half by car and he spent that time telling us about the area. It is 40,000 square kilometers and mostly flat. While it is a gamble to live and grow crops in the north of Vietnam because of typhoons, it is easy to do so in the Mekong Delta where it is possible to get three crop cycles in each year. 12 million tons of rice is exported from this region each year, and people also support themselves fishing primarily for catfish and tilapia and growing fruit. The river itself is very long; it wends through China, Tibet, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Its tributary in the city is the Saigon River and currently it has a lovely river walk. Mr. Hung says that 10 years ago the Japanese government financially assisted the Vietnamese with a cleanup of the river, evacuating the slums that had grown up around it and expanding the road along it. As a result, now there is only a small area of slums along the river toward the edge of the city.

It is currently monsoon season, though Mr. Hung says that is not what it is called in Vietnam. While the people along the Mekong River do experience flooding during this time of year, they call it instead “the floating season” and they appreciate the gifts the weather brings. There is a great respect for the flood: the waters clean, fertilize and promote growth.

There are several delicacies in the region and he forewarned us that if we saw Rice-Field Rabbit on a menu in the Delta, we should be aware that term is slang for rat, but we should also be aware that rice-field rats are quite different from city rats because they are clean, plump and have only ever eaten rice throughout their lives. He also told us snake wine takes like cognac despite being made by soaking a king cobra, cobra, rattlesnake, sidewinder and viper in rice water with herbs for 100 days. They call it Vietnamese Viagra because of the boost it is known to give men. Something Mr. Hung made clear throughout the day was that there is very little wasted in production here in Vietnam. Every part of the coconut has a use and a re-use. Every part of a grain of rice has a use and a re-use. The husks are used as cooking fuel and fertilizer. Almost every bit of land is purposed and repurposed as well. Rice farmers will often farm ducks because they can exist on the same plot of land and eat bugs and their dung fertilizes the ground making it a rich place for the rice to grow.

When encountering people near the Mekong, Mr. Hung says their first question is often “how old are you?” because this helps them know how to refer to you with respect. People who are older are called uncle or aunt and people who are the same age are called brother or sister. Up until about 10 years ago, the word for Russian was synonymous with the word for foreigner because Russians were the only visitors here. As a result sometimes now people will refer to tourists as Russians by accident.

Travel is an excellent teacher and so many of my assumptions are being challenged. Remembering how sick I felt on the six hour drive from Oaxaca City to the coast and how terrible the dirt roads were traveling from Antigua to Pana in Guatemala, I purchased Dramamine for this trip only to discover not only roads but nicely paved toll roads. Along those toll roads are rice farms and here and again we saw graves. Mr. Hung says that everyone in Saigon is cremated not because there isn’t an emphasis on ancestor worship but because there is no room for bodies; however, out in the country families often bury their dead at home in the garden where it is easy to tend to them.

When we arrived to the Mekong, Mr. Hung brought us on a boat across the river. As soon as we climbed on, he got out a machete and whacked away at coconuts so that first we could drink the water and then—whack, whack, whack again—we could scoop out the immature gelatinous coconut fruit from the inside.  While it was clear he had done the same thing many times before, it is disconcerting to have someone whack a machete blade at the floor of a rickety wooden boat that supports you. The river is brown now because it is the floating season but he said that it is typically a brilliant green. It has water hyacinth growing everywhere and is filled with both ferries and fishing boats. The vegetation is lush and we took the boat across the river to the island village of Ben Tre where we spent several hours on Dragon Island. First we wandered through coconut gardens and Mr. Hung showed us grapefruit trees, cocoa plants and lemon grass and the he brought us to an outdoor kitchen where a woman was making a coconut treat similar to a crepe that was delicious and another that hardens and is similar to a waffle cone in an American ice cream shop. We went on to what was essentially a jungle factory producing coconut candy, essentially a soft caramel made from coconut water and sugar. We also tasted coconut wine which is wine in name only and more like grain alcohol.

We rented bicycles and toured the villages of Quoi Son, Phu An Hoa and An Khanh that way. Later in life when people ask me “have you been to…” I might not know that I have because the names of these places are hard to anchor in my brain. The lanes on Dragon Island were narrow and we shared them with pedestrians, dogs, motorbikes and cars. Despite the fact that Mr. Hung was in the lead, often on his phone and he never once yielded to another vehicle, there were several moments I suspected would be my last as motorbikes zoomed past on my left and right. We stopped for sugarcane juice and saw how the cane was squeezed time and again until absolutely dry and we stopped to see a business that spun rope from the thread in coconut shells. It was lovely to see the homes in this part of the world and to see, much closer than we had while on the highway, graves in front gardens in the Vietnamese jungle. We ended our ride at small tea shop that served local seasonal fruits and there we tried rat hair fruit, dragon eye fruit, jackfruit, grapefruit and pineapple. Rat hair fruit is so called because it is a reddish brown color and has hairy tendrils around its outside and dragon eye fruit because when you suck the meat from the pit what is left looks like… a dragon’s eye. They’re rather literal in their naming of things here.

