Travel Blogging V

Dateline: Da Nang, Vietnam. Day before yesterday we tied up at the port serving Da Nang and drove instead to the imperial city of Hue. There we saw The Citadel, visited a pagoda, saw an emperor’s tomb, and saw somebody make incense. This was a long, tiring day, very hot and humid.

The Citadel is, on the outside, a classical early 19^th century fortification: moat, wall with projections to provide intersecting fields of fire, etc. On the inside the Citadel is a series of palaces, each of which features separate quarters for the military mandarins (generals) and civil mandarins (other government leaders). Apparently the only contact they had was to argue their (often conflicting) viewpoints before the emperor. I’m not sure things are much different in today’s Washington.

Vietnam is poor, much poorer than Ko Sumai, Vietnam. Many houses are hovels, others are smartly constructed narrow, vertical, stucco homes set amongst shacks. Why people build vertical homes isn’t clear, our guide said it was the high cost of land but I saw narrow homes where the people clearly had enough land to build wider. I wonder if it has to do with property taxes being based on ground-floor area? That would cause people to build upward to keep the ground-floor ‘footprint’ small. These vertical houses didn’t have a classically Asian feel about them. A fellow passenger called them French, a reflection of the colonial era. I don’t see it.

Public transport seems limited, I saw few buses devoted to anything except tourism. Road traffic consists of many motorcycles, mostly light-weight, some bicycles, a few buses, a very few autos, and many trucks, mostly large. I am not surprised that people prefer private motorcycles over public transport; where they can afford autos, people prefer them over public transport too. We did see one large piece of furniture, like an armoire, being delivered on a three-wheel bicycle. Oddly, we didn’t see tuk-tuks (three-wheeled motorcycles with a covered seat for two in back) like Thailand has used, possibly because the entrepreneurship needed to buy tuk-tuks and operate them as taxis isn’t permitted in a communist state.

It is odd to drive along immersed in Asian culture and then occasionally see a yellow hammer and sickle on a blood-red background. Communism feels “grafted-on” to Vietnamese society. My guess: someday it will disappear quickly here as it did in Russia.