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Travel Logs March 2013

Why Vietnam?

By Wendy Costa

Sidewalks in Vietnam are used for cooking, restaurants, skinning frogs, motorbikes, motorbike parking, weddings, funerals, public markets, fish markets, automobile body work, recycling American bomb parts, manufacturing fish sauce, and trash disposal – any activity, in fact, except walking.

vt_costa0313c“Why Vietnam?” asked my friends when I told them that I would be traveling to Southeast Asia for the first 19 days of January. I replied that it was the only time I could take a vacation, that it was warm there, and that since I was far too chicken to travel to an Asian country by myself, Overseas Adventure Travel had some openings available for me and my friend, Ann.

Throughout the trip, though, I kept asking myself the question, “Why Vietnam for any American?” The answers are as diverse as sidewalk activities in any Vietnamese city. (Sidewalks in Vietnam are used for cooking, restaurants, skinning frogs, motorbikes, motorbike parking, weddings, funerals, public markets, fish markets, automobile body work, recycling American bomb parts, manufacturing fish sauce, and trash disposal – any activity, in fact, except walking.)

First of all, Vietnam is a great place to see thin people. In the U.S., really thin people are practically extinct, but in Vietnam thin is still the norm, and this is a good thing, a necessary thing, because otherwise a mother, a father, two children, and a crate of oranges could not fit on a motorbike. The entire economy of the country might collapse if people were not slender enough to transport such things as huge porcelain vases, racks of dresses, or aquariums full of fish on motorbikes. One of the mysteries of Vietnam is how people who eat great quantities of fresh, colorful, and delicious food stay so slender. I gained five pounds in 19 days.

Second, Vietnam is reputed to be a place where older people are respected, and since I am past “the new fifty,” I wanted to see how this actually works. What I found is that while Vietnam is a good place to be old, it’s an even better place to be dead, especially if you are an ancestor. In the Buddhist tradition, the ancestors get lovely shrines in the best rooms of almost every house.

In some areas of the country, a body is buried for three years, and then the family of the deceased digs up the coffin, opens it, washes the bones, and places them in a smaller coffin in a tiled shrine. In a cold, drizzling rain, we visited a small cemetery of such shrines to pay respect to some ancestors who were sort of standing in for our leader’s grandmother, who was buried a thousand miles away. Since it was the anniversary of her death, our guide wanted to honor her by paying respects at another woman’s grave. He placed a baguette, a pack of Marlboros, some fake money, and lighted incense on a grave, and then he gave us similar things to place on other graves, which was quite a challenge, because the rain kept extinguishing the incense and dozens of motorbikes nearly ran us over.

A third reason to visit Vietnam is to see how weasel coffee is made, even though few Americans can afford this delicacy. Apparently, some alert person noticed that weasels were eating coffee beans but not, um, digesting them completely. The coffee beans that had passed through the digestive tracts of these weasels brewed into an especially delicious beverage that is now all the rage. Visiting foreign dignitaries get goodie bags that include weasel coffee. Weasels, which used to be wild and free, now cost $700 apiece and live in small cages that have mesh bottoms to capture their valuable poop.

Elegant new mansions have replaced the corrugated tin shacks of the farmers who produce weasel coffee. (Perhaps these rich farmers will come to be called weasel barons by future generations.) History will decide if weasel coffee will join penicillin, Teflon, and Viagra on the list of accidental discoveries that changed the world.

An important reason to visit Vietnam – or any foreign land – is to meet people who live there. We had the opportunity to visit several families in their homes and share wonderful meals with them. I must admit that I enjoyed the dinner inside the home of a young architect more than the lunch in the backyard of a village chief whose roosters were in training for a New Year’s cockfight while we munched, or rather, crunched, on barbecued lizard.

On the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, I shared a great meal with three aging Viet Cong guerillas who are now prosperous community leaders. Memories of bitter arguments with my father about the Vietnam War flooded my mind. He was a World War II veteran who had seen the Iron Curtain descend on Eastern Europe after the war, so he was, understandably, a hawk when it came to Vietnam. I was an idealistic college student who thought that the South Vietnamese government was as terrible as anything that Ho Chi Minh would establish, and that the U.S. had no right to interfere in a civil war.

Thirty-eight years have gone by since the Communists won, and now I think that perhaps we were both right. The American military ruined millions of lives and huge land areas with Agent Orange, and that was a horrific crime. But Communism, at least initially, was really terrible. From 1975 until about 1987, Vietnam was a harsh, starving country. Since 1987 it has normalized relations with the rest of the world, and it has become, for the most part, a capitalist economy. It is difficult for a foreigner who does not speak Vietnamese to know how many freedoms are curtailed, but it is clear that most Vietnamese are very proud of their rapidly developing, unified nation that is becoming more prosperous and beautiful every day.

Why Vietnam? Go for the sidewalk culture, the motorbike madness, the “otherness” of an ancient Buddhist civilization, the quirkiness of weasel coffee. And go for a lesson about the Vietnam War (or the American War, as it is called in Vietnam).

 

Wendy Costa lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where she is a U.S. Coast Guard captain of boats up to 100 tons.

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