Vietnam - where Lenin meets Levis

By PAUL PANCKHURST

Outside the mausoleum in Hanoi, someone asked our guide what the Russian experts had used to preserve the 35-year-old corpse of Ho Chi Minh - Uncle Ho, the white-bearded father of communist Vietnam.

The Russians secretly embalmed him in a North Vietnamese jungle cave in 1970.

"I don't know," said Tran Xuan Hai, the guide. "But I'm sure it was a very special fluid."

Nice.

Obscure serve, politic return.

Who knows what Hai really thinks of the glorification of Ho in a country where communism is more a decorating style - the red and yellow flags, some ponderous state architecture - than an economic reality?

As a second-time visitor, I have passed on a repeat viewing.

Been there, seen Ho.

Later, our group's opinions vary.

He looked "orangey".

He looked white and seemed to be glowing with an inner light.

A whirlwind tour of unified Vietnam is a dizzying journey through hammer and sickle propaganda, rich green ricefields, artefacts of war, and the pulsing street life of one of the most densely populated countries in Southeast Asia, with 82 million people on a ribbon of land only bigger by one-fifth than New Zealand.

While the country has opened up since Doi Moi, the economic "renovation" that officially began in 1986, the government remains a suspicious host.

In New Zealand, our travel advisers had told us journalists should tick "tourism" not "business" when applying for visas.

Not a free speech nation.

Passing through, the propaganda and the Soviet symbolism can be hilarious, like encountering an alternative reality where the Berlin Wall never toppled.

An issue of the English-language Vietnam News reported on "glorious feats of armour" (a military division) and the glorious ever-strengthening ties with Fidel Castro and Cuba.

In his excellent 1998 book of reportage on modern Vietnam, Shadows and Wind, the former AFP correspondent, Robert Templer, describes how a statue of Lenin went up in Hanoi in 1986, just as Eastern Europe was about to start tearing down its Marxist monuments.

We whizzed past this bronze in Hanoi and I later read Templer's account of why it's known as the "stop, thief!" monument; Vladimir is hand on hip, looking a little startled, as if reaching for his wallet and pointing after a fleeing pickpocket.

The aim of the trip was to show journalists the maximum number of attractions in the minimum time.

In five days, we did Saigon in the south, the capital of Hanoi in the north, the "living museum" of the coastal town of Hoi An, and the limestone islands of Halong Bay.

That included museums, markets, temples, walking tours, the water puppet theatre, a cooking class, two internal flights, three boat trips, and an ongoing search for "weasel coffee", a brew originally made from coffee beans predigested by rodents. (Time magazine quotes a coffee mogul as saying the modern variant uses beans processed in enzymes that approximate a weasel's stomach.)

From day one in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), when I pushed open the hotel room window to let in a woomph of warm air, the trip was on the borderlines of sensory overload.

This is a country that may literally reach out to hold you. In a Saigon market, the vendor of knock-off Levis gently stopped me from walking away from his sales pitch.

Armies of low-powered motorbikes swarmed up a storm.

The street vendors and beggars were as persistent as you might have expected in a country where $700 can be an annual income.

Vietnam for tourists is largely food - see Peta Mathias' book Noodle Pillows or the movie The Vertical Ray of the Sun - and shopping.

Tourists exit with suitcases stuffed full of pirated DVDs, delicately speckled lacquerware, and tailored-in-a-day suits and ao dai, the traditional women's tunic with long sleeves and panels front and back.

One of the taste memories is lime on seafood.

Another, for me, was a particular bowl of noodle soup, pho - pronounced "fur" - that incorporated beef strips, coriander, mint, sprouts, chillis amid a swirl of tastes.

Vietnam is also an encounter with the country's place in our media-saturated minds as a 20th-century war zone.

Tourists do their duty, tackling the horrors of the Vietnam War - here it is called the American War - even if our grasp of historical detail can sometimes be tenuous.

