Vietnam has been ravaged by first of all war and then the poverty of an undeveloped economy. Unlike Cambodia and Laos, or even Myanmar, it has managed to rebuild lots of infrastructure. The roads are universally excellent, with flat tarmac surfaces. Bridges are easily destroyed in war, but now there are many new ones, including a magnificent one that I went over in the Mekong Delta. I’ve seen maybe even a dozen new bridges being built in my short journey through Vietnam.

Halong City has a population of 150,000 people, slightly more than Cambridge in the UK. Its water system has been badly maintained over the years, and so has been recently refurbished. What’s curious is how the refurbishment was funded… 90% by the Dutch government via a World Bank loan, and 10% by the local state Vietnamese water company. Evidently the people of Halong City needed an update to their water system, but it isn’t entirely clear to me why the Dutch government funded it, especially when it is considered doubtful that the loan will ever be repaid.

There’s more to this. It must be for industrial economic development, as it is essentially for an urban environment, rather than the much poorer rural Vietnamese. Also, it doesn’t seem a sensible use of development money as it isn’t very catalytic, like education would be. To back this up, the project isn’t very strong on training; the contractor doesn’t have to train Vietnamese people to replace it in future.

The project is managed by a Dutch consulting company, and run by a French contractor, SAUR. On Saturday I visited the French company’s offices in Halong City. They have 12 expat staff, mainly French but also some others, and 50 Vietnamese staff.

From a technical point of view water engineering is actually pretty interesting. There are lots of strategies to fixing damaged pipes. For example, you can slipline them by inserting a new rubbery pipe inside an existing pipe, or you can send a device down to spray line them with epoxy resin. To find the problems, one technique is called the pressure test, which involves sending high pressure water down to break the pipe. Then you look for where the water squirts out the surface in a fountain, and go fix it!

The water project has two major sources being a dam in one area, and a river in another. There is also some extra water gathered from boreholes. As well as fixing existing pipes, they’ve lain large tracts of new pipe (manufactured in Malyasia). This involves fun things like temporarily damming rivers so you can run a pipeline under the river bed.

Physically the pipe laying is very easy, as labour here is cheap. At the flick of a hand, an arbitary number of digging people can be mustered. The hard bit (for the contracting company, rather than the sweating labourers) is negotiating permits. Often while doing works people will come out of their houses and physically stop them digging in the back of their garden, demanding more compensation.

If you’re building a house, then once the site is secured and cleared, it is like painting a picture. With pipelines the environment always affects your plans while you are laying them – performing a thorough underground survey would be as expensive and disruptive as actually just trying to lay the pipe.

Me, mindlessly propogate links? I’m going to make an exception to the byline at the top of this page. It relates to both Vietnam (where I am at the moment) and to the impending Iraq war, so perhaps we can forgive me.

‘Quiet American’ Irony article. Seeing the film “The Quiet American” in Vietnam months before its long-delayed opening in the United States, PNS Associate Editor Andrew Lam finds a country where activists and artists risk government crackdown to promote freedom of expression. Back in America, though, self-censorship is rising as an anti-war masterpiece is draped and a poetry reading cancelled.

I found the article while using the fantastic Google News Search. Every week or so I punch in Vietnam and China, and it gives me all the articles relating to where I am, and where I’m soon to be. These searches are particularly good at rooting out less common news sources, such as Asian English language newspapers. The front page of Google News is less good at exposing non-US perspective stories.

Last week, I made my way into the old North Vietnam. I went on a tour of the old DMZ (Demilitarised Zone) which separated the North from the South, and across which the Vietnam war was fought. The trees are starting to grow back, and replacement houses in all the bombed towns have been largely rebuilt. Our guide was a child during the war, from a village near the border. He was moved several times when fighting came too close, ending up as a refugee far away in the South, separated from his parents.

The North isn’t so different from the South. The weather is cool, it feels like a dreary late winter or autumn day, with clouds and rain. It’s nice when it is sunny though. If partly because it isn’t sunny, people are perhaps slightly less smiley here. Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam but doesn’t feel any more important than HCMC (Saigon), almost like Vietnam still has two capital cities.

The communist party presence is stronger though, and you can tell Hanoi is the political capital. We visited Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, where his body rests embalmed. This is done by the Russians, and every summer he goes on a holiday there to be touched up again. It was explicitly against Ho’s own wishes; he left instructions for cremation, and modest orders in relation to memorials to him. The communist government must have felt that they needed his charisma even after he died.

