VIETNAM : Tourist Tours of Duty : Dispatches From the Former War Zone, Now Open to Americans and Changing Fast : BY SEA ON A CRUISE SHIP

Passengers aboard one of the first cruise ships to carry Americans to Vietnamese ports since the war were awed by the splendors of Ha Long Bay: hundreds of gigantic natural sculptures of gray stone jutting from the sea like the jagged mountains of Chinese landscape paintings. Those grotesquely beautiful shapes carved by wind and sea are even more moving to the Vietnamese themselves. Ha Long means “Descending Dragon,” a beneficent beast in their mythology.

Families came alongside the Frontier Spirit--a Japanese-built vessel of 6,700 tons built for adventure cruising--on small fishing sampans to stare at the newcomers from another world, and to gesture that they were hungry. Shyly, almost shame-faced, the newcomers dropped dinner rolls into the sampans--and stared in turn at the way the water people gobbled them up.

After that initial shock, the passengers were not impressed when the ship tied up at the grubby port of Haiphong, the chief port of the northern half of Vietnam, which lies about 50 miles southeast of the capital, Hanoi. Veterans of many cruises, they were inured to the mass welcomes staged at dockside by entrepreneurs eager for the Yankee dollar.

Yet even the eight among the passengers and staff who had already seen Vietnam under different circumstances were surprised by the unfeigned enthusiasm that greeted them--not only at Haiphong, but at Da Nang, a city about halfway down the coastline from Haiphong to Ho Chi Minh City, which its people still call Saigon.

There was good reason for those fervent greetings. To the people cheering on the docks, the unremarkable middle-aged Americans were harbingers of the new plenty that Vietnamese believe will soon displace the pinched poverty imposed by their totalitarian rulers.

The avid smiles of those cultivated, sophisticated men and women recalled the cargo cult of the primitive tribes of New Guinea, who believe that some day great ships will unload on their beaches infinite riches to be distributed free to the deserving--themselves.

Perhaps paradoxically, their great expectations and those of the Vietnamese heirs of Confucianism, the world’s oldest continuous civilization, have the same root. In both cases, ardent confidence arises from the torrents of consumer goods and machinery that spilled from ships and aircraft when American GIs arrived.

The Vietnamese just know that their lives will be much better when the Americans return in force--this time as investors or tourists rather than as soldiers. From cabinet ministers to coolies, they are convinced that if the American embargo on trade is lifted, investment and aid will produce an immediate upsurge of economic activity leading to prosperity for all.

New traders and investors have already swarmed into Vietnam from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Britain and Germany. Ferries crossing the Saigon River toward the enormous neon Sony advertisement on the far bank flaunt billboards promoting Konica and Lufthansa. But the theme song of Vietnam today is “Yankee, Come Back!”

A vendor of souvenir booklets at the unremarkable tombs of the last imperial dynasty near Hue summed up the general wish: On the front of his cap appeared the slogan “For Reconciliation” above crossed American and Vietnamese flags. Why such eagerness? Simply because the United States, still vilified in dozens of war museums throughout the country, is ironically the best hope of a people whose annual income per head is less than $200.

Aside from a curiosity about a distant land that has exerted such a powerful influence on the U.S., why should Americans visit Vietnam? Simply because it is one of the most beautiful countries on the face of the earth. Indeed, no other country of Asia displays such monuments of a complex civilization amid unspoiled works of nature in quite the same striking way.

Vietnam’s most striking aspect is 1,600 miles of sea coast stretching from the sub-tropics to the deep tropics. That coast is variously spectacular, idyllic and brooding--from the rugged grotesquerie of the natural sculptures of Ha Long Bay, to the Haivan, the precipitous “Pass Between the Sea and the Clouds” through the cliffs that separate Hue from Da Nang, then to the languorous grace of Nha Trang and southward down to the dark mysteries of the mangrove-tangled shores of the Mekong Delta. It took just a week for the Frontier Spirit to make the voyage from Haiphong to the last port of call, Ho Chi Minh City.

