HCMC-Hue

What Vietnamese trains lack in romance, they make up for in efficiency. If Metro North ran long-distance trains with sleeping cars, this is what they would look like---there's not a lot of romance in socialism. But the Hanoi-bound Reunification Express pulled out of Saigon Station---also non-atmospheric; was the French terminal building bombed?---promptly at one on Wednesday afternoon and delivered us on schedule Thursday morning at 8 in Hue.

The train's four-berth compartment was spartan, the bedding freshly laundered, and the one meal provided---rice and soup Wednesday at 5---edible. Two Vietnamese men entered our digs at 190:30 p.m., climbed to the upper berths, and went to sleep.

The train was plain but the scenery rich. Our window was only a little filthy, and anyway we could go out into the corridor, lower the window there, and hang out. (And warm up---the non-steerage cars of the train were frigid.)

At an average speed of 47 miles per hour (according to the Lonely Planet Guide, our god), the train rumbled across tropical hill and dale. There were the usual reassuring palms and banana trees, and rice fields, and also miles and miles of cashew groves---the Vietnamese, like the Cambodians, mostly eat the fruit (shaped like small bell peppers but pinkish) and sell the nut that grows off the bottom.

Sheets of veneer lay drying in the sun. There were cornfields, and bean vines growing up poles the size of telephone poles. We thought we saw big peppercorns drying on tarps, but those could have been dark beans. Once, Joe said, "This is the train trip we wanted."

Near the coast, we passed through a strangely arid area, like northern Mexico, and then it got wet again, with egrets posing in rice paddies, and then it was dark out, and we got out our books.

I read Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." (Or, it turned out, re-read it---I realized I had already read it in some past life, i.e., before leaving Pennsylvania.) On the train, I came to a passage where the decent, naive young American official Pyle, in Saigon in 1953 or so, worries to the older, harder British war correspondent Fowler that if the Viet Minh communists defeat the French, and "if Indochina goes..."

Fowler replies: "I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember---from a buffalo's point of view you are a European too."

This book was published in 1955---not bad. Greene was dead-on about the futility of the West's attempting to fiddle around with Southeast Asia. But the 500-year forecast I'm not so sure about. Like the rest of us around at the time, Greene did not know then about climate change. I haven't seen any forecasts about what global warming might mean for this region. But what if the monsoon rains double in intensity and inundate everybody and everything? Or what if the rains drift elsewhere and leave Southeast Asia high and dry?

Vietnamese agriculture has survived communism; these people are far too practical to muck up their own food supply. But can farmers here survive an American culture of SUVs and every tot brandishing a Weed Whacker? And of half of China and India in their own versions of carbon-dioxide-spewing Model Ts? And what about Saigon's own millions of fossil-fuel-eating motorbikes? Whatever the case, we're likely to know in far fewer than 500 years whether or not the small boys will continue sitting on the buffaloes.

In Hue, the handsome old Nguyen dynasty capital, just south of the pre-war "demilitarized zone," we adapted up again. In a droll attempt to gain good Internet access, we booked an upper-mid-range hotel called the Huong Giang. But with all the gleaming marble and stainless steel, and with all the daintily appointed rooms featuring bamboo elements that were decorative rather than structural, and with all the chirpy "Good morning, Sirs"s and "Have a good meal, Sirs"s endlessly raining down upon us, many things in this place did not work so well.

The computer set-up---or "business center"---was a washout. A hotel worker tipped us off early not to bother. "The connection is not good," she said anxiously. Twice or more daily, we witnessed seried rank upon seried rank of Alsacians and Milanese glowering at computer screen informing them that "this page cannot be displayed." We thought of it as The Room of Throwing Up the Hands. (None of the local Internet cafes were up to the task either. Joe got two photos onto the blog at another hotel, until we were politely chased out for not being hotel guests. I'm posting this from Hanoi, where Joe has some hope of uploading pix.)

Worse could happen to us than a funnily inept hotel---we know that. Mai pen rai. Not, however, at 90 bucks a night, 50 (or 80) more than we customarily spend. But we'll long remember the Huong Giang. One night we saw a farang tour group seated inside the off-the-lobby Korean restaurant (we suspect the hotel is Korean-owned) gotten up in colorful silk "oriental" costumes as they fumbled with their chop sticks. One morning when the maid asked Joe, "Did you sleep well?"---all the staff have been hilariously over-programmed---he replied, "Very well, thank you. And how did you sleep?" That stumped her. At breakfast yesterday, where the swags on the buffet table reminded Joe of "cartoon ponies' eyelids," a large tour group arrived which Joe thought looked just like "the Pittsfield Country Club crowd." (You know who you are.)

Good things about so far unduly maligned Hue: It's a pretty, mid-sized city of French-built avenues and tree-lined streets on two sides of the Susquehanna-like Perfume river. The restaurants are good, with local specialties such as tasty glutinous rice cakes with crispy shrimp suspended inside, and a flat, pasta-like shrimp concoction that's steamed inside a banana leaf. Plus standard (i.e., superb) Vietnamese chicken, beef and pork soups and fried dishes. (A French place makes a mean house salad that I wolfed down without middle-of-the-night consequences. Travel in this region really has changed in that regard. The sign outside the Red Piano cafe in Siem Reap, Cambodia, promises "Style-Quality-Comfort-Hygeine-since 2002." And it was true. The bottled water is safe too. The label on the Uy Mey New Day Pure Drinking Water bottle in Phnom Penh guaranteed "Pure water, testing through DEIONNIZED highly isolating substance and germ, keeps in high quality.")

The other attractions in Hue include the Citadel, a fortified imperial complex built in the early 19th century. It was badly damaged in a post-Tet offensive major battle in 1968 (a cyclo driver whose services I declined yelled after me "Citadel---American bombs! American bombs!") and then left to crumble by the communists, who saw it as a relic of Vietnam's feudal past. Ten years ago the city of Hue saw tourism potential in the Citadel, and now it's a Unesco World Heritage site under restoration.

The Citadel is fun to amble around in, but even better is the Thien Mu pagoda, south of town. You take a "dragon boat" down the river to get there. The 1844 seven-story pagoda is an imposing tower with a lot of history, the most compelling being modern. The monks here organized protests against the crooked and repressive Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the 1960s, and again in the 1980s when the communists were behaving similarly.

In 1963, a Thien Mu monk, Thich Quang Duc, was driven to Saigon in a robin's egg blue Austin sedan---it's on display near the pagoda---and publicly immolated himself to protest Diem's treatment of Buddhists. The news photo is part of history. Madame Ngu, Diem's sister-in-law, applauded this "barbecue party." Later that year, Diem was toppled---and murdered---with the approval of the CIA.

Even more architectually impressive than Thien Mu is the tomb of the Emeror Tu Duc (1848-83), built in the 1860s. This series of gracefully executed stone and brick buildings and monuments is set on some friendly low hills among groves of pine and frangipani trees. The emperor's geomancer, or feng shui expert, made sure the site had the approval of Tu Duc's ancestors.

More importantly for visitors today, the designers produced hyacinth ponds, moats, walls and buildings---residences, temples, family sepulchres, stelae---that were so elegantly and organically woven into the landscape that they give the sensation almost of having floated into place. (Actually, forced labor was employed.) Even the shadowy woods---the day we were there was overcast---felt protective and welcoming, a fine place to be laid to rest or just to take one.