Arrival and first impressions

Despite my desire to see the world, Vietnam was the one country I hoped I would never have to visit. Coming of age in the late 1960s, Vietnam to me, was not a country, but a war. It was an especially brutal war, taking place in the jungles of some far off land that none of us knew anything about.

I suffered extremely ambivalent feelings at the time, because on the one hand, I was a patriotic American that had bought into the Domino Theory. On the other, I didn't want to put on a uniform, pick up a gun, shoot people, and run the risk of having my own head blown off.

Fast forward. While everyone had been asking if I had been to Vietnam yet, the place had never made it into my Top 10 List of Must See Destinations. The real reason I went was that I was a travel writer and I had been invited to stay at a luxury property on a stretch of beach that was being positioned as Vietnam's answer to Bali. Rumors had it that between 30 to 50 world class hotels and resorts would be opening within the next three to five years.

I was not sure what to expect, but arriving in Vietnam was not like arriving in Thailand or Indonesia or any of the other countries I've visited. I didn't realize just how much emotional baggage I would be carrying.

As I exited the Arrivals Hall at the airport in Ho Chi Minh City, I saw a crowd of diminutive Vietnamese people sizing me up impassively. An unexpected chill ran up and down my spine, and a strange thought entered my head: “Are these friendly villagers or hostile villagers?” And I wondered what they thought about Americans and if they knew that I was one.

It was a strange flash-back to something I had heard about many years before: the frustration that the American military had fighting a war with an invisible enemy. American soldiers often complained that they could never be sure who the enemy was.

“When we entered a village, we would wonder if these were friendly villagers or hostile villagers,” I often heard them say. “If they were loyal to the government, they would be cooperative, and we had nothing to worry about. If they were loyal to the Viet Cong, we might be walking into an ambush.”

The charming PR woman that met me at the airport – an overseas Vietnamese woman that had grown up in France – had fled with her family at the age of three, returning four years ago to take up a position in the homeland she had only scant recollections of. I told her that I had mixed feelings about visiting Vietnam, fearing that it might bring back sour memories and not knowing what kind of reception I would be given.

“What do they think about Americans?” I asked. “Do they harbor any resentment because of the war?”

“I can assure you that you will never encounter any hostility because of the war,” she said. “They have put the war behind them. They have come to understand that the soldiers that came here were only following orders.”

I woke up early the next morning. I had a hearty breakfast and then decided to explore the neighborhood before meeting someone from the hotel’s PR department for a tour of the facilities. As I walked down the lengthy driveway of The Nam Hai, Hoi An – the newest resort to open on China Beach in Central Vietnam – my thoughts wandered back to the late 1960s.

Recollections of anti-war marches, violent confrontations with the police, arguments with my parents’ generation over the use of napalm, Vietnam vets coming home with missing limbs and in body bags, the Hells Angels defending my hometown, Oakland, against “communist rabble” from UC Berkeley – these were some of the thoughts that flooded my mind as the walked down the five-star resort’s lengthy driveway. And I kept wondering, “What do they think about us?” I was about to find out.

No sooner had I walked onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel than two young women drove by on a motor scooter. Spotting me, the woman on the back smiled broadly, waved enthusiastically, and shouted, “Good morning! How are you?”

They did a double U-turn, and came to a stop along side of me. “Where you go?” the driver asked. “You want me take you there?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m just taking a walk.”

“You go Marble Mountain yet? You want me take you there? I have shop.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m a travel writer, and the hotel has made arrangements for me. I’m going to Marble Mountain and day after tomorrow”

“Okay,” she said. “No problem. I give you my address. You come my shop, I give you good price.”

The passenger then asked me where I was from. Still not sure what the people here thought about Americans, I decided to play it safe. “I live in Hong Kong,” I said evasively.

“Yes,” she said, eying me suspiciously. “But where you really come from?”

Looking her straight in the eye, I said, “The United States.”

The two women broke into big grins and gave me the thumb’s up. The passenger said, “TO-tal-ly AWE-some!”

I was sure I had misunderstood, so I said, “Excuse me?”

“Totally awesome,” she said more slowly. The two women said goodbye and continued their journey.