Viewing his body is a reverential occasion, with huge numbers of Vietnamese visitors. If you made a move for the body, the utterly still guards would bayonet you in an instant. Should you be a far-right, terrorist, old-communist-leader-corpse-desecrating fanatic, then you’d have to add “suicide” in there as well. Uncle Ho looks a bit wax like, but also peaceful and serene, still with his whispy beard, resting from the world’s turmoil.

We? I’ve now met up with Gavin, my friend who also used to work at Creature Labs. We’re going to spend two weeks together in the north of Vietnam, before he heads south and then to India, and I go to China. Say “hello Gav!” if you know him! At the moment we’re in Halong Bay, world heritage site, and home of Gavin’s French friend Nat. Nat works here for a French company, and we’re staying for free in a guesthouse rented by his company. It’s really good, and strange, to be suddenly welcomed in a foreign land. It makes me feel a bit colonial, but more about that another day.

Halong Bay is a fantastic erie place. Weird limestone rocks form thousands of islands in the mill-pond still sea. We went on a two day boat tour, sleeping over night anchored off from an island. There are excellent cave systems, with huge chambers very near their entrance, feeling like something from Jules Verne. Sailing through the bay itself it had clearly once inspired many legends, then fantasy novels, and no doubt now computer games. All these things have slightly less imagination than I thought, and the world more.

Rain rain rain. Vietnam is meterologically mysterious. All the books say that when you pass through the strip of mountains just north of Dangang, the weather changes, and becomes pretty awful. I couldn’t quite believe them. Yesterday morning I was in tropical winter, beautiful, hot dry climate, giving you the feeling of no care in the world. Today I toured the ancient city of Hue in the rain. This is the same latitude as Yangon (Rangoon, in Myanmar), which instead is hot and tropical. So from now on it’s cold and wet, a good job spring is coming on, although there isn’t really such a thing as spring until a lot further north.

This morning I had an amusing introduction to the Vietnamese gay scene. There’s a fantastic imperial palace in the middle of Hue, built in the 19th century by the Nguyen dynasty. It’s a huge set of nested fortresses very much Chinese in style. Absolutely daunting that such things are built, how much power can accumulate. While walking round I imagined it being active, which it was until 1945. There are other places in the world which are living now, and perhaps in a shorter time than we think will be tromped through by tourists – perhaps the Vatican, the Whitehouse.

Anyway, it was raining, so I was hanging out to dry in one of the buildings for a while. A man minding a shop starts talking to me, and asks the usual introductory questions. “Where are you from?” “Are you married?” “Do you have a girlfriend?” This is quite clever, as everyone asks me if I’m married, it just seems to be the culturally accepted question to ask a man unaccompanied by a wife.

When I say no, he suddenly says “I have a boyfriend, in Germany”. I assume that he doesn’t quite understand that “boyfriend” isn’t just a friend who happens to be male, but as he tells me more it dawns that he really does mean boyfriend. This German is coming to visit in the summer for a month, and they are going to tour Vietnam together; by this point I’m pretty sure they won’t just hold hands.

So I ask him how they met. Here, in the picture shop! The German came with another male friend, and at first our Vietnamese shopkeeper thought that they were partners. Somehow it became clear that this wasn’t the case, and the German asked him if he likes boys. Then one led to two, and afterwards they swapped email addresses, so this year they can have another rendezvous.

By this point I was curious to learn more about the local gay scene, so I ask him if he has boyfriends here. No no! Not at all, he only has foreign boyfriends, as they are easier to keep secret. There was evidently some stigma with being openly gay, although he said that some people were nevertheless. No, instead, he says, he has Vietnamese girlfriends!

It was quite clear that there was an offer to me going on, so I made it explicitly clear that I prefered girls. He went so far as to say (in hushed tones, going quiet as another two tourists passed by), that some people who haven’t had boys before like to try it out anyway, even if they’re not sure. And, he said, that if it didn’t work, or they didn’t like it, that would be no problem.

At this point I decided to make what he perceived as a hasty exit – “You can just stay and talk if you like, I’m not forcing anything on you!” – not because I felt at all uncomfortable about the situation, but to quickly run a hundred yards and burst into laughter.

So if you’re in Hue, and gay, I can tell you the place to go!