We left the bicycles at the tea shop and took a row boat along a water palm creek back to the river. That experience may just be the Christmas card picture this year, but who knows what the rest of this trip will hold. In some moments it has been hard to reckon our experience here with the settings we’ve been given by American films about the war, but on the boat on the creek, it was easy to imagine what it must have been like for American GIs here 40 years ago. At the same time, the reality of it was absolutely serene.

We transferred to the a bigger boat when we reached the river and had lunch on Phoenix Island (there are four: Tortoise, Phoenix, Dragon and Unicorn—I’m not sure if when they were named the Vietnamese people believed tortoises to be magical creatures or if they believed the phoenix, dragon and unicorn were real but there is an incongruity here in ttohe names). Lunch on Phoenix Island was unbelievable, as all of our meals have been. Mr. Hung didn’t eat with us, just deposited us at a table and left us in the hands of a waiter who brought course after course, each bigger than the last. The first thing he brought was a plate with a bamboo stand designed to hold an entire deep fried elephant ear fish upright so you can see all of its glory. It might be a little smaller than a football, but not much, and there is table service as the waiter soaks rice paper, then wraps cucumber, pineapple, and parts of the fish in it and I say parts because I don’t mean to suggest he filleted the fish. He just scraped skin and flesh and bones and all into it so: parts. It was delicious. The combination of the pineapple and cucumber was refreshing and clean tasting and the fish was a sharp contrast. Our second course was prawns with ground salt, chili of some sort and peanuts. The third was beef soup. The fourth was an omelet with shrimp and mushrooms. The fifth was sticky rice and something like tortilla chips but made from rice and sweetened. The people who know us know that we are good eaters. We’ll eat a lot of whatever we are given but we cannot keep up with the volume and frequency of these meals and all of the dishes that are served at each one of them. I feel guilty leaving so much behind on every meal table, but I haven’t been hungry since we boarded the plane.

After lunch, we took the boat back to the other side of the river and drove back to Saigon. Along the way, we listened to Mr. Hung as he told stories and answered our questions. We asked about the poor in Vietnam and how veterans are treated. They do have very poor people, he told us, and they collect in shanty towns along the rivers in Vietnam because there is constant access to food in those areas. The Buddhists organize a volunteer corps of teachers to try to improve the lifestyles of these people and some avail themselves of the opportunity and others do not. The volunteer teachers also work with veterans and there are vocational centers specifically for vets to attend for job training and they are given priority when it comes to job placement.

While education is free in Vietnam, Mr. Hung indicated that the national budget for education is very small so class sizes are big (50 students to a class) and parents are asked to pay a great deal of money each year, sometimes monthly and there are special assessments if the school needs a new copier or air conditioning. All too familiar. He said that hospitals are also overloaded and sometimes there are two patients for every bed. If a patient agrees to pay cash for their medical care, they receive more immediate attention. Mr. Hung’s wife cooks food for indigent patients.

The last question I asked Mr. Hung before we parted ways was to let me know what I could tell my students about American involvement in the war. He told us that propaganda throughout the Communist Party was dense about “American henchmen” having invaded the country but to expand his answer he gave us a short history lesson about the relationship between the two countries dating back to WW2 when Japan invaded and occupied Vietnam and the loss of life was catastrophic, so when American pilots were shot down Ho Chi Minh delivered them to the Chinese government instead of the Japanese. He also indicated that the first of Ho Chi Minh’s armies was trained by the OSS. Ultimately, he believes that the South Vietnamese would always be grateful that the Americans came to their side in the war against the north when it seemed no one else would.

We said our goodbyes to Mr. Hung late in the day—he was a dear and wonderful tour guide and I would recommend his services to anyone traveling in this part of the world--and we waited in the coffee shop at our hotel for another visit from Mrs. Chi so we could complete the payment for this tour. Afterwards, we walked around the neighborhood, braving crossing the street for the first time without Mr. Hung, Mrs. Chi or Mr. Hao by our sides and wandered through the night market. Every evening in this neighborhood people set up tents and sell all manner of goods in the street. Markets are surprisingly similar from Panajachel to Merida to Saigon, but there is an electricity and energy to the market being held at night and in the middle of a major metropolitan area and in a street that is not closed to through traffic. The rains came and people bustled to cover their wares with plastic tarps and we headed back to our hotel to get some sleep in preparation for our flight to Buon Ma Thuoc the next morning. Who knew there was an airport in Buon Ma Thuoc? Who knew there was a place called Buon Ma Thuoc?