~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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Main street, Vietnam

HO CHI MINH HIGHWAY - The tangle of pathways and dirt roads known collectively as the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a logistical jugular vein for Communist forces during the Vietnam War. Saturation bombings and chemical defoliants failed to sever the legendary supply line, which meandered southward from Communist North Vietnam, fanned out into neighboring Laos and Cambodia and penetrated deep into the pro-American South.

Now, an initial investment of $800 million and the sweat of 30,000 laborers is transforming the low-tech trail into Vietnam's best highway. More than a generation after the war ended in a Communist victory, the road -- named for the country's revolutionary hero, Bac "Uncle" Ho -- is opening up the remote highlands in central Vietnam to road trippers.

The Ho Chi Minh Highway resonates in the national imagination largely because it evokes the wartime trail -- an almost mythical symbol of sacrifice and triumph over awesome odds. To help legitimize the highway, the government is trying to portray it as a successor to the trail. Along many sections of the road, signs in red and yellow -- the colors of the national flag -- form gauntlets of revolutionary slogans. Vietnam languished for years as a Soviet-bloc backwater, but now it's making up for lost time. Its communist rulers have embraced market reforms, as in China, and normalized relations with the U.S., penetrated new markets with exports like shoes and shrimp, and joined the World Trade Organization. Designer brands, stock portfolios and driving lessons are the new status symbols. Vietnam is still largely a poor country but as exports boom and parts of the economy begin to prosper, the government is investing in massive public works projects such as the highway.

Although many Americans still associate Vietnam with war and suffering, many others now see it as an edgy vacation destination. About 3.6 million foreigners arrived here last year, a 22% increase over 2004. For travelers, a trip on the highway is a chance to go beyond the obvious places, like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and see another side of Vietnam, from craggy mountains and forests to once-remote hamlets where most people rarely glimpse Westerners.

There are few hotels or restaurants yet along the highway, but it's ideal for adventurous day trips between cities and away from the crowded coast. For a taste of the road in central Vietnam, travelers can start out from the old capital of Hue, where they can tour historic sites such as the imperial fortress and elaborate pagodas, or the coastal city of Da Nang, known for its white-sand beaches and luxury resorts. Language is an issue, so hiring a guide will help travelers who want to learn about local wildlife or meet ethnic minority people and barter with them for hand-woven baskets and other handicrafts. Eventually, the government hopes the road will stimulate cultural and eco-tourism throughout the Central Highlands.

I recently traveled for three days along a rugged section, driving south from around Da Nang. Although I worked in Vietnam as a reporter for three years in the early 1990s and married a Hanoi artist, I had never roamed this part of the country before. I was struck by its aboriginal isolation. The breakneck changes in the rest of Vietnam seem largely to have passed it by. The Ho Chi Minh Highway follows sections of the wartime trail for much of its length and weaves them together with many sections that are new. It winds for about 865 miles so far, from the town of Hoa Lac, near the capital Hanoi, to Kontum in the Central Highlands. By 2014, the highway will extend all the way from Vietnam's northern border to its southernmost tip, for a total cost of $2.6 billion. The government touts the two-lane highway as vital for developing tourism and the backward economy of sparsely settled regions along the country's rugged western frontier. Planners also justify the new road as important for national security, although officials won't say what the threats might be.

But critics, many of them foreign, have panned the project. Some say the road will only benefit communities that are close to it, and they argue that the government could have invested its money more productively in, say, schools or nationwide Internet training. Others point out landslides caused by highway construction, although the government says the highway doesn't cause harm to nature.

Conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Fund worry that the new road will make it easier for illegal loggers and poachers to ravage rich wilderness areas. WWF is particularly concerned for the saola, an antelope-like creature so rare that biologists estimate there are no more than 500 still alive -- all of them in Vietnam and Laos. Scientists believe the saola's main habitat is a patch of what the WWF calls "ever-wet forest" bisected by the highway in the Truong Son Mountains of central Vietnam. In a study to be released this month, the group will urge the government to create and protect a reserve of at least 25,000 hectares for the saola. Barney Long, WWF's Central Truong Son Landscape Coordinator who works closely with local academics and scientists on behalf of the non-government organization, guides me along the Ho Chi Minh Highway where it slices through lush forest along the Laotian border between the towns of Prao and A Luoi. Except for bird songs and the trickling of streams, the mountains here are breathtakingly quiet. Fog lurks in gulches below us, and entire trees, roots and all, have tumbled on to the asphalt from steep hillsides above. Alas, we see no signs of the shy saola -- or many other humans.

A jumble of one-room, wooden houses -- many on stilts and most lacking paint -- straddles the road in Xoi Mot, a hamlet near the WWF's hoped-for saola sanctuary. The villagers here belong to the Co-tu minority; they speak their own language and are wary of outsiders. One woman scurries into a bamboo thicket when I greet her. Blieng Hong, a subsistence farmer and mother of five, is more chatty. She says she used to hike for seven hours to reach the nearest market, often carrying a rattan backpack filled with cassava roots. She'd barter the cassava for salt, clothing and other provisions and stuff them into her bag for the long trip home. Now, thanks to the highway, traders, most of them members of the ethnic Kinh majority, come directly to her. "Only the Kinh people know how to do business. We are learning from them -- but I haven't learned anything yet," Ms. Hong says.

As I continue south near the village of Ro, children on adults' bicycles careen back and forth across the highway ahead of me, navigating an obstacle course of buffalo dung on the blacktop. Rounding a blind curve, I almost collide with a pair of water buffalo ambling toward me in the middle of our -- their -- lane. Many of the dominant Kinh have long looked down on the minorities living in these remote highlands. Even today, Kinh people commonly refer to the highlanders as "moi," or "savages." The highway is compounding the pressures on these minorities to abandon their traditional lifestyles. Some critics worry that the highway could seal the fate of these unique mountain cultures, as ever more Kinh settle here and impose their rules, such as a ban on slash-and-burn agriculture.

In the city of Kontum, North Vietnamese army veteran Than Tram Luy recalls life on the trail as a feral nightmare. The 80-year-old says he scavenged plantains and other wild vegetables and hunted monkeys and boar. He endured leeches and hunkered in foxholes while B-52 bombers obliterated the jungle -- a lot of those bombs never exploded, posing a lethal hazard to highway-building crews years later. "The Trail bore the human talent and material resources for unifying the country," says Mr. Luy, "and now it is helping to bring Vietnam into the modern era."

By Bruce Stanley - The Wall Street Journal - August 3, 2007.