I was about to write it off as two entrepreneurial types wanting to make a quick buck, when two other young women rode by, doing the same thing – except that they didn’t stop. They just waved at me, shouted a friendly greeting, and kept going.

A few more yards down the road and a young girl playing in her front yard spotted me. Jumping up and down excitedly, she came running toward me, enthusiastically shouting, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” Her mother joined her, smiled at me, and waved.

The warm welcome continued as I made my way down the road. A few drivers honked their horns at me and waved as they passed me. People on both sides of the street shouted greetings to me as I passed them. And then I came across an elderly person for the first time. Thinking that this one was old enough to remember the war, I wondered how she was going to react when she saw me. When she did, I noticed a slight curving upward of the lips and softening of the eyes. I looked at her and smiled shyly. She broke into a broad grin and waved at me enthusiastically. I was starting to like this place.

Approaching a group of men my own age, they looked me straight into the eye, broke into broad grins, and waved heartily. When I smiled and waved back, they looked at each other and started talking excitedly.

If the people here harbored any grudges, they were keeping them well hidden. And they had certainly not passed them unto the next generation. This was evident when I approached a school. When the children saw me, they started cheering wildly and came running over the greet me.

If children are the world’s most honest critics, this American was getting rave reviews. I wanted to take a picture of them, but this only excited them more. They waved at me and tried to shake hands with me or high five me. A few wanted to touch me or touch my camera.

Then I noticed three little boys trying to get my attention. When I looked at them, they stood at attention, smiled excitedly, looked me straight in the eye, and saluted me. I did not know at the time what they were up to so I just smiled. Looking disappointed, they saluted me again. Not sure what to do, I tried waving at them, which obviously disappointed them. They said something to me in Vietnamese, stood again at attention and saluted me. Confused, I shook hands with them walked off.

I marveled at the warm reaction of the simple people that went out of their way to let me know that I was welcome in their country. But I was especially appreciative of the reaction I got from the elderly – who had experienced the war – and the young – who could only have known about it by what their parents and grandparents had told them. The children had surely been taught in school to hate Americans – but if they had, they hadn’t taken it to heart.

And then I thought about those three little boys. At six feet tall, I must have cut a pretty striking figure in their eyes. That’s when it hit me. How could I have been so stupid? All little boys in their innocence want to be soldiers when they grow up. That’s why they had saluted me. They hadn’t seen me as an enemy, but as a hero. Realizing this, I felt sad, and wished I had understood so that I could have saluted back.

I returned to my luxurious resort in a state of near shock. In my many travels, I don’t remember ever having been treated with such seemingly genuine warmth from perfect strangers.

I changed and met one of the hotel’s PR managers, who took me on a tour of the facilities. He was very easy to talk to, and we spent more time shooting the breeze than talking about the hotel. When he asked me where I was from, I said I lived in Hong Kong. “Are you from the UK?” he asked. “No, I’m American,” I said. “But I’ve lived in Hong Kong for many years.”

Finishing our tour, we headed for the terrace, where we sat down and had something to drink. We talked about many things, from US foreign policy to Vietnam’s opening up, to religion, family values, and education. But the topic kept returning to the war, which my host was too young to have experienced first hand. Finally, he asked, “How old were you then?”

“Old enough to have served,” I said. “I was lucky. Because of health issues, I wasn’t drafted. But my brother and many others of my generation spent a year in Vietnam.”

He commented that I was the same age as his parents. He had heard their spin on the war, and now he wanted to hear mine.

I tread carefully, not wanting to say the wrong thing and find myself in the middle of an argument. But I also didn’t want to misrepresent the way I saw things.

I said that most Americans had supported the war in the beginning, but that when the casualties started mounting – when our boys starting coming home with missing limbs and in body bags and with psychological problems, and when we started seeing horrific images of both American and Vietnamese atrocities on the evening news – opinions started changing.

“It didn’t happen all at once,” I said. “You didn’t go to bed one night supporting the war and wake up the next morning opposing the war. I think the My Lai Massacre was a turning point. In the end, the American people turned not only against the war, but against their own soldiers, calling them baby killers and spitting on them. I always felt bad about that. Most of them were 18-year-olds drafted into the military. It was not their decision to fight this war. They were only following orders.”

