Vietnam is an amazing country, primarily because of the beautiful countryside, the warm, energetic people, and the chance to watch radical changes occurring before your eyes. The land itself is intensely green, full of bright emerald rice fields, darker hills and lush trees, accented by blue skies and tropical flowers. The people are quite friendly and curious to meet foreigners. Our initial concerns about visiting as Americans quickly disappeared once we started meeting people. It's a very young country, and I think something like 60% of the population is under 30 years old. Everywhere you see signs of change - 3-story buildings sprouting in the middle of rice paddies, the first skyscrapers going up in Hanoi, privately owned cars entering the streets.

If we hadn't already known it, we might not have realized that Vietnam is a communist country. Like the rest of us, they have homeless people living on the streets. Surprisingly, they don't even provide free health care or education to their people. But we also didn't see the huge contrasts between rich and poor so common in other third-world countries. The majority of people are quite poor, but appear to at least have enough to eat. Living conditions for many consist of very basic homes built of wood or palm leaves, but many have electricity and perhaps a television. The children are particularly curious about meeting foreigners, some because we are still a novelty, and some, I'm afraid, because they've learned to beg for coins, candy and pens. I wish the tourists would have better sense about this issue - it's the same in Kenya, Kathmandu and probably just about any poor country. They think they're being generous but end up teaching the kids to be beggars. The effect on us has been to make us want to ignore these pesky kids instead of having fun with them and perhaps getting to know them. When we do interact with kids now, it's always with trepidation and suspicion that they'll start asking for American coins or pens or rupees. If any of you are thinking about traveling, please don't feed this habit!

Our Vietnam itinerary included several days in Hanoi, still a quiet, formerly-French-colonial city in the north of the country. The streets are filled with honking sounds from various moving vehicles, including bicycles, motorbikes, a few cars and minibuses. Oh, and I can't forget to mention the charming cyclos, called cycle rickshaws here in Nepal, sort of like a giant tricycle with a big seat in front for the passenger. You wouldn't believe how much weight those old, stringy cyclo drivers can take (for example, the two of us, on each others' laps, plus all our gear!) Vying for footspace with these vehicles are the people on foot. Simply crossing the street is quite an experience, since there are few traffic lights (we found maybe three of them in the city) and no regulatory signs whatsoever. Picture two very crowded streets filled with all the above. Now imagine that these roads are intersecting perpendicularly. But somehow everyone gets where they need to go!

After spending a couple of days in Hanoi we visited Ha Long Bay where there are over 3,000 limestone islands jutting out of the bay. As with everything else in Vietnam, the islands were a beautiful green and quite impressive. At one point during our boat ride we set anchor and went swimming off the side of the boat. The water was so pleasant and the setting so peaceful that this has to have been the most beautiful place we've been swimming.

The drive to Ha Long Bay was only a glimpse of the wonders of transportation we were to experience in the coming weeks. What would normally be considered a Bay Area commute becomes a 5 hour bus ride in Vietnam. It's not that the roads are in that bad a shape, but rather the fact that everything (trucks, buses, oxen, bicycles, motorbikes and people) wants to go down the middle of the road. Never mind that someone heading the opposite direction has the same idea. Couple that with everyone trying to overtake everyone else at the same time and you get the picture. Anyway after our 5 hour bus trip we got on to the train for our 12 hour overnight trip to Hue (the capital in earlier times). Soft seat class is about as soft as a park bench, but the friendly people on the train (almost everyone else was Vietnamese) made the trip bearable. After visiting some of the local temples and sights we headed on to Hoi An. The drive was another adventure since we happened to be driving through a typhoon. A lot of downed power lines and tree branches, but apparently they get 15-20 of these storms a season. As our driver put it: "no problem...with all the people in our minivan we're too heavy to be blown off the road!" While we waited for the weather to improve, we couldn't resist the bargain basement tailor made clothes in the open air market.

After the weather cleared, we decided it was time to go upscale and fly to Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City) rather than brave another 25 hour train ride in "soft seat". With an average airplane fleet age of under one year (mostly brand new Airbuses) we were definitely living it up - nothing like the old Russian planes they used to have. We had expected Saigon to be total chaos, but it turned out to be fairly sane for a large city. Mostly we used Saigon as a staging area to head out to the Mekong Delta where a lot of the population lives right alongside the many channels of the delta and where almost all the transportation is by boat. In fact a lot of the commerce is also done by boat by way of floating markets, riverside stores and roaming boats hawking their goods.

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