Almost There

Nha Trang, 3440 km from the start (and less than 500 from Saigon)

I'm in the bustling beach tourist town of Nha Trang and I'm not impressed with it. Partly it's that it's a noisy concrete jungle like Surfer's Paradise or Ibiza, and partly it's the contrast with the absolutely perfect beach I have just arrived from. Whatever the case, I'm not lingering, and should be on the road first thing tomorrow morning.

I think I last wrote from Hoi An. I spent an extra, unexpected day off the bike there when I overslept and decided it was too late to set off that day. It was a nice day, spent sketching, playing guitar, reading and eating, and was well worth it.

My first day back on the bike was the first day of June, which brought home to me how little time I have left; I fly out of Saigon on the 21st of June. I laid down a big day of 144 km in tremendous heat. Luckily the ride was interrupted by a few sights to see, most notably two Cham Towers. The Cham, an Indianized state along the central and south-central Vietnamese coast, built a whole series of tall red brick Hindu temples that have survived to the present as just about the only really old structures in the country. In Hoi An I did a day trip to My Son, the longest-occupied and biggest Cham temple site. What the ravages of time hadn't done to the My Son temples, US bombs and helicopter-borne sapper teams did, and the biggest temples there were blown to smithereens in 1969 to prevent the VC from using them. On my ride south from Hoi An on June 1st, I took a look at two temple complexes, Chien Dang and Khuong My. Amazingly, although these towers loom high over the countryside at 25 metres in height, I managed to bike right past both of them, located 50 metres from the road, even though I was specifically looking for them. I really liked both sites, as they were utterly deserted and allowed me to poke around and take photos at leisure. There were some bits of sculpture frieze left on the buildings, which to me always really makes a building interesting. Architecture is OK, but sculpture stirs the soul of this ruins-hound.

At the end of that day, I followed an endless dusty dirt track to a beach near Son My. That name may not mean much to you, but one of the tiny hamlets in this district was called My Lai. Ring any bells? By coincidence, in a week when the US military is being investigated for an alleged massascre (or several) of civilians in Iraq, I visited the site of the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War, in which 500 civilians were gunned down, blown up with grenades, raped and bayoneted by US soldiers in March, 1968, in reprisal for attacks on US troops. The next morning, I visited the memorial site and its museum. Only one soldier, Lieutenant William Calley, ever faced disciplinary action for this massacre, and he served 3 years of house arrest before being released. Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who stopped Calley's platoon's rampage by interposing his helicopter between civilians and Calley's men and training his heavy machine gun on the US soldiers, died sometime in the last year and I read his obituary in The Economist. The obit mentioned that when he testified at a US Senate hearing into the case, one senator told him that "the only soldier who should be court-martialled for what happened at My Lai is you, you traitor." This kind of "my country right or wrong" attitude is, sadly, all too prevalent today.

I left the Son My memorial deeply moved, and even more impressed than ever by the Vietnamese capacity not to hold a grudge. Anyone over the age of 45 in that area would have known someone personally who died in that massacre, and yet the older people I saw along the road were uniformly friendly and smiling and welcoming.

A short day (78 km) brought me to the pretty bay of Sa Huynh, where I ate well and loafed on the beach all afternoon. On the way into town, I met a 12-year-old girl whose parents ran a little shop who spoke good English and was completely self-possessed and calmly confident. I really enjoyed talking to her. I meet a few Vietnamese who speak good English, but most of them are either working in the tourist trade or English teachers. To be that good at English while living in a nowhere highway town is remarkable, particularly as she told me that she had never talked to a real live foreigner before. It was one of the really positive, soul-warming encounters I have had with the Vietnamese for a good long while.

