Update 24

  Tour guide perspective—spinning and spinning—Rog



After visiting the War Remnants Museum in Ho Ch Minh City, I found a bench in the shade.  Beside me was a young  (twenty something?) Vietnamese girl. She was a tour guide and very knowledgeable about Vietnam war history. She asked what I thought of the museum. The museum had presented reasons for the war that were different from what we heard in the U.S.  I told her that in the U.S. we were told that the Vietnamese people wanted us to help them force the Communists out so they could be free to choose their own leaders.  
She thought that idea was very funny…she laughed and said that the Vietnamese people had had an election and they chose to reunify their country, but the U.S. tried to keep the country separated. The U.S. set up a government in South Vietnam and wanted to keep South Vietnam as a colony, denying them freedom. 
So…the Vietnamese were fighting the war to win freedom from the colonialist power, America.

A big difference in perspective! 

She went on to say, "That was a long time ago. We don't hold any bad feelings toward the U.S., we just think about the future. We are happy that we are one country and are no longer separated the way that Korea is."
———
Later, while visiting Dalat, a man smiled and asked where I was from.  We talked for awhile and he told me that his father had fought along with the U.S. during the war.  After the war his father was jailed for 10 years.  When he was released from jail he went to the U.S. and lives there now.  Even though the war ended long ago and we see mostly smiling faces, the damage to individuals and their families is often just below the surface.

 Some Russians were recently allowed to visit North Korea and…

They had a reaction similar to how we feel when visiting unfamiliar places. 

See below for what one Russian said.

"The main message of my content is that anywhere: no matter what country, no matter what nationality, it is regular people who live there, and you should treat people with love everywhere," says Voskresensky.  "I hope traveling will save the world."

Maybe it won't save the world, but it might help us to feel that we are all in this together and that we are more alike than we are different from one another.

Rog

Update 23

After saying good bye to Thai, we hung around the pool until dark visiting with Pete & Nita from Canada who recently retired and are on their 2nd long trip. Fun to connect. Later we took a stroll through the main park under a giant Dragon decoration. Musicians, dancers, snakes & bunnies available to hold, painted statue performers, vendors & lots of lights gave it a carnival feeling.
Next morning we went to the War Remnant Museum. Hard to relive & learn more about the VN war. The many stirring pictures & painstaking stories cut to the core. Will mankind ever learn?? Seeing young VN there made me wonder how it made them feel. And when I saw men my age or older who appeared to be American, you could see the pain in their eyes. Rog ended up on a bench under a tree talking to a VN tour guide who was on her break. (He may write about this later.). I did hear her spontaneous laugh when Rog told her we were told America was in VN to save SVN from the communist. It was a sobering morning. Again we sought the pool to cool off & let the experience penetrate. Around 4, we walked to see the impressive old post office. We attempted to go into the Notre Dame of Saigon but it's under major repairs & closed. By then it was dinner time & then bed.
We took a train out of HCM headed north to Mui Ne—a fishing town on the South China Sea. The train gave us more freedom to move around but also what we saw out our window was the backside of towns. Not that nice. We did see acres of passion fruit plants, rows of tall trees, several fruit orchards & small gardens. Few people outside. Mui Ne is an older town but with several new resorts. Our hotel was older, small & quaint with a nice pool. Huge waves were crashing against the high retaining wall on the other side of the pool. We took a Grab to see where the fishermen were actively bringing in their catch & the women were cleaning & sorting it. Motorcycles were lines up with large plastic jugs to deliver the catch to markets. All the boats seemed freshly painted a bright blue, pale green & vivid yellow. Man of the boats were totally round! Story goes that when the gov't first started taxing boats, the clever people wove huge baskets, covered them with tar and claimed they weren't boats. It worked! They actually really liked them too because they were light & easy to put in/out of water! But man, it made us dizzy just watching them in the water. Many of the local restaurants have big glass tanks filled with fresh catch on display. We enjoyed some! Later we sat on a windy beach & watched hundreds of kite surfers. We were ready for these slower paced days.
On the bus again…headed to Dalat. The road was quite rough barely two lanes and since we were going up & down a mountainous area, very curvy. I felt like we were playing peek-a-boo going around those curves! I was glad to see many curves had mirrors. The last hour, the road improved & we saw much nicer homes & towns. We got to Dalat after 5 so we just went to our hotel & crashed. Got up early, ate lots from the breakfast spread, then got a Grab to the Crazy House. Crazy is an understatement! Lady who had it built wanted to incorporate nature. It was a fascinating maze & you just had to be there to believe it. She actually rents rooms in it. Next stop was the Flower Village. Massive creative displays of gobs of varieties of flowers & vege plants. Many of the flowers were the same as we have in Michigan - but 5x larger & all in bloom. A feast for the eyes! There's a cable car that takes you over the mountain so we rode that too. Dalat is nestled high in the mountains so the weather is cooler & refreshing. It's a large town with many new & well maintained buildings & several nice parks. Tomorrow morning we are hoping to do a roller coaster ride and see one of the many waterfalls around here. Then…back on the bus & off to Nha Trang.