A niche of Vietnam resistant to change
Breakfast at the Morin Hotel in Hue was a game of Russian roulette. As my husband, Tad, and I sat sipping Vietnamese coffee in the courtyard, nuts from the bang trees above us dropped like bombs onto the stone patio. I asked our waiter, Dinh, if they ever hit people. "Yes," he said, pointing to his forearm and shoulder with a shrug. "One broke a table."
If you're not left unconscious, the Morin's terrace can be quite pleasant, a refuge from the choking summer heat and the buzz of motor scooters in central Hue. Small birds with bright yellow beaks - called chim sao - hop around, scavenging food from your table.
"They follow the farmers," Dinh told us. "We used to have 10. Now there are only four or five."
"Maybe they went to another hotel," Tad said.
"No," Dinh replied, taking him seriously, "no better place than here."
At the moment, that's true. But the Morin, a landmark since 1901, is a four-star hotel, and the tourism boom here has led to the construction of five-star hotels all around the city.
For nearly two decades, Vietnam's two big metropolises, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), have embraced capitalism and the modern world. But here in the center of the country, a belt of land only about 60 kilometers, or about 40 miles, wide, that acts as a divider between the north and the south - and that consequently saw some of the Vietnam War's fiercest battles - the mood is often less aggressive. As we saw in Hue when we went there last summer, and later when we drove down Route 1 through Da Nang to the old fishing town of Hoi An, change is met with a mixture of desire and reluctance.
Small vendors continue to sell bunches of temple incense gathered like colored brooms. Grooming is still done right on the street, with sidewalk salons for ear cleaning and facials that are conducted by running a thread over a customer's face in tiny strokes. And although motor scooters have taken over even in the villages, water buffaloes are never far from view.
Our guide for several days was Do Ba Dat, a reticent man with dark still eyes and cheekbones like hamburger buns. On our first morning together, we headed toward the Perfume River - some say its name, Huong Giang, should translate as Fragrant River - to board a narrow old wooden motorboat. Bamboo fishing boats crowded the riverbank across from us. Children were jumping into the water from a nearby island.
Gia Long, the first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, ordered the planting of fragrant trees along the river in the early 1800s, and much of the riverfront remains grassy and untouched. As we headed west, Dat said little, except to point out an imposing modern tower on the riverbank. "This is a water purification tower," he said, proudly.
Just as the temperature reached 103, we docked upriver and walked into the old Thien Mu pagoda and monastery.
In 1963, an elderly monk from Thien Mu, Thich Quang Duc, set himself on fire to protest President Ngo Dinh Diem's policies of discrimination against Buddhists. The baby blue Austin in which the monk made his fatal trip to Saigon is kept in an open building, where it rusts slowly in the room next to where the monks eat their meals.
Atop the car is a grim photo of Quang Duc sitting in the lotus position, his body consumed by flames. A fire extinguisher sits nearby.
"The Green Berets were stationed 45 miles from here," Dat said, in one of his many sudden, oblique references to the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese refer to as "the American War").
The war was never far from view (at the Citadel, which once contained the royal palace - a small-scale version of Beijing's Forbidden City - the walls are still peppered with bullet holes from the Tet offensive, and some of Hue's nightclubs have names like "Apocalypse New"). But while no one expressed resentment about American involvement in their country's affairs, no one wanted to talk about it much, either.
Surrounding Hue are a number of emperors' tombs, many built as summer retreats and eventual burial sights. We arrived at the tomb of Tu Duc, the 19th-century emperor who had the longest reign - 35 years- of the Nguyen dynasty, at noon, when the temperature had soared to a level that I never wish to repeat. Tu Duc spent summers in Hue, and the pondside pavilion where he would write poetry and relax with his concubines - "a boring job," Dat said - still stands among frangipani trees.
Tu Duc is one of the few emperors who left a postmortem of his job performance. On a large stone table near his tomb, Tu Duc criticizes himself for losing to the French and for lacking a direction. He did build a lovely tomb, though.
