Liz and I had a one week holiday in the Mekong Delta of
Vietnam, an area we had not previously visited and one which may not last too
much longer as climate change takes its toll; it produces most of the country’s
rice but raised sea levels has already increased salinity and rendered much of
the land useless.
I can think of no other country in the world with a name as emotionally charged as I noted in Chapter 11 of The Travel Addict’s Puzzle:
Vietnam: a place full of exotic
images, global political power play and horrendous deeds. It was a huge name
for my generation and a place that ultimately helped to define us. Although the
Labour Government in Britain had the good sense to stay out of that American
adventure, that did not stop us from indulging in the cultural orgy of
anti-imperialism which swept the western world. Maybe all emerging generations
need to challenge the existing order, but we did it as no other. ‘Make love not
war’ was a slogan created by the conflict in Vietnam, and with Flower Power and
transistor radios we wrested control from the Establishment and never looked
back. Even today music from the sixties and seventies rules the radio waves;
music which from Bob Dylan to The Beatles was typically written by the
performers and not spoon fed them by corporate institutions concerned only with
making money. With the body bags returning to America it was there that the
main protest movement was generated. But it wasn’t just an injured cry for
change; it was also a seizing of power by the sheer force of adolescent
hormones erupting in a very different cultural revolution to that getting
underway in China. The penetrating discordant nasal tones of Dylan spelt it
out:
Come mothers and fathers throughout
the land
And don’t
criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand
For the times they are
a-changin’
When the
Americans ignominiously fled Saigon it was not just a victory for the Vietcong,
it was the victory of my generation over what we saw as an old fashioned and
narrow minded view of the world. But of course over the years we’ve gone soft;
our idealism has been worn away with mortgages and television soap operas, …..
Saigon somehow managed to be bustling and relaxed at the same
time and felt much preferable to the skyscrapers and motorways of Kuala Lumpur
but, as ever, the best experience came from visiting the rural areas. In
particular a place where we stayed with delicious local food served at tables
and chairs overlooking one of the myriad branches of the river which had a
constant flow of barge transport, but then the tide went out and left one heavily
laden vessel stranded until the moon dragged enough water back to re-float it.