My wife, Moira, and I took the trip last November, during the dry season, which lasts until May. The Frontier Spirit has a Norwegian captain, a largely Japanese complement of officers and a largely Filipino crew. It was Moira’s first coastwise voyage, but the second for me. I had sailed from Haiphong to Saigon aboard the Marine Adder, a ship of the U.S. Navy’s Transport Command crammed full of refuges from the Communist takeover of the North in 1955. Thereafter, I spent a cumulative total of two to three years in the country, departing for the last time in 1975 when the North conquered the South.

Returning after 17 years, I felt neither bitterness nor guilt, but above all compassion for a hard-working and intelligent people who have so long been battered by war and the aftermath of war. Like so many peoples, the Vietnamese have been ill-served by their politicians, regardless of whether those politicians call themselves Communists or anti-Communists.

I had been invited to sail on the Frontier Spirit as a lecturer because the owners wished me to share my experience and study of Vietnam with the passengers. Moira and I found the comfort and security of a cabin on a ship the ideal way to dip our toes once more into the realities of the country.

Vietnam can still be a rough place to visit, although facilities are gradually improving. Not for everyone is the heat, the worry about the food and water or the lack of truly comfortable accommodations outside the major cities. It was good to return to the ship at night.

The Frontier Spirit carried about 120 passengers, mostly Americans, including retired four-star Admiral Bernard Clarey, who once commanded the Pacific Fleet, and Brigadier Thomas Mort, who commanded artillery units at Hue during the worst fighting of 1968. The ship was so well run that most passengers were not aware of the universal corruption that extends even to the Border Guard and Customs, who had to be given generous “commissions” by the ship’s staff to keep authorities from inventing artificial difficulties.

All land excursions were also arranged in advance. But for those who, like us, find it a trial to travel in tour buses with voluble guides dispensing studied misinformation, individual cars can be hired. More expensive in the north, a car with a guide (virtually obligatory but helpful, since the north was hardly well known to us) cost about $200 for a day. In the more liberal and open south, travelers can wander more freely, limited chiefly by language problems.

On our day excursions beyond the coast of Vietnam, we saw high plateaus and steep valleys, most abundantly fecund. Pagodas tower above palm trees, and gaudy Confucian shrines stand on the banks of slow flowing rivers. Water buffalo wallow in mud puddles, and cockerels with shiny green tail feathers strut before their hens. In the tropics, the vegetation is a more intense green, and the sea a deeper blue.

In the countryside most Vietnamese, male or female, still wear the pajama-like costume of black coat and trousers. But jeans are beginning to appear, and the tan solar topi is everywhere in the north. Bright silks adorn better-off women in the cities, and the women of the mountain tribes wear short kilt-like skirts striped with bead work.

As much as the gorgeous sights of the tropics, I am captivated by the unique smells. Above all, the smoke from 10,000 cooking fires that lies over villages and towns; then the tang of food cooking--frying garlic, mild curries and the briny odor of nuoc mam , the universal sauce made from fermented fish. Also the limburger-cheese-and-chocolate reek of the spiked durian fruit, the stench of night soil on the fields, the ashy sweetness of incense--and a sudden whiff of jasmine or roses. Vietnam is still old Asia.

A few years of grace remain, but not many. Soon enough the tidal waves of industrialization and mass tourism will break over its untouched beaches, its untamed mountains and its unplundered forests. Those waves are already rising. In downtown Saigon, the massive, Australian-built Floating Hotel is berthed on the river front, and a consortium from Saigon has just completed a new hotel in Hanoi.

Aside from Saigon, Hanoi and refurbished hotels in gracious Hue, however, modern infrastructure is virtually nonexistent. In the spectacularly beautiful--and ripe for development--southern port of Nha Trang, where we made a day call, only two hotels are now open to foreign visitors, both charmingly colonial. Bao Dai’s Villa, on the heights overlooking the port, was once the estate the playboy who was the French-designated last emperor of Vietnam. It is patronized primarily by French tourists arduously traveling the 1,300-mile length of the country by minivan. Commanding the heights, its scattered buildings are set amid well tended gardens.

