The DMZ and Me

On Thursday, I took a bus tour out to the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), north of Hue. The DMZ is a 10 kilometer wide strip of land along the 17th parallel that divided the north and south of Vietnam according to the 1954 Geneva Accords. The agreement was that there was no bombing in the strip itself, but on either side there was a lot of destruction and the area still has unexploded ordnance littering the countryside. Now, the 10k strip is all rice paddies, and the military bases that had been set up on the south side by the U.S. are all gone, so one can only imagine how the area might have looked during the war. North of the DMZ I visited some tunnels dug by North Vietnamese villagers to escape the bombing. Over 400 people lived for 5 years in the tunnels; I couldn’t bear to be in them more than 5 minutes. While I was waiting outside for the others, I noticed some decent looking waves coming in at Cua Tung (although the water looks a bit murky!)

The overnight train to Hanoi was a mistake. It was all too similar to the overnight train from Rangoon to Mandalay back in 2006 (as my father, aunt and sister will recall). I shared the cabin with a Czech couple that did not speak English, but had their dinner of fish and raw garlic in the cabin, the smell of which stayed with us all night. We bumped along for 14 hours, and I was jarred awake as often as I fell asleep. I found out later that I had been mistakenly booked on the local “market” train instead of the express Hue-Hanoi line (which apparently is quite deluxe).