Just like Thailand 20 years ago

Posted by admin on January 7th, 2008 filed in beach life, hospitality, sightseeing

Thailand has become so overrun with tourists that is really isn’t rural old Asia anymore. To find the old innocence of this continent you have to travel elsewhere – to a country that has been frozen in time for the past two decades. That country is Vietnam and a recent visit was a refreshing step back in time.

 

Recently I spent a few weeks in Vietnam, my first ever trip to this country that was so much part of the news 30 years ago. Of course I was too young to be involved in the war (as a soldier or demonstrator) and to be honest, neither did I visit Thailand twenty years ago, but the comparisons are obvious. Vietnam, like Thailand, is now very much on the tourist map and they are making the most of it! Despite being one of only 5 communist countries left in the world, they are embracing commercial tourism with zest and doing a damned good job of it. 

 

Thailand’s tourism industry ironically got going on the back of the Vietnam war when GI’s came over in their droves for R&R. One unfortunate legacy of that was the rampant sex industry that flourishes so much here, but really that’s just because the Thai’s are ambivalent to anything that can generate income and have little conscience about prostitution. 

 

Meanwhile, as travel to Asia blossomed and Thailand welcomed more and more foreigners and their money (so that more than 10% of their economy now depends on this now), Vietnam virtually closed itself off to the world after 1975. Even by 1990 returning Vietnam Vets and exiled Vietnamese hoping to donate and help with reconstruction were welcomed suspiciously. Only by the mid 1990s when the Communist government realised that the world order had shifted, did they really begin deregulating things sufficiently to enable a tourism industry to thrive. And boy has it come a long way in 10 years!

 

But, if hotels and tour companies have sprung up everywhere, staffed by professional and hospitable young Vietnamese speaking excellent English and who are on the ball (so much so that they often make the Thais look like amateurs), the country itself is still a marxist society of almost uniform poverty and humbleness. For sure Vietnam is now growing at an astonishing pace (8% per year), second only to China, with it’s confusing brand of market-marxism where people no longer  need to be equally poor as long as the government stays in countrol. Like communist China, some people have become exceedingly wealthy in Vietnam in the last 10 years, certainly by contrast to everyone else. Thirty years ago, anyone with wealth was sent to re-education camps who escaped as ‘boat people’.

 

Meanwhile, the countryside, and many parts of the city are delightfully old Asia. Vietnam isn’t some tiny backwater like Laos, or a corrupt and dangerous hellhole like Cambodia, but a happening country of 80 million people and a culture that stretches back 2 millenium. It is rich in literary skill and art, has ruins of ancient kingdoms, and plenty of incredible natural scenery – just like Thailand. It also has some of the friendliest and most hospitable people (excluding the embittered older generation that fought imperialism). They hold few grudges now to Americans, French or any others.

 

So, just why is it like Thailand probably was 20 years ago? Well, for one, it still has its innocence about it. People are still mostly rice farmers. They ride around on bicycles in their conical rice farmer hats – even in the big cities. Women still wear their graceful ao dai dresses, peasants wander around in their traditional ‘pyjamas’ and traders wander around the city balancing sholder poles with baskets of fruit and grain hanging from them. 

 

You hardly see anyone with mobile phones perpetually glued to their ear, chatting simply out of boredom, or girls uniformly dressed in identical fashionable crease stained jeans and belly hugging tank tops. In short, the Vietnamese still appear innocent. They don’t hang out of bars yelling ‘hello you’re welcome’. Thirty years of communist propaganda has made it clear to them that everyone must put in a hard day’s work. Few people believe you get suddenly rich by marrying a westerner or conning your way into the middle of a deal in which you get a windfall (bribe) for doing very little. 

 

Yes, communism has wrecked the country. There is poverty everywhere, buildings in Hanoi haven’t received a coat of paint since the French left, everyone rides bicycles instead of yearning for a status-building Honda CRV (SUV). Instead of sitting around fondling their bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label and singing Karaoke, people in Vietnam eat from impromptu Com Pho noodle shops on street sides, seated on foot-high stools. The food is tasty and nutritious. They are unpretentious about it and they uncomplainingly get on with life. After everything these poor people have been through this is now quite comfortable for them.

 

The crowded bustling streets of Hanoi still retain the original 36 guilds which formed the old commercial sector – one for metal work, one for cloth, one for food etc. – the plush malls haven’t yet taken over Bangkok style. Market sellers generally quote a fair opening price when bargaining rather than doubling the price because of your white skin. 

 

You see the rows of rice paddy still ploughed by water buffalo and simply villages. People dress like they always have done in Asia, not like some US sitcom. Locals who can speak English come up to you wanting to simply befriend foreigners – they aren’t yet jaded by countless ‘rude and rushed’ foreigners.  

 

This is how I imagined Thailand to have been 20 years ago. Of course there are still pockets of Thailand where you can still see the old way of life, but it’s now a prosperous country where even the poorest village has been transformed. Vietnam is also changing rapidly and it’s scarcely the same place it was five years ago from what I’ve been told. Five years from now it will be different again, that’s the reality I guess of a once poor continent that is now rapidly pulling itself into the modern age and good for them. They deserve to be better off and the Vietnamese are smart and hard working, but so far I can see that any increase in wealth (the younger generation have infinitely more disposable income than their parents did), it hasn’t gone to their head. One of the few advantages of a communist system (albiet a twenty-first century one) is that its taught it’s people not to be too materialistic.

However, as with any country that is still poor but now seeing a sudden influx of wealthy people (charitable visitors) pouring in, everywhere you go in Vietnam there is someone following you or trying to catch your attention for business – ciclo riders, souvenir sellers, black marketeers; you name it. And boy are they persistent and annoying!

You can easily get a visa in Bangkok within a day or two and fly to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon), and it’s well worth the visit for a few days break during your Vietnam visit – certainly if you want to see a more genuinely traditional Asia.

Complete Thailand travel guide