The last few days I’ve been travelling up the coast of Vietnam by railway. It’s good to have a change from buses, boats and pick-up trucks. I haven’t been on a train since an early, and somewhat bad, experience in Myanmar. It’s 1726km along the iron road from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, the whole journey taking 30 to 40 hours depending on how express the trains you get are.

For me the best thing is that it avoids the backpacker’s cafe tourist-bus trail; a depressing situation where you buy a cheap ticket the whole length of the country with stop-offs where you want. You end up herded from over-touristed area to over-touristed area, on buses shared entirely with other tourists. For all the Vietnamese that you see you mayn’t as well be in Vietnam. As I found in the Mekong Delta, the tourist infrastructure here is often too good.

There are three different classes of seating, and two different classes of sleeper. I’m deliberately travelling by day, and so far have tried the “soft seat” and the “soft sea air conditioned” classes. Because of this, I have been accompanied by reasonably wealthy Vietnamese. The people on the trains, and in Vietnam in general, are very friendly and kind to me. I’d heard bad reports before I got here that the Vietnamese were distant, cold, or even nasty, but I find it hard to see where that idea comes from. Perhaps I’m smiling at them too much ;)

Yesterday I stopped off in Qui Nhon, bypassing the famous beaches of Nha Trang partly because I don’t like beaches, and partly to speed things up so I can get to Hanoi by 18th February. Mainly I chose Qui Nhon so I could visit somewhere by the sea that hasn’t yet been quite so infected with tourism. The mountains, the sea, the bay are beautiful there. It was lovely to see the sea, which I haven’t seen for months. I cycled round the harbour, watching huge tree trunks been unloaded from boats, and ice been crushed and chuted into fishing boats.

It was interesting to observe the tourist infrastructure being built. I stayed at a six month new guesthouse designed for backpackers, which is only just mentioned in my brand new edition of Lonely Planet (a bookseller in Ho Chi Minh City spent some time trying to buy the book off me, so she could copy it and be first with the new edition – she wasn’t prepared to pay more than the cover price though, so evidently wasn’t that desperate.). It was very quiet, the only other guests I saw were a Singaporese civil engineer who was managing the building of a beach resort just along the coast, and his architect. Nevertheless the New Zealand proprietor is expecting such a rush, presumably now she is in The Book, that she’s already building a second hotel “Barbara’s on the Beach”.

So, we tourists all rush to the latest place, incited by Lonely Planet to avoid the crowds. It’s all authentic, local, interesting, cultural, if tough because the moto drivers don’t know where your hotel is, and some of the restauranteurs (shock!) don’t speak English. Of course eventually there are too many of us to want to go there any more, so we head off to remoter places like Cambodia or Laos. “Luckily” there is always somewhere new regenerated to be fresh and raw by civil war, or emerging from the isolation of a totalitarian dictatorship. So we can look forward in about seventeen years time to cultural tours of Iraq, or perhaps bathing on the beaches of Somalia.

After enjoying Qui Nhon, I made my way today to Hoi An. It’s a beautiful town, with surviving, practical, wooden colonial architecture, a rarity in much bombed Vietnam. I just ate the most delicious meal ever, at a place called Cafe des Amis. He cooks different meals as he likes each day, giving you only one choice as to whether you prefer seafood or vegetarian. This was the best demonstration yet of my nascent rule of thumb – the fewer items on the menu, the less choice you have, the better the food!

Time to talk about shopping. The nice thing about shopping is that it is easy for a tourist to make some kind of judgement about it. Shops are designed to be open, visitable, and for you to be able to find out about them. Also, coming from the consumerist culture that I do, even a bad shopper like me is very well trained. This makes it much easier than trying to analyse, say, the system of government.

The shops are just starting to open with avengeance after the Chinese New Year festival. Yesterday I went into the Diamond Department Store. This is part of a 13 story sky scraper, much of which is offices. The offices are all for international companies, the sign in the lobby telling you which floor to go to is written entirely in English. Although, apparently lots of Koreans work in the building – these companies are Asian as well as Western.

The shops were opulant, more like a posh department store on Oxford Street (London) than John Lewis (a cheaper, commoner UK department store). Prices seemed quite reasonable but only when compared to prices in the UK. A designer t-shirt for seven dollars is good value, but not if you only earn one dollar a day. The quality was very good, I was impressed by the clothes fashion – I think perhaps it was from the US, and the colours are brighter than in the UK.

