14th July, 2002: Vientiane, Laos

Arrived in Vientiane (Laos) after a sweaty, knee-breaking, and generally hellish 33 hour bus ride from Hanoi. Supposed to be "only" 22 hours (non-stop in an air con bus - ho ho ho), it involved abandoned / evicted passengers, corrupt border guards, and drug-running passengers. When we arrived at 2 am we got on a tuk tuk to the town centre, which then ran out of petrol. Finally we made it to town only to find the first 6 hotels we tried were all full...

Now that my legs are working again I have had a look around - this place has the best French colonial architecture I've seen anywhere so far, and lots of temples and monks in bright orange robes. This means that I will be taking lots more slightly amusing photos of monks doing un-monk-like things, such as watching football on the box, smoking, and sending text messages. Vientiane is also the only capital city I've ever seen to have no cinemas, cash points, or traffic to speak of.

It's a far cry from the hectic streets of Hanoi, alive with the romantic sounds of tooting moped horns, irritating ice-cream vendor jingles (Dean and Saskia, you know the one), and the incessant calls of: "You! You! Motorbike!", to which I am always tempted to reply: "You! You! Annoying!". The old quarter of Hanoi was quite interesting. It consists of 36 streets named after the merchandise that was originally sold on that street, such as: Hang Cot = Bamboo Lattice St., and Thuoc Bac = Herbal Medicine St. However, someone clearly needs to tell the Hanoi authorities to change the street names in order to bring them up to date: some examples include Pirate DVD St., Cheap Plastic Chinese-made Toy St., and Internet Cafe / Rip-off Bus Ticket St.

I caught my first train in Vietnam (for which tourists pay 4 times what the locals pay) which was quite an experience: faced with a choice of hard sleeper, soft sleeper, and soft seat, for a 16 hour night train, I chose hard sleeper as it was the cheapest and I was in a hard-core budget travelling mood. Big mistake. Despite being assured it was a "thin mattress", I arrived to find a small sweaty cabin with 6 large wooden shelves, just big enough to fit a Vietnamese person on each. The bars on the windows and doors added to the whole Auschwitz atmosphere. Four of these "beds" were occupied - by 6 people! Yes, not satisfied with the already laughably cheap price of $4, this family had squeezed 6 people into 4 bunks to save money. My mattress was a thin bamboo beach mat, and my pillow had been taken by one of the sleeping Vietnamese. To say I slept well would be bending the truth. Lets just say that when I got to Hanoi I pushed the boat out and got an air-con room with satellite telly and my own bathroom for the exorbitant price of 3 dollars!

The traffice in Vietnamese cities is pure chaos - huge herds of mopeds and no apparent rules of the road. For a while we weren't sure if they drove on the left or the right. Crossing the road was at first a daunting prospect - after standing and waiting for a gap for some time, we noticed several people, including a decrepit old woman - had miraculously managed to cross without getting hit. After a few near-misses we soon discovered that the trick is to step out into the street with barely a glance towards the oncoming traffic, and without breaking stride. Then you maintain this pace without looking at the oncoming traffic, and above all you don't stop or run. They just go round you - it's quite scary at first but after a while you feel like Moses parting the red sea.

On a trip to Halong bay, an amazing world-heritage seascape of hundreds of jungly islands with sheer rock-faces descending into the sea, I got talking to our guide, a smart young girl with good english. I was curious about how communism works in practice, and we eventually got around to the subject of censorship. She told me that the government controls everything broadcast on television and radio by restricting which cable channels are allowed, and the newspapers are all state-run. Even the BBC is not allowed. There is also a huge list of books which are not allowed to be published. She explained that the government thinks it's a bad idea, for example, that people should read books about young people living together without being married, because it's wrong. Also, a lot of books about the american war published outside Vietnam are banned because the information they contain is "wrong" (i.e. different to what the propaganda machine of Vietnam want sthe people to believe).

I explained that in the west we believe that we should be able to read both sides of the story and make up our own mind. I then asked her what she thought of the fact that the government decides what she should and shouldn't be able to read. She said she thought it was a good idea. My jaw dropped. We soon established that she really did support the government's policy to protect society from "social evils", even if by doing so they could prevent publication of different political viewpoints and hence control political dissent. Wow. Most of the other tourists who had been listening in were also pretty shocked at her naivete. Government indoctrination and brainwashing, or protection from "Social Evils" and Western hedonism? You decide.

Saw some pretty funny examples of Government propaganda when I visited the "Hanoi Hilton", the French-built jail where American POWs were held during the Vietnam war, now a museum. The constant rhetoric about the "heroic patriots", subjected to "barbarous repression" by the "colonial masters" was quite entertaining. The funniest caption we found, though, was this one about the treatment of american POWs:

"Despite the untold evil and vicious crimes committed against the innocent people of North Vietnam by the US imperialist dogs, American prisoners kept here were well treated..."

I see.

Found dog on the menu the other day, along with frog, snake and pigeon. Perhaps this is why Hanoi seems to be lacking the packs of mangy dogs that haunt all the other big Asian cities I've seen.

Later,

Matt

PS For those of you who don't know DMZ stands for De-Militarized Zone.