Hai Yen (meaning Sea Swallow), a hotel whose double doors open onto the beach, was familiar. I first slept there in 1959, when it was the headquarters of the Green Berets, who were just beginning to enter the country. Later it was the headquarters of local American civilian officials, including the Central Intelligence Agency.

Nha Trang overlooks the country’s most beautiful half moon of beach, dominated by the compound of the Border Guard whose emblem is the same crossed hammer and sickle beneath a red and gold star worn by the despised Frontier Police on the former Berlin Wall. The mud-laned village, however, boasts an institute conducting practical research into fish and shrimp farming and, also, one new three-story building with a tile facade. That is the home of the head of the state-owned corporation that exports expensive swallows’ nests to Hong Kong and Taiwan to make highly-prized soups.

The old is also preserved--and the contrasts sharp--in “revolutionary” Hanoi itself, where the Temple of Confucius has been lovingly refurbished by a regime that is officially not only anti-religious, but anti-Confucian. The curator spent several years at Beijing University to learn not only modern Chinese, but the difficult code-like classical language in which educated Chinese and Vietnamese wrote before the 20th Century. In the courtyards stand stele, stone tablets, bearing the names of eminent Vietnamese mandarins of centuries past, which promise: “Their renown will never perish!”

I saw similar stele in the languorous city of Hue, on the Perfume River, before it was devastated by the Communists’ Tet Offensive of 1968. There the Nguyen, Vietnam’s last imperial dynasty, established its capital in 1802 and built the Citadel, a small scale reproduction of the Imperial City in Beijing. Only a few buildings now stand within the walls of the Citadel, where the Viet Cong took refuge after slaughtering Hue’s middle class. American artillery wreaked much of the destruction.

The Throne Hall has, however, been largely restored, though artists are still laying the gold leaf on the imperial five-clawed dragons that encircle the vermilion pillars. Once again arches stand before the Throne Hall bearing solid Confucian mottoes in classical Chinese.

Vietnamese are inherently religious, their natural inclination intensified by the troubles of the last half-century. Even in grimy Nha Trang, not only Buddhist, but Confucian shrines still prosper. As they have for millennia, devotees light incense sticks and pray to carved and painted deities. Because they must, the Communists grimly tolerate beliefs ranging from animism to the complexities of Cao Dai, whose saints include Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc and Thomas Edison.

Hanoi, like any image-conscious authoritarian regime, attempts to keep the visitors bringing precious foreign exchange from seeing the country warts and all. Nonetheless, tourist guides are themselves inclined to lapse into honest revelations after delivering themselves of the prescribed paeans of praise of the regime. Further, visitors can see for themselves the rutted roads, particularly the highway between Haiphong and Hanoi. And in the villages, even in the south, they all see that life is still very straitened, as in Nha Trang’s hardware store, which is merely a collection of old nails, screws and tools displayed in boxes on the veranda of the proprietor’s house.

Yet the policy of “opening”--the grudging toleration of some free market practices--have improved conditions. Vietnam now exports small quantities of both rice and oil; in 1992 for the first time exports exceeded imports, by $75 million. Further, the U.S. dollar, the country’s second currency, actually fell 12% against the dong in 1992--after rising 88% in 1991.

Nonetheless, inflation ran more than 30% last year, although down from 60% in 1991, and unemployment was more than 20%. Even once-dedicated Communists are not only angry, but deeply confused. One conversation I had dramatically displayed that disillusion.

A Hanoi trishaw driver, who earns about $10 a month pedaling passengers and goods in his three-wheeled vehicle, heard me speaking German to another Vietnamese. The driver confided to me in excellent German that he had been a North Vietnamese soldier in the South in the 1970s, perhaps shooting at war correspondents like me. He had once attended Humboldt University in East Berlin for five years, studying, he said with distaste, “Socialist economics.”

He then demanded: “Why did our planning fail so miserably? Where did we go wrong?”

I replied as best I could that, despite its faults, the free market had proved the best way to a better life for the greatest number. Since man was not divine, he could not see far ahead to plan a country’s economic course for years ahead.