As I walked round, the place felt wrong. It wasn’t Vietnamese, it felt plonked here to satisfy the market of people working in the offices above it. Who were the people shopping there? How did they earn so so much more than most of the people in the country? People in Ho Chi Minh City on average (HCMC) earn four times as much as the rest of the country, but even that wouldn’t be enough. The Diamond Department Store felt like an invasion, not part of a process of improvement.

In contrast, today I went to Ben Thanh market, just reopened after Tet. This is in the centre of HCMC, and it is the best market I’ve seen in SE Asia, and I’ve seen a few. By best what I really mean is cleanest. The place had a red tiled floor, rather than earth or concrete. The noodle soup stalls were fantastic, made with white tiles, and they felt safe. The whole place must be thoroughly scrubbed every day – as are all the roads and markets I’ve seen in Vietnam. In Vinh Long in the Mekong Delta I watched a market from my hotel room. It was messy, dirty, covered with rubbish by the evening when I went to sleep. In the morning, I awoke to a clean empty street. Similarly in HCMC, somebody comes along at night and clears up the streets. Better than parts of London!

The thing about Ben Thanh market is that it felt like a natural improvement of SE Asian markets. It still sold all local and fresh foods, and a whole range of clothing, both local cloth and cheap international clothes by Nike or Ralph Lauren. You could still find fresh living fish, but admittedly meat still wasn’t refrigerated despite the heat. There was real proper free market competition, between lots of shops owned by different people, selling similar products so you can compare and negotiate prices. Yet it had been improved, to be more organised, and cleaner, and could be improved more. On the bad side, the service is partly only so good because of the working hours market people put in, they are in their shops for 12 hours a day, and 7 days a week.

Before I fall into the soup of my own rhetoric, I’ll give a different example of the point I’m trying to make. Just opposite the market there is a fast food noodle soup place called Pho 2000. Bill Clinton stopped there for a bowl when he visited Vietnam as president in 2000. It’s basically an improved, easier version of your normal noodle soup stall. It’s inside a building for one, with decent, clean chairs and tables, waiter service, and a fixed menu in English as well as Vietnamese. I could easily see them franchising it, and opening up shops all over the country. What I really want them to do is move into Europe, compete with and cause the shutting down of half the Burger Kings, so we have a good cheap Asian choice of fast food.

Anyone think they can do it? What, you mean you couldn’t compete with McDonalds’ marketing? Or perhaps you believe that the Burger and Fry is fundamenally superior to Noodle Soup, so it would never catch on? Noodle soup certainly seems popular enough here, and these human beings don’t seem that radically different. No, the hard bit is cultural, how would you promote such a thing, and get it to reach a tipping point where it becomes as popular as an American burger chain?

I’ve been here for five and a half days now, and see no sign of leaving yet. I’m staying in a really good guesthouse, a bit away from the main backpacker area, and friendly and hospitable.

My long visit is partly because you have to chill out during the Tet festival. That’s the Lunar New Year, which is the same as the Chinese New Year. For three days people go back to visit their family, so the city is relatively deserted, as recent migration patterns mean that more people in the city have families in the country than vice versa.

There seem to be endless things to do here. Lots of interesting modern history stuff, such as meseums to do with the Vietnam war, and day trips to visit the tunnels that the Viet Cong hid in. And then loads of interesting pagodas, from the strange religions that the Vietnamese have, mixtures of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Animism and Ancestor Worship. In the Mekong river delta people regularly seem to start new religions, which often have had their own private army at periods over the last century.

And that’s without all the stuff that’s closed for Tet! Like shopping centres, some of the museums, and the french patesseries.

The city is seem seemingly infinite. There’s a central bit where most stuff is, and you can soon get to know it. But if you leave from there, it goes on forever. Endless long wide streets with tall trees, and infinite infinite local shops, selling who knows what, as they’re all closed for Tet. I climbed a curious pagoda today that had 7 or 8 levels, with a different statue on each one. From the top the city stretched to the horizon, with no real break or distinguishing feature.

This morning I accidentally ended up at a theme park crossed with a garden centre and water park on the outskirts of town. It was next to a pagoda that I was trying to visit. Hoardes of holiday happy Vietnamese, going on rides, having picnics. In Europe at such places, we might have tropical plant greenhouses, so of course here there was an air-conditioned glass building, full of exotic temperate climate plants.