Vacation Tour of Vietnam: Anyone for Durian?

Vietnam was one of my History papers at University (circa 1986) and I had to travel up by train from my campus in Berkshire to attend once-a-week tutorials at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Quite a simple commute you might think but between Goodge Street underground station and my lecture room there stands The School of Eastern European Studies and their excellent union bar. My very good friend Jas attended this bar (sorry...school!) and our pre-tutorial drink, more often than not, extended right through the lesson and on into the late afternoon. My slack and absentee attitude was far from conducive to attaining knowledge so it was with relative ignorance that I landed in the ancient capital of Hue about 23 years later. I did however learn from a pop song of about the same mid-eighties era that the average age of US soldiers sent to fight the Viet-Cong was 19 ( as in n-n-n-nineteen)! In over a decade of fighting they lost about 60,000 men; 5,000 helicopters and 3,700 fixed-wing aircraft. The total cost was over $165 billion. In contrast VC fatalities were a million with another four million civilians snuffed out. Not only did they bomb the be-Jesus out of the place but they sprayed so much agent orange over the forests and napalm and phosphorous bombs on the people ( it melts the flesh) that still, to this day, forests are struggling to regenerate and children are being born with gross deformities. Perhaps the UN should send a few inspectors to the States to insure they don't do it again! There is a museum in Ho Chi Minh City that displays 'some pictures of US Imperialists' Aggressive War Crimes in Vietnam' not forgetting the infamous My Lai massacre where unarmed civilians (mainly women and children) were slaughtered by Uncle Sam's soldiers. Although slanted...the evidence is all  there to see. Perhaps Messrs Bush and Blair should have spent half an hour looking around this strangely named ' War Remnants Museum' before invading Iraq as it might have made them think twice.

However, the Vietnamese are an extremely forgiving people and everybody is welcomed into their country. Statues of Ho Chi Minh smile down benignly on you in many town centres and there are hammers and sickles and gold-starred red flags fluttering from posts outside almost every building. It is communism-lite here...a kind of soft-doctrinal version of the original concept...and it seems to work. Capitalism rubs alongside the old order and the infrastructure has kept pace with a boom in tourism. They say Vietnam is the new Thailand but I'm inclined to think it's gone over the top and will soon begin to loose its appeal. All the tourist sights have been wrapped up and packaged...anathema to a traveller seeking discovery and adventure far from the beaten track. Resorts have mushroomed along its lengthy coastline and the locals seem to have lost much of their innocence. Admittedly we only travelled through South Vietnam but I grew tired of holding out my hand for the rest of my change as the shopkeeper  looked up furtively to ascertain whether I'd correctly counted or missed the extra 50,000 dong note ( about $3 ) that I was due.

We spent a good 10 days  just taking it easy in Hoi An and Mui Ne and spend a good deal of time whipping through the countryside on scooters exploring the many Cham temple ruins/ sand dunes/fishing villages etc...This was really just holiday time for us so perhaps we didn't do as much as was possible. When you have been travelling for as long and as extensively as we had (over 5 months and counting up until Vietnam)  you eventually run out of new things to do or see. It really becomes quite a challenge in itself just thinking of new experiences and they become more bizarre and seemingly insignificant the further down the track you go. It is into this category that the following episode falls and even then it was new only to Julia and not myself. We'd been keeping half an eye open for one of these over the course of our Far Eastern travels and it was only a few days ago, whilst staying in the Mekong Delta, that we finally stumbled across one of these delicacies as previously they'd been out of season. Anybody whose travelled out east will have heard of the Durian fruit and I have not met two people who have described its taste and smell in a similar way. Rotten meat and custard crops up quite often as does decomposing eggs and rancid butter. It's an acquired taste and the locals love it in the same way that the Russians (and I for that matter) love caviar. It's also very expensive by Vietnamese standards and due to its overpowering smell you are forbidden from taking it into public places. For me it smells of mature compost or rotting vegetation and the flesh around each of its four large seeds (for this is the only edible part) falls off like an over-ripe camembert. The taste is extremely strong and rich: a bit like eating spoonfuls of brandy butter with the alcohol missing. On a tree it resembles a spikier yet slightly smaller jackfruit...but I for one won't be scaling its tree for second helpings!

One last observation on Saigon itself before signing off. When I'd previously thought of this city I'd conjured up pictures if thousands of people wearing conical hats and seated atop rickety bicycles. Indeed this was the case a couple of decades ago but  now, however, it is the land of the Honda Dream and a nightmare if you're trying to cross one of its wider boulevards. In Cannes they have the Croisette and in Barcelona Las Ramblas but in Saigon they don't take the evening air on foot but pack the whole family and their dog ( true...I've seen it) on the family scooter and cruise around the centre for a couple of hours once dusk settles. It's a truly amazing sight: think of the start of the London Marathon but put everyone on motorcycles. The noise is deafening but it's strangely compelling just standing there watching the world buzz around...and around and around and around!