Entering into Vietnam.

A first time traveller in Vietnam.

Day 1

Only a couple minutes into Vietnam and the people grab you in to the fabric of this place. No one stares, no one asks you useless stuff to buy. The city is busy minding its own business. I dont feel a foreigner. I guess the country’s history has seen a lot of foreign occupation which makes up for this tastelessness in foreigners. I dont know what it is exactly, but whatever it is, it is awesome!!

We landed into Da Nang, our connecting flight was all the way south to Ho Chi Minh city. To get to the domestic terminal we had to go through the immigration. No needless checks. Not even a word uttered. The officer smiled and stamped me and Maharudra sir into his land and here we were into Vietnam. We had planned to visit Ha Noi but the flights were booked to Ho Chi Minh city, so two days of travel was a must to come up to Ha Noi. I dont know what went through my mind, I said, why not just get out at Da  Nang? We have already gone through immigration. It was a hassle to go and ask a security person if we could skip the flight so we asked the airlines instead and they said yeah, no worries, you can stay in Da Nang, and just like that we walked out of the airport. A sim card and some dollars exchanged and we were millionares. Literally!! We had only exchnaged $100 and we had around 2.5 million Vietnamese dongs.

We walked through the alleyways, where everyone seemed busy, doing their own thing.

Everytime I spoke ‘xin chào’ people looked in awe.

Bikes were passing left and right in all directions. I think, we were the only ones walking for the first 15 minutes. Then, as we neared the city centre, we saw many people jail-walking which gave us some confidence on the streets. Our hostel offered us welcome drinks and the receptionist was extremely polite. I mean, I have lived in a place where everyone is a bit depressed. The towns in India are a case-study. What can happen when the political structure is corrupt and without morals!? That’s exactly what India looks like. A depressed cup of espresso which shuts you down rather than wake you up. Shana, a dutch Psychology student was sitting next to us. She told us about Hoi An and a lot of other places that were a must to visit. Even she was amazed by the positive attitude of people towards foreigners when their country was bombed by many foreign powers. It takes a lot of patience to have that kind of acceptance of people who dont look like you! While in India, we are infighting within ourselves, our religions and our castes, it is uplifting to see a kind of gratitude within the people who live here. No posters or banners of any person. I was so happy to not see Modi, Shinde, Fadnavis or any local mla’s and karyakartaas on the street. The ‘big brother’ nature of Modi was eminent for the first time when we walked in this sane society.

Sanity is a drug that Indians are forcibly impoverished with. To be sane for a second, was something that I had missed for a long time. Not in England, not in Scotland but I found sanity in Vietnam of all places. I remember watching Anthony Bourdain’s ‘No Reservations’ where he says, ‘ I came to Vietnam and fell in love.’ I have fallen in love in the first 24 hours…

Day 2

Reality always plays a game of cat and mouse with me. The moment I feel that I am enjoying the place, reality walks in from the back door and shows its ugly face. The world is a wonderful place for the ones who have figured the game out. I feel even that is a lie at times. The feeling that you know is a false one when that wanting and knowing dies out. All that is left is an empty vessel which you call your body and a show that plays on your screen through your eyes.

I was optimistic about Vietnam. A lot had been written and said before about this place and believe me its absolutely a wonderful place, but I think these people have learnt tolerance to a scale that no one can match. Deadly wars, thousands if not millions dead in the past two centuries. An oppressive French regime followed by an American and Soviet infighting leading to mass bombings and an erasure of the culture that once comprised in Vietnam. Now, all that is left is a few old people who look absolutely dumbfounded and psychotic with the pace of which they have seen their cities and countries change from nothing to everything in just one lifetime. I don’t know what to make of this. Yesterday, people seemed happy, but today I saw something behind that mask of happiness and I didn’t like what I saw. It was smile out of necessity..

I have a question. Do we ever learn from our past?

I felt everyone was happily working. I feel this is what you get when you add in two polar opposites to a country of a few tribes that lived without outside disturbance only until 200 years back. Yes, the French were here but none of them wanted to go in the search for these tribes deep in the mountainous regions of Vietnam. They were happy as long as they got their coffee, indigo and silk. I was sitting in a hotel which was situated in a remnant of a French style town, when I saw an old video of two French ladies throwing grain and coins at the Vietnamese people, and laughing at them as they scattered around to  collect it. I wonder where this mentality comes from? I wonder what made them think of these people as animals in a zoo. The world was a zoo for most Colonialists when they went on this ride to conquer the known world. Sitting next to me was a elderly group of English getting entertained by a local street seller. I saw the same mentality of those French ladies. This is the exotic tale that they would carry home and tell their friends in some pub.

The Vietnamese on the other hand are a mixture to extremely opposite ideologies. Communism and Buddhism. I wonder if these two things will ever live alongside in the long run. The younger generation already seem ashamed of their old culture. The Mao style reformations already killed the remaining thoughts of preserving it. I know most democracies around the world are corrupt, but even communism while it definitely brings a structure and an order, it does little to nothing to feed the soul of the person. It rather has the tendency to kill it at a much faster rate. The people are patient, with almost everything and everyone. They know their place in the society and that there is no upward flow when they come from a lower income background. I think they have no other option than to accept this fate that they have brought upon themselves. We will not kill you, but we will make you work like hell! This game of past, present and future plays with every person around here. The lack of money, but the world around them is growing so big that future seems bright, and so I strive!

I wonder what it was like, when the western nations had not taken it upon themselves to teach the world what the ‘right’ way of living was.. I think everyone was doing just fine and moreover they were happy doing what they liked doing. The western ideals have shattered the smallest of indigenous groups in the far corners of Vietnam. Rehahn’s gallery based in Hoi An was a living testimony to that feeling of how happy people were before this extreme westernised globalisation. Everyone in between, like the leaders of the governments and the bureaucrats are just enjoying the benefits of this westernised society which manages to shut itself up and gets busy in more and more and more!!! and the more just never ends.

I was confused at the end of the day, sitting on a bench next to the river in Da Nang where I suddenly realised.. no one who works here, actually lives here! I mean the normal Vietnamese don’t live in these big buildings around the town. They are just passing by. Its an entire city passing by on two wheelers as loads of foreigners watch the madness of the city. Every two wheeler has an entire life-story on it. Its always in motion and it never stops.

Strangely, a Vietnamese man walked up to me and asked me if I was travelling from India. I said yes, and we started speaking. He asked if I was here for boom boom. “Many Indians come here.. stay in those big hotels near the beach and do boom boom with Vietnamese women.” I was a bit confused with what he had just said. The words were in the right order but the english was hard to understand. It finally dawned on me when he did the hand-gestures. So a lot of Indians come to Vietnam to have sex with the girls around here. I said I am not here for that. He was a bit surprised. I asked him if he felt like traveling outside of Vietnam. There was a confidence in his ‘no’ because he knew that he wont with the kind of money he makes.

I wonder what it makes of us as a culture and a global village if the only good thing about the south-east Asia is an easy way to fuck a woman who obviously does that job out of necessity. I wonder if anyone returning to London can triumphantly say that I helped the local economy by doing that. I don’t know  what to make of this culture anymore.. I wonder who is more animal, the local Vietnamese or the ‘foreigner’.