Outside the Presidential Palace in Saigon, famously taken by the Viet Cong's tanks on April 30, 1975, one of our number quizzed a guide: "So this is the gates they crashed through?"

"Yep."

"So ... who did the crashing?"

Tourists lined up at the War Remnants Museum in Saigon (formerly the American War Crimes Museum) to silently stomach the photographs of torture, killing, and the deformities from drenching a country in defoliants.

A young traveller chewed his water bottle in silence.

One of the museum's displays was of anti-war protests and posters, including a grainy photographic reminder of how small gestures travel across the world: "People in New Zealand rallied at Myers Park, protesting against the US aggressive war in Vietnam, March 27, 1966."

After the museum, some of our group went out of Saigon to Ben Dinh, a tourist display of part of the incredible 250km network of tunnels used by the Viet Cong.

The Americans tried to bomb the tunnels away and a guide book described this as "the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally devastated area in the history of war".

Gum trees grew in a crater-pocked landscape. Hunched tourists walked through tunnels expanded for Western heights and girths.

A shooting range offered tourists a go with an array of military weapons including an AK47 - as apt as offering cigarettes after a tour of a cancer ward.

A mural next to a display of metal man-traps was unpleasantly gleeful: clunky dumb Yanks spiked by VC ingenuity.

If the war displays were the most sobering and disturbing experiences of the trip, the chance encounters in street, shop and market brushed in the lighter shades.

Our group experimented with bus-to-motorbike motorised flirting.

In Hoi An, the home of instant tailoring, a woman fabric vendor cracked open watermelon seeds with her teeth and shared the contents with me, giggling.

I asked her to make three silk scarves.

She later handed over three ragged efforts that were more like vague gestures towards the general concept of "a scarf".

I was charmed and - who cares? - maybe a few bucks down.

In Hanoi, I went to investigate the early morning calisthenics around Hoan Kiem Lake and encountered not displays of grace but blaring pop music and jazzercise, a bit of tai chi, and oldies in ferocious displays of flexibility.

Hilarious.

Outside one of Uncle Ho's historic abodes in Hanoi, queues of gorgeous school-kids mugged for the camera - "Ha-looooow!"

North of Hanoi, en route to Halong Bay, I watched at a workshop as a masked woman delicately hammered fragments of egg and duck shell into the picture slowly emerging on a piece of lacquerware.

Heading home through Hong Kong from this whizz through a nation, our group turned a business class lounge into what looked like a refugee camp, dotted with the fallen sick, exhausted, and hungover.

I got back with counterfeit "label" clothes, silk ties, tailored shirts and a suit (the fly burst in the Herald newsroom, otherwise perfect), pirated DVDs that worked, pirated CDs that did not, three so-called "scarves", a shimmering lacquer plate, and intentionally bad taste lighters - Saddam and bombs, Osama and an exploding World Trade Centre - that only a tourist would buy.

One of our number had lucked into weasel coffee.

Back home, on the drive in from Auckland Airport, I had the usual feeling.

The streets were all too bloody quiet.

Visas

New Zealand passport holders require a Vietnamese visa which costs $80 for one month.

When to go

Vietnam is suitable for travel at all times of the year, as the climate is diverse, and will always be good in at least one part of the country.

Health

Seek vaccination advice from Travel Doctor; Drink bottled water only.

Currency

NZ$1 equals approximately 10,000 Dong. Travellers are advised to carry US dollars in cash; US$1 equals approximately 15,700 Dong. There are ATMs in Hanoi and Saigon.

Departure taxes

Save US$12 for departing from Ho Chi Minh City; US$14 from Hanoi.

Getting there

Cathay Pacific's return economy-class fares from New Zealand to Vietnam start at $1799.

Adventure World has packages to Vietnam starting with the seven-day Taste of Vietnam trip for $1559 a person on a twin-share basis.

Further information: Cathay Pacific, phone 0800 800 454; Adventure World, phone 09 524 5118