As the late, lamented Spiro Agnew once said, “Seen one UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site, seen ‘em all.”
Hoi An is not exactly the same as Luang Prabang. Luang Prabang is on the Mekong. Hoi An is on the Thu Bon River. Luang Prabang has Wats, monks and a Royal Palace. Hoi An does not. Hoi An has an ocean beach 20 minutes away by bike, lots of old houses, and a mix of Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese architecture. Luang Prabang doesn’t have any of that. But, both are old, something surprisingly hard to come by in south east Asia, easy to walk, filled with tourists and, as a result, also filled with restaurants and small hotels. Both have “quaint”—there’s a suspect concept if ever there was one—markets and crafts and river life.
My Son, the Cham “holy land”—as it happens, written up in an article in Thursay’s NYTimes on the occasion of an exhibit of Vietnamese art at the Asia Museum on Park and 70th—is about an hour from Hoi An, an easy day. Like just about everything else in central Viet Nam, it was bombed by the Americans and is now mostly rubble. There is some reconstruction going on but, as elsewhere in SE Asia, it is hard to tell what is original and what is new. It turns out that authenticity really is a western preoccupation.
The food in Hoi An was terrific—one mediocre dinner far outweighed by three excellent dinners (including a California-Vietnamese fusion restaurant that was probably the best food we’ve had in Viet Nam--expensive by local standards but still less than Northampton Yuppie Cuisine) and two excellent lunches.
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Travel fatigue is setting in. We are replacing the Slogan for Greater Happiness of the Loyal Employees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (work less, drink more) with a Slogan for Greater Happiness of the Loyal Visitors to the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (see less, drink more). (And Katie, if you got this far, do as I say, not as I do or even as I say I do.)
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You can’t really appreciate Tony Danza until you’ve watched Going Ape in Vietnamese at the Danang Airport.
Was not pleased, only relieved and reassured, to hear that you and Naomi are like all non-superhumans beginning to feel travel fatigue. I've sometimes felt it after only a single week. Barbara usually gets it after only one night. But the following is a response not to your latest posting but to the one before that. Rob, you certainly have the right to think about whatever you want to think about, and if what you want to think about is Vietnam's problem of constructing a glorious history for itself that's your business. Besides, what you write is interesting. But, since I haven't paid much attention to Vietnam since the last U.S. troops exited, your observations on the challenges V faces in constructing a glorious past put me to wondering (momentarily) about how V might also be attempting to construct its glorious future. Must say, I didn't even know if the model they were currently looking to was Japan, China, South Korea, North Korea — or Albania circa 1950. Went to Wikipedia. Discovered to my surprise that the Viet population has grown to something like 84 million. Goodness, where have I been? But it looks so little on the map. Even narrower, particularly at that wasp waist it has, than Chile. If I'd been asked to guess, in my ignorance I'd have guessed a pop of 20 million, 25m max. Was further surprised, in the Wiki section on the Viet economy, to come on the words "manufacturing, information technology, and high-tech industries" and ref to recent 7 and 8 percent growth rates that have made it "the world's second fastest growing economy." Sorry, isn't V the place where we used to drop cluster bombs on rice paddies? But to return to the way a country constructs a glorious past for itself, you know, a country really isn't under any obligation to take the junk of yesteryear it finds lying around here and there and get it fast into the hands of a bunch of scholar-bureaucrats in a back room with instructions to whip it up into a glorious past for consumption by tourists and secondary school students. Here in Brazil, e.g., we don't have a very glorious past. Well, it's not uniformly inglorious and there are aspects of it that are actually quite inspiring. But not much is done in the way of teaching Brazilian history in the schools and I have never met intelligent, generally well-educated adults who know as little of their own national history as intelligent, generally well-educated Brazilian adults do. (Why was I surprised at this initially? Because I came down here with my own North American experience on my shoulders and I thought that everyone everywhere was supposed to be indoctrinated in the myths of a glorious natl past.) You quote Tocqueville on how "the same men who live on a small scale in narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic splendor in the erection of their public monuments." But, as you know, Brazilians have never done much in the way of erecting splendid public monuments." So let's let T off the hook on the strength of his "frequently." I tell you, it's just not a universal obligation of the state to come up with a glorious past for the citizenry to feel all puffy-chested about. Where there isn't a glorious history, the problem can simply be finessed. Worked around. It is not something scholar-bureaucrats have to stay up and burn midnight oil over. Here in Brazil, e.g., the same psychic benefits that a glorious history provides can be extracted from, say, a glorious geography, belief in the inexhaustibility of natural resources, and other such materials. So I wouldn't worry too much about the Vietnamese in this regard, not with GDP growth rates of 7-8 percent.
ReplyDeleteDrinking more is fine in the absence of stronger drugs, like the bennies that Mark apparently takes to write comments like that, complete with wiki research (who knew THAT ran in families?).
ReplyDeleteWhat is that stone structure on this post? Looks alluring...
ReplyDeleteI stayed at the Caravelle. Glad to hear it's still standing. . . .Vietnam has always been deeply weird. Some things never change. . . Great photos, Robert!
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