The former protege of the Communists, now existing only by backbreaking coolie labor that will undoubtedly shorten his life, asked: “Do you believe in God?”

When I said I did, he replied: “I think I do, too!”

Vivacious Saigon was, on the other hand, most impressive and most hopeful. In truth, magical. I know Saigon best of all Vietnam, for it was the war correspondents’ base. For Old Asia hands, Vietnam was not just a battlefield but a charming country that aroused affection as well as wonder and, often enough, fury.

As important, my wife Moira and I had once spent part of a peripatetic honeymoon in Saigon, staying at the magnificently colonial Majestic Hotel on the waterfront. On our recent visit, with the better part of two days at our disposal, we hired an air-conditioned minibus for ourselves at $5 an hour and looked up an old friend with whom we scurried around town. We found the old Majestic--not necessarily the best, but certainly the most picturesque and evocative hotel in town--virtually unchanged, still decaying gently under repeated coats of fresh paint.

But the patronage of a new generation of foreigners has spruced up the rooftop bar. In the violet tropical dusk, young English men and women were drinking gin and tonic while conversing in strangulated whinnies, the upper-class “public school accent” Hong Kong’s British firms prefer in their recruits. It took us back decades when we saw the couple holding hands in the corner: a very blond young man and a very pretty Vietnamienne with long black hair flowing over her cerise ao dai .

One big difference, however. Menu prices were in dollars, not dong , as they had been during the war. Sentimentally, we negotiated the purchase of an ashtray inscribed “Majestic Hotel, Saigon,” for $3.

I must report that the Continental Shelf has vanished. So we called the broad open terrace of the Continental Hotel, where all Saigon--all that mattered, that is--gathered to sip aperitifs, swap rumors and watch the constantly changing street scene. Although the coffee shop on the corner opposite remains virtually unchanged, the Continental has been refurbished at much expense--and the terrace has been enclosed. The Caravelle across the boulevard, in 1959 brand new and smartest of hotels, has also been refurbished, but has lost much of its flavor. A block away, the Rex, a rather down-market slab of a building that once accommodated transient American officers, is now considered up market.

The cyclo, the pedaled trishaw, is still the chief means of transportation. And it is still a death-defying ride in the motorized cyclo called a pousse-pousse, whose driver uses his unprotected passenger sitting in front like a battering ram. But traffic, though still chaotic, is extremely light compared to the old days. A fleet of new, yellow air-conditioned taxis is a great advance, but for visitors only since the prices, stated in dollars, are out of Vietnamese reach.

Saigon remains Saigon, brash, bustling, and vital after slow, suspicious Hanoi. The vast markets, open air or covered, as well as the innumerable shops, are almost as busy as they were during the war. On the city’s Fifth Avenue, now called Dong Khoi, dozens of night clubs that catered to GIs have been transformed into curio shops and art galleries.

Although customers are not plentiful, Vietnamese stubbornness still inhibits normal Asian bargaining. But prices are very cheap by outsiders’ standards. Largely for those outsiders, but also for Vietnamese yuppies, who are rising under the new freedom of trade, dance halls have opened. Ambitious bar girls, now making a comeback, are studying Japanese rather than English. Yet the most marked increase I noted was the number and the pitiable state of the beggars congregating around the Cathedral of Notre Dame at the head of Dong Khoi Avenue.

Nostalgic, I wanted to visit Cholon, Saigon’s vast Chinatown, to see the Arc en Ciel, once the best Chinese restaurant in Vietnam. It had changed under Communist administration since the war ended. The restaurant, famous for crisp Sichuan duck, is now on the roof of a new four-story hotel that caters primarily to visitors from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But the ambience of the 3-year-old hotel is that of a second-rate Overseas Chinese inn in an out of the way place like Borneo 30 years ago.

And Cholon itself, once the throbbing commercial and financial heart of Saigon? The heart is still beating. But the pulse is much slower than it was during the war or the burst of prosperity just before the war. The broad street outside the Arc en Ciel is empty of motor vehicles, except for our hired minibus. The normally energetic Cantonese saunter past a pawn shop, a movie house, a hardware store, and street vendors selling shiny rubber-pink chunks of black market pork. Illegal vendors bribe the cop on the beat, rather than pay the high rents of the public markets.

