Raphael Kessler

Saigon is not the most attractive city in the world and the smell of the black river that runs through it is quite repulsive.

In Cu Chi one can visit some of the tunnels the VietCong used to get around and hide in during the French and American wars.

The Mekong Delta supports a large number of people who live both on its banks (photos 1 & 2) and actually on it (photo 3). The market is held in the middle of the river with people selling their produce from canoes and boats (photos 4 & 5). For some reason someone decided to wrap a python round me when I was there (photo 6). The snake was friendly enough though.

At the Cao Dai Temple (photo 1), a peculiar fusion of religions is celebrated with Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Chinese mythology blended in quite a bizarre way. Outside the temple the busy street scene (photo 2) looked exactly like some of the scenes in Vietnam war films like Full Metal Jacket and Good Morning Vietnam, except with the soldiers and war bit obviously. 

In Da Lat I met Vien Thuc (photo 1) a Zen monk and a bit of a nutter, he wrote Zen sayings in several languages and tended his garden and giggled like a girl whilst he did so. I also saw a girl making rice noodles which spent most of the time looking like pancakes. From Da Lat I headed into the Central Highlands with a couple of Aussies and some Vietnamese motorcyclists who took us each riding pinion. We saw a much more isolated part of the country, where the locals rarely saw tourists (unlike the main well trodden route from Saigon to Hanoi). This comparative lack of development was more interesting for us aswell. We saw boys riding buffalos (photo 3) and smiling faces on young and old alike (photos 4 & 5), who seemed pleased just to see something different. The tribal people who live up in the Central Highlands (photos 5 & 6) live a very meager life in wicker homes and because they usually have more than the maximum two children allowed they lose their state benefits. Whilst I was there, the government was in the process of getting electricity to all the villages and giving the villagers televisions in a move to reduce the amount of pregnancies. Having watched some Vietnamese television I can understand how it could work as a contraceptive. 

The Cham ruins at My Son were horrendously damaged by American bombing. Still the temples that remain (photos below) are interesting and the location within a ring of mountains is excellent. 

Along the Perfume River near Hue are the tombs of the former emperors of Vietnam. The splendour and size of these tombs is quite astounding, being entire palace complexes for dead blokes.

Hanoi is an attractive city with some nice colonial architecture. Slap bang in the middle though is a typically Communist looking building which is home to another dead bloke, Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnamese Communism. I went and saw him in his glass sarcophagus and he was glowing which was a bit odd considering he'd been dead thirty years.

Ha Long Bay is a beautiful bit of sea in the gulf of China with Dolomitic rocks sticking up in a jade green sea with flying fish skating along the surface. With the erosion on some of the monolithic outcrops they looked like they ready to fall over.