“Two of your presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, made bad policy decisions,” my host said. “Vietnam suffered because of those decisions, but we weren’t the only ones that suffered. Your country also paid a price – a very big price. Do you know how many Americans died in the war?”

“No,” I confessed.

“Fifty-eight thousand,” he said. “That is not a small number. I want you to know that we know that your country suffered, too.”

I was very surprised by this comment, and I felt a tremendous sense of gratitude at this acknowledgement. But I was also deeply humbled.

“How many Vietnamese died?” I asked.

“Nobody knows for sure,” he said. “The official estimate is 2 million, but it could be 3 or even 4 million.”

“And what is the population of Vietnam?” I asked.

“Then?” he asked. “I’m not sure, but I think it was about 25 million.”

“So roughly 10 per cent of your population died in the war,” I said.

“Correct,” he said. “Every Vietnamese family lost three or four members. There are cemeteries everywhere.”

“All I can say is, you’re a much smaller country, but you paid a much bigger price,” I said. “For those of us that didn’t have to serve, the suffering was psychological and economic. But we suffered from a distance, watching the war on television and reading about it in the newspaper. You lived it. For you the suffering was immediate, physical, and material.”

I looked into my host’s brown eyes for a long time. Neither one of us blinked. And I said, “I didn’t think I ever wanted to come to Vietnam. I thought it would bring back too many painful memories. And I didn’t know what kind of reception I would receive. But I was truly overwhelmed by the warmth and friendliness of the people I encountered on the street this morning. Now that I’m here, I’m so glad I came. I don’t know why, but I feel a strange bond with the Vietnamese people. Maybe it is because our countries shared a very tragic episode in our two histories. We went through a lot together.”

My host looked into my blue eyes, and said, “Maybe it is because we were born of the same mother.”

Welcome to China Beach

Just 10 years ago, few foreign tourists ventured outside of Saigon (almost nobody in Vietnam refers to the former South Vietnamese capital as Ho Chi Minh City) or Hanoi. That changed with the opening of the 198-room Furama Resort Danang – the first hotel of international stature outside Vietnam’s two largest cities – in 1997.

When French developers arrived two years later to explore the possibility of developing a site several kilometers down China Beach, they were met with skepticism by local officials.

“Nobody would want to stay at a hotel on the beach,” Claude Balland, general manager of the four-star Victoria Hoi An Beach Resort & Spa says they were told. “Why don’t you build it in town?”

The five-star Nam Hai, Hoi An, is situated on a 35-hectare beachfront site and comprises 100 villas, 40 with their own private pools. Opening in late 2006, it is the newest kid on the block – but it won’t be the last.

A number of the world’s top luxury hotel chains have announced plans to develop properties along the 40-km stretch of sand. As many as 30 new properties could open within the next three years, with another 20 over the following two. Included are Life Resorts, Banyan Tree, Raffles and Hyatt Regency. Five world class golf courses are also currently under development. The first will open at year’s end.

Site of the hit TV series of the same name, China Beach sits at the heart of a region blessed with four UNESCO world heritage sites.

Hoi An, an important trading center established in the 15th century, continues to house a picturesque mix of shop houses, temples, pagodas, bridges and homes. Containing sacred Hindu ruins, My Son Valley was the spiritual center of the Champa Kingdom, which emerged in the 2nd Century BC. Thirteen emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty called the former imperial city of Hue home. Running through the Phong Nha Caves, the Son River is the world’s longest underground waterway. All are within a 30-minute to a three-hour drive.

“You’ve got the best of both worlds in China Beach,” says Wayne Duberly, general manager, The Nam Hai, Hoi An. “You can go sightseeing, you can go shopping, you can play a round of golf or you can lie in the sun by the pool.”



Places to Stay

Furama Resort Danang
www.furamavietnam.com

The Nam Hai, Hoi An
www.ghmhotels.com

Victoria Hoi An Beach Resort & Spa
www.victoriahotels-asia.com







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