A longer day, of 127 km, brought me to the major town of Quy Nhon on June 3rd. It was made longer by my attempts to add 3 more Cham towers to my collection. I missed one of them (again!) after nobody I asked had any clue and all gave me conflicting directions. By the time I found someone who knew, I was an hour down the road and loath to turn back. I did, however, find another tower not in my guidebook, as well as the site of the second Cham capital. The Cham, over the course of centuries, were pushed southwards by the Chinese-influenced Vietnamese state centred around Hanoi, and sometime around 1000 their first capital, near Hoi An and My Son, fell to the Vietnamese and they moved a few hundred kilometres south. This second capital was the one which the Khmer kingdom of Angkor captured in the 13th century in a campaign depicted in great detail on some of the temple and palace walls of Angkor. Not much left these days except for fragments of a wall and one tower under restoration. From the central hill, I spotted another tower in the distance to which I duly headed. This one, Banh It, was the most atmospheric of all, atop a hill, buffeted with cool gale-force winds and contrasting wonderfully with the blue sky and distant ocean. I lingered there, sketching and taking photos, before setting off into the teeth of the gale into town. A boy on a bicycle passed me and he and I raced all the way into town; he did well and kept up with me, but stayed drafting behind me; when I dropped back and made him lead, our speed dropped dramatically. I managed to cycle past yet another Cham Tower in the process, and had to backtrack to see it. It was a good day; 4 Cham Towers and two swims.

The wind continued the next day, making the ride to the Soviet-style new town of Tuy Hoa longer than expected. I entered town along a new boulevard wide enough to land a 747 on, found a hotel and then went out to check out the inevitable Cham Tower (another nice hilltop location, but crowded with picnickers). I ate my favourite Vietnamese meal (nem lui, roll-yer-own kebab spring rolls) and crashed, tired out by the wind, the heat and the appalling dullness of National Route 1A.

It was a perfect day to make a detour off the hated highway. Unfortunately, the detour didn't happen until after I stopped for a swim and came back to find that someone had filched my watch and emptied my wallet (which only had the day's budget in it, luckily). As it was the third time I'd had things stolen in Vietnam, I can now officially state that travelling in Vietnam is as risky for your material possessions as is travelling in western Europe (where I also had things stolen 3 times; that time it was more valuable things, though). Luckily the thief, who had to work fast, didn't realize that my camera equipment was all in my camera bag on the front handlebars, or I would really have had a fit, instead of just muttering imprecations as I rode off. In my annoyance, I forgot to attach my swimsuit to the back bag on my bike to dry, and it blew off somewhere along the road.

In an annoyed mood, then, I cycled 22 km onto a peninsula just north of Nha Trang to the Jungle Beach Resort. I once ate every evening meal for a month at another Jungle Beach Resort, on Havelock Island in the idyllic Andamans, and this one was very similar. At the end of a road, with zero traffic, far enough from a village to hear no karaoke or motorcycles, backing onto dense jungle, with a long, deserted beach out front, it was just what I had been craving. I realized that, aside from the nights I spent on Mt. Fansipan and one night in the Northeast, it was the only time I haven't stayed in a decent-sized town with all the noise, annoyance and general unpleasantness that that entails in Vietnam. It took a place like this, developed by a Canadian guy, to escape from the horrible model of tourist development that Vietnam has chosen for itself.

I spent two days doing very little, and loving it. I swam a lot, I read a lot (devouring Joe Simpson's magnificent The Beckoning Silence), I played guitar, I contemplated chess problems, I watched the sun set and the wonderful southern stars come out. I ate exquisite meals, chatted with the occasional other guests (practicing my French and my very rusty Russian) and completely unplugged from Vietnam. It was by far the nicest place I stayed in Vietnam and it was rather sad to realize that this was because it was insulated from the ugly, annoying aspects of modern Vietnam. I certainly hope that Phu Quoc Island is another haven of tropical peace at the end of the trip. Until then, I'll grin and bear it, and keep a closer eye on my possessions.

It was a short spin into town today, which was just as well as it was harder than ever to ride along the squalid, noisy, smog-choked strip of misery which is Route 1A. Tomorrow, though, should be my last full day on 1A before I turn off to Dalat and then take a coastal road most of the way to Saigon.

I was going to mention lots of details, musings and random factoids, but I'm tired and eager to watch some French Open tennis. I'll just say that I've had a haircut (in Hoi An) and it wasn't nearly as traumatic as haircuts usually are for me. It's much shorter on the top and sides, so it's a bit of a mullet, but I think it will grow in well. It's already bleaching white blond in the fierce sun.