Good Morning Vietnam

… is a great film, as is Apocalypse Now, but if you want to know the real story of this country I can only recommend the brilliant documentary by Burns, simply titled “The Vietnam War”. I don’t know of any other documentary that brilliantly explains the 20th century history of a country, and in doing so, it explains very well the cultural and political changes in France and the USA.
The children know a little bit about the Vietnam war, because we encountered its long term effects in Laos when we visited the medical rehabilitation centre for the victims of cluster bombs that still go off to this day, but I am going to let them watch at least the 1st episode of Ken Burns work, so that they see the terrible mistakes the French and the Americans made here.
Florence and I were here on our honeymoon (9 weeks though much of Asia) in 2007, so we know a little of this country already and we are keen to see how much its changed in recent years.
We arrived in Vietnam after a rather bizarre journey to leave China. We were in Nanning which is the closest city to Vietnam in China, and we had originally planned to take the train from there to Hanoi, but when I applied for the Chinese visas, the service was still suspended due to Covid (April 2023!), so I was forced to buy flight tickets, since I needed proof of how we would leave China. So we had flight tickets Nanning to Shenzhen, and then Shenzhen to Hanoi, because curiously there are no flights from Nanning to Hanoi. Just for fun, the airline cancelled the connecting flight from Nanning to Shenzhen and booked us two days earlier, which, of course, was impossible because we had not even arrived in Nanning two days earlier I spent the best part of a day trying to find another way out at a reasonable cost. (If money is no problem, there is always a solution) So we ended up taking the train to Shenzhen, which meant a 5 hour train journey, plus an hour at either end on the metro. I forgot to say that now the train to Hanoi has resumed, but we lacked clarity on whether we could cross the border visa free, as this seems to only be allowed at major airports. There is an e-visa, but this is only usable at a limited number of (air)ports. So the aeroplane it was, and for good measure, the only flight leaves China at midnight and arrives in Hanoi at 1am. Just for fun, the Vietnamese have the slowest passport control we have experienced to date, so we eventually got to the hotel and bed around 3am. First time we slept so long that we missed breakfast.Leia mais