However, the pace of trade--and self-improvement--is quickening. Markets are bursting with life and goods: foodstuffs, including tropical mangoes and strawberries from the highlands, sausages, cheeses, artichokes, 10 kinds of rice, and long French loaves; clothing from filmy ao dais to fashionable jeans, somewhat sleazy silks, and footwear, now one of Vietnam’s major products; foreign-made toiletries from Joy perfume to Aramis after shave, all smuggled into the country by bribing officials.

“One of our biggest challenges,” once declared Premier Viet, “is corruption in the state apparatus and the smuggling that goes along with it.” A trader from Taiwan I met shopping for jewelry for his Vietnamese girlfriend is doing a big business importing used motor scooters. I did not ask whether they came in the front or the back door.

Since Vietnam’s south is becoming more vital every moment, it will someday be Mercedes- Benzes and Lexuses imported legally. If the United States eventually drops the trade embargo, it could be Pontiacs and Chryslers in the country that demands: “Yankee, Come Back!”

GUIDEBOOK

Cruising to Vietnam

Four cruise lines now sail to Vietnam:

SeaQuest Cruises: The 164-passenger Frontier Spirit will visit Vietnam on four separate cruises in 1993. Land/cruise packages of 22 days depart the United States for Singapore April 11 and Aug. 28. In Vietnam, cruises stop at Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Nha Trang, Da Nang, Hue, Haiphong (for Hanoi) and Ha Long Bay, and Zhanjiang, Xiamen, Fuzhou and Shanghai, China, en route to Hong Kong. Packages include three days each in Singapore and Hong Kong. Fares are $7,100-$12,300 per person, double occupancy, including air fare from the West Coast.

A pair of 18-day land/cruise packages depart the U.S. for Hong Kong June 2 and Oct. 19. Stops are Ha Long Bay, Haiphong, Hue, Da Nang, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang and Ho Chi Minh City, plus Kuantan, Malaysia, en route to Singapore. Fares are $5,800-$9,700 per person, double occupancy, for the June sailing; $6,000-$10,200 for the October voyage. For reservations, contact your travel agent or SeaQuest Cruises: (800) 223-5688.

Classical Cruises: The 80-passenger Aurora I travels from Bangkok to Hong Kong via Vietnam beginning Feb. 9, and from Hong Kong to Singapore via Vietnam starting Feb. 21. Both itineraries feature on-board lecturers and include overnight stops at Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang (with an excursion to Hue), Haiphong (for Hanoi) and Ha Long Bay. The former 18-day land/cruise package costs $4,595-$5,995 per person, double occupancy; the latter 15-day trip runs $4,345-$5,745 per double. Prices do not include air fare to and from Asia. Trip extensions to Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and Bangkok are also available. Later this year and in early 1994 the Aurora I will include Mekong River excursions into Cambodia. Classical Cruises: (800) 252-7745.

Pearl Cruises: The 480-passenger Ocean Pearl offers two 19-day Vietnam cruise itineraries from Singapore to Hong Kong, with package departures from the U.S. March 4 and Aug. 23. The ship calls at most of the main Vietnamese ports listed above. Fares run $3,850-$7,350 per person, double occupancy, plus air add-ons of $695 from the West Coast. The ship calls also at Ho Chi Minh City and Nha Trang during March 16, July 12 and Oct. 14 departures on Pearl’s “Great Cities of Asia” itinerary. For more information on these 23- and 21-day cruises call Pearl Cruises at (800) 556-8850.

Royal Viking Line: The 200-passenger Royal Viking Queen will call at Ho Chi Minh City during a 13-day Hong Kong-to-Singapore cruise departing Feb. 20. Oceanographer Jean-Michel Cousteau will lecture on his research in the Mekong Delta. Prices start at $9,995 per person, double occupancy, including air fare from the West Coast. Royal Viking: (800) 422-8000.