Dateline: DaNang, Vietnam. We did a tour to famous Da Nang today, driving south on Highway 1, the national highway, paralleling the one and only railroad in the country which runs from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). This is the second time we’ve driven along this RR and I’ve yet to see an engine, moving cars or even sitting still. Today we did see some freight cars sitting on a siding near the tunnel north of Da Nang. Our guide, Minh, said there were two passenger trains a day but added we should take a short trip before committing to a long trip as these trains are noisy and dirty. I’ve yet to see one but I guess he was accurate about their existence. He claims it was built by the French, and appears to be narrow-gauge.
I think I got an answer about the tall, narrow houses you see all over this part of ‘Nam. Minh says that everybody wants a house that fronts on the main street because they want to be able to operate a small business out of the ground floor and need street frontage to do so. Therefore main street frontage is what is expensive, more than acreage. So you get these narrow, deep, tall dwellings/shops. Not every homeowner wants to operate a shop but every owner wants to be able to do so, if only to increase the resale value or to have a shop to rent out.
The whole Da Nang area has great beaches and is ripe for development, it will be the next Phuket. We spent time today in Hoi An, a town near Da Nang that has been named a World Heritage Site, as an unspoiled old town. As a result there are a bunch of tourists there, not just off our ship. If you want to visit a town in Vietnam where your white skin and round eyes won’t make you an oddity, Hoi An is that town. In Hoi An we saw non-Vietnamese who included everything from backpacking teens to families to geriatric dodderers.
Vietnam is having the same problem other agricultural societies have had; farm kids want to go to the city and do something that doesn’t require wading knee deep in a mixture of mud and human waste in the broiling sun. We saw people doing that today in the rice paddies; it is picturesque but none of us volunteered to try it. This is a poor country which intentionally uses labor-intensive methods in lieu of capital-intensive ones. We saw six people manning three highway toll booths, what is the point of that?
Vietnam’s hawkers of tourist trinkets are as persistent as those in Egypt, although are less likely to mistaken for terrorists. This persistence can be ugly when you cannot get rid of them. We only hit that a couple of times today, mostly it wasn’t bad. One such time was at the top of a pass just north of Da Nang.
This pass, in the minds of Vietnamese, divides the country into northerners and southerners. It is where the weather often switches from colder, cloudier north to sunnier, warmer south. It is NOT where the old DMZ was, not the dividing point between the pre-1975 North Vietnam and South Vietnam. That was some 100 km north on the 17th parallel. The pass is defended with both ancient and modern fortifications, the most recent built by the U.S. pre-1973. All are merely curiosities in a unified Vietnam.
Interestingly, northerners and southerners in Vietnam have stereotypes of each other in the same way that they do in the U.S. One overall impression: Vietnam looks more "Asian" than do the major cities of China or Taiwan, or Thailand for that matter.