Afterward, we stopped at one of the outdoor cafés along the Dong Ba canal; they are packed together so tightly it's hard to know which one you're in.
After three days in Hue, we left early for a daylong drive through Da Nang to Hoi An, following Route 1 - sometimes referred to as the "route of the mandarins" - which runs like a vein through Vietnam from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The route took us on a high-speed trip through the tiny theaters of Vietnamese daily life.
As our car weaved around motor scooters and bicycles, we passed a woman on her haunches wearing a non (the conical peasant hat) and splitting wood; women carrying babies; computer stores and coffin shops; rice fields; haystacks for cooking fuel; bungalows and new McMansions trapped behind iron fences. The villages are small and pass by in a breath.
After about two hours on the road, we began climbing Cloudy Pass, a harrowing stretch that marks the country's climate divide, separating the wet north from the dry, hot south. At the top, Dat pointed out Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where the first regular U.S. ground troops landed in March 1965. To the east was Monkey Mountain, a spit of land, and to the south, Da Nang, nestled by mountains, hung under a band of haze. During the war, Da Nang was called "shelled city," because the Communist forces attacked it from all angles.
We stopped in Da Nang for the only reason anyone stops in Da Nang: to see the Cham Museum, at the south end of town. The open-air galleries are jammed with Cham sculpture, mostly from the 9th to the 11th centuries, which was a great moment for free expression.
One of the treats of Vietnam is fresh-pressed sugar cane juice. In the late afternoon in Hoi An, about 27 kilometers south of Da Nang, the cafés along the Thu Bon River fill with people drinking beer, eating rice cakes and drinking gallons of the cane juice, called nuoc mia. It comes out of the press pale green and cloudy with a fluff of foam on top. It's sweet, zesty - due to being pressed with tiny limes - and pleasantly faint.
Hoi An, which means "peaceful life union," is a sleepy place easily traversed on foot. When we strolled through the central market one afternoon, nearly all the vendors were napping, some lying on bags of rice, others with feet propped up on piles of dried beans.
But the inevitable reorientation to tourists has begun, and it is hard to escape the town's many energetic tailors.
Hoi An's charm is its historic buildings, whose architecture was heavily influenced by immigrants from Japan and China. At Fujian Assembly Hall, a Chinese-style community center, a wooden model of a junk stood near sculptures of the man of the sun and the woman of the moon, two magical Chinese gods. At the back of the hall were altars to deities for beauty, wealth and social position.
A group of young men wearing T-shirts that said "Netnam" - the Microsoft of Vietnam - crowded in behind us. They were there to pray to Tan Tai Cong, the tycoon deity who determines people's financial future. If an entrepreneur's prayers are granted, he is supposed to return to thank the deity. If he fails to, it is certain death - or, at the very least, social ostracism.
The Netnam group reminded me of Phan Thuan An, an elderly scholar and relic of a vanishing Vietnam, whom we had met earlier in Hue. He would have been pleased to know that these techies were keeping up old traditions, although he would have been scandalized to see T-shirts in the temple. Thuan An is a member of the former royal family, and his painstaking documentation of the palace helped the Imperial City in Hue win status as a World Heritage Site.
When we visited him at his traditional house in Hue, he was wearing an ao trong, the white two-piece tunic and pants, with a pair of wooden clogs. He took us for a tour of the grounds of his home, designed in a feng shui style with a koi pond in the center and a screen of bamboo at the back. Inside, he showed us the altar dedicated to his ancestors. It was piled with mangoes and cake and his grandmother's ivory chopsticks - a time capsule in a time capsule.
Like many people in a country undergoing so much change, Thuan An is worried about Hue's future.
"If more people come here, the atmosphere in the city is not good," he said. "The number of foreign visitors, they destroy the cultural atmosphere in our city. When they go to the pagoda, and to the Imperial City, they wear shorts. I don't know what to say."
By Amanda Hesser - The New York Times - September 01, 2005.
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