KYQ4: Vietnam: Hoi An and My Son

Hoi An - shopping mecca

We travelled by road from Hue to Da Nang on a cloudy day after the tropical storm. We dropped out of the mist from the Hai Van pass to the rapidly expanding port city of Danang. It is now the third-largest city in Vietnam, boasting a new airport built on the old American base for the B52 bombers.

The city has benefitted from a strong leader who understood that investment in new infrastructure would create opportunities for private investment. The General Secretary of the party would have made a good mayor in Sim City. He invested heavily in new bridges, an international airport, new housing, a designer skyscraper as the City HQ, and built a sports village with facilities that would grace any major western city. He allocated land along the sandy beaches for the development of luxury hotels and conference facilities. But he was not just building a city to win a mayor's house, his immediate family had become the prime real estate developers along the coastal strip. This was not resented, he was seen as someone who had improved the lives of local people and it was alleged that he had been asked to become 'mayor' of Hanoi but turned it down to see through the transformation of Danang.

It was one of the better examples of how Vietnamese communism and global capitalism are fused together in a form of governance that uses the authoritarian powers of Communism to facilitate and encourage the release of market capital. I began to reflect that this sort of CommCap had its virtues despite the democratic deficit and potential for corruption. It had achieved rapid economic growth, job opportunities, improved facilities and better services for the local people.

We continued to the ancient city and port of Hoi An which was still suffering from floods, it was a city that still had a human scale and it attracted many tourists with its markets, tailors and craft shops. It was surrounded by rice fields and a string of modern hotels that had colonised the long sandy beaches. The beaches were littered with driftwood and uprooted vegetation following the recent tropical storm. Our hotel had had to be evacuated the day before we arrived. After getting measured for a jacket and a pair of trousers at a local tailor's shop we returned to the hotel. After I had taken a long relaxing run on the beach which stretched for miles, we just rested. This was probably for the first time on the trip and afterwards, we ate in the hotel rather than going out. It began to feel more like a holiday than a travel marathon.

The next day we visited the capital of the former Champa Kingdom at My Son. Dozens of red brick tower temples dating from the 7th to 13th century had been discovered in the lush tropical forest by French Archaeologists early in the 20th century. The journey there was through flooded fields along roads oozing with mud and as we arrived we were treated to another tropical deluge. Needless to say, the American bombing had damaged the site and bomb craters littered the different zones. Italian archaeologists were restoring some of the buildings and bricks were being fired from the local clays to reconstruct some of the damage. No cement or mortar was used in the construction, the bricks went together like Lego. We returned to the hotel in the early afternoon and after a swim, we returned to Hoi An to enjoy the markets, and shops and for our final fitting of clothes that we had ordered.

We stayed on for an evening meal and met a couple from Warwick whom we first had met during our sail in Halong Bay. He was a retired civil servant and as always on these occasions, we found lots in common. I was told that I had done well to marry a Kingsley girl, they were much sought after by the boys of Warwick Grammar. We finished the night by sharing a taxi back to the hotel and then indulged in a few cocktails. The next day we were up at 5am for the short trip to Danang International Airport and from there to Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon.