All titles may not be immediately available. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T O D A Y Would you rather walk? Discuss your travels by foot in Table Talk. INTERVIEW LINK NEED TEXT (11/18/97) R E C E N T L Y Road Warrior Chris Gulker (11/17/97) The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Dinner and a video with a tasty trout recipe (11/14/97) Mondo Weirdo By Andrew Brown A charming -- and cheap! -- French château (11/14/97) Open Lands By Mark Taplin Travels through Russia's once-forbidden places (11/13/97) The Aussie way of Wanderlust By Tony Wheeler Lonely Planet founder: Why Aussies are traveling fools (11/12/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A full list of all Wanderlust articles		FULL CIRCLE | PAGE 2 OF 2 + + + + + + + + DAY 79 Dong Hoi station is in a downpour. Little children, wet through, beg at the windows, smiling ever so sweetly, raising their palms out at arm's length until little pools of water form in them. They are chased away by the guard. Catering ladies, middle-aged and motherly, with grey suits and incongruous white frilly aprons, come by with breakfast. This consists of a dry, vermicular collection of noodles sloshed into a bowl, accompanied by a cream wafer. When I ask if there's anything else they look at me pitifully and move on. Feel a bit dejected. It could be all sorts of things -- the weather, the breakfast, lack of sleep after a night of being rocked and rolled about on my couchette, or the side-effects of the strong anti-malaria pills which I shall be taking from now until we leave the tropics. I'm struggling to stuff the cold sticky noodles into my mouth when, with loud protestations, the ladies in grey reappear, seize back my bowl and pour a heap of hot pork broth on top, giggling gently as one might at someone who had tried to eat Weetabix without milk. From my window I look out on a grey-green, washed-out world of paddy-fields and palm trees. White specks of light fleck the grey as a flock of egrets rises and curls away. A cemetery offers a brief splash of colour, bright blue and green paint peeling off the gravestones. There is an animated game of cards going on in the compartment next to mine. I count nine people squeezed around an up-turned suitcase. Next to that a man with a full-length keyboard across his knee is giving music lessons to a vivacious lady in a pink and black jumpsuit. Forty miles south of Dong Hoi the rain has passed out to sea and a hot sun is breaking through as we roll slowly across the Ben Hai River, better known by its line of latitude as the Seventeenth Parallel. Between the years of 1954 and 1976, it marked the division between North and South Vietnam. Thirty years ago President Johnson's huge "Rolling Thunder" bombing offensive swept across the soft, sylvan countryside. Some of the craters can still be seen, though most have been filled in to prevent them becoming stagnant breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. Defoliants, like Agent Orange, have left their mark too, but the trees they burned and poisoned have been replaced, mostly by fast-growing eucalypts. Mines, planted by both sides, are still being discovered. For someone of my age the Vietnam War remains a source of appalled fascination. For ten years or more images of the utmost cruelty came out of this green and pleasant land. Today nature has covered up most of the scars and, seeing it with my own eyes for the first time, the landscape looks as innocent as a baby. We arrive at Ga Hue at midday. (Ga, meaning station, is a phonetic Vietnamization of the French "gare".) Nothing much advertises the fact that we are in what was once the imperial capital of Vietnam. An ugly concrete girdle has been grafted onto the crumbling pink wash of the old French station building. Across a dusty square white metal tables are set out beneath a pair of thin acacia trees. We leave the train here and take a boat up the Song Huong -- the Perfume River -- as far as the famous Thien Mu Pagoda. Its popularity as a tourist attraction is evident from the amount of transport available, ranging from catamarans, their prows decorated with gaudily-painted tin dragons, to the bobbing sampans with semi-circular rattan cabin covers, fan shaped bows and long-stem outboards, nimbly steered by foot or groin even. As we chug up river I see a woman bending over the side of a boat washing her hair. She rinses it with scoops of water from an American army helmet. At the jetty below the elegant seven-storey brick pagoda, children gather round, hands outstretched. "Pen? ... Chewing gum? ... Money?" There is a small monastery up on the hill behind the pagoda. It was from here that a monk called Thich Quang Duc left for Saigon in June 1963, and became the subject of one of the most famous photographs of the century by setting himself alight on a public street as a protest against President Diem's treatment of Buddhists. His car, a four door light-blue Austin sedan, registration DBA 599, which appears in the background of the photo, is now on display in a corner of the monastery. In colour, make, model and quite possibly year of manufacture, it is identical to the one in which my father used to drive to work every day. Back in Hue, cyclo drivers outside the hotel offer us "Dancing", "Boom-boom" and "Eighteen-year-old girls". But in the end we settle for Princess Diana. Her Panorama interview, filling a huge screen, plays to an almost empty hotel bar. + + + + + + + + DAY 82 Breakfast overlooking the Perfume River. Rain falls from a low, flat sky, as it has done for the last thirty-six hours. A shiny green kingfisher stares intently into the limpid water. A village of sampans lies strung out on the stream and the slim boats look like driftwood in a monochrome morning light. At Hue station, cyclo passengers arrive encased like babies in multi-colored rainproof sheeting. Children are sheltering under one of the arcades, taking it in turns to see who can slide their sandal furthest along the tiled floor. As we progress slowly down the coast towards Da Nang on the southbound Reunification Express I can see why water puppetry is such an art form in Vietnam. The entire countryside looks as though it is about to float away. Short, fat, lazy rivers merge with waterlogged fields. Canals join up with impromptu creeks and ponds, which are in turn swelled by streams spilling merrily over mud walls. My bowels seem to take inspiration from all this and I am forced to face the Chinese toilet-paper torture. Hong-He Sanitary Tissues, the only lavatory paper that could also be used for sanding down. Outside Da Nang the prospect changes dramatically. Our single line track winds up through tunnels and across steep, bridged gorges until we reach Hai Van Pass, nearly 4000 feet above the ocean. Waterfalls and tumbling streams have replaced the listless rivers of the plain. Far below, the flat, dull-silver surface of the South China Sea is transformed into tossing, turbulent breakers. + + + + + + + + DAY 82 We are on our way north from Saigon, heading for the town of Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, in search of an international religion found only in Vietnam. It's called Caodaism and its secrets were revealed to a minor official in the French administration called Ngo Van Chieu at a seance in 1921. Through Ngo Van Chieu God made known his "third alliance with mankind", which turned out to be a fusion of existing religions -- Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. This eclectic ecumenical grouping was based on direct psychic communication with great figures of world history and at times Descartes, Pasteur, Joan of Arc, Lenin and even Shakespeare have been contacted (though Shakespeare has not been heard of since 1935). The most regular respondent has been Victor Hugo, who was honored for his ability by being made spiritual chief of Foreign Missions (which have so far extended only as far as Cambodia, 40 miles away). At Tay Ninh this youngest of world religions is alive and well and the red-and-white trimmed, ornately-towered ochre walls of the Caodaist cathedral rise from a wide and empty compound the size of Red Square. The general shape of the cathedral is open-plan Western-style, but there the similarity ends. The floor is on nine different levels -- representing the nine steps to heaven -- and from it rise columns wound round with lumpy, luridly-painted green and orange dragons. The tracery is wildly and fantastically floral with what looks like great cabbage stalks growing up around the windows. The dome at the far end is painted to represent star-spangled heavens and beneath it is a huge globe on which is painted a single eye in a triangle, the symbol of Caodaism. The service is very laid back. The mood is gentle and contemplative, the music precise and delicate, and quite haunting. Women enter from one door and men from the other and all sit cross-legged on the brightly-tiled floor wearing ethereal expressions and chanting gently. Above them birds swoop in and out of the building. Irrepressible roving bands of ten-year-old salesmen lurk outside. "What your name?" "Michael." "Oh. Your name beautiful." An ice-cold can of 7-Up is thrust against my arm. "You very handsome." "Not now thank you." "Maybe later. Yes?" On the way back to Saigon we stop at the Cu-Chi tunnels, a system of passageways and chambers dug from the hard red earth during the guerrilla wars against the French, and later the American and South Vietnamese forces. Despite being close to enemy bases, their cover stripped by dioxin defoliants and carpet-bombed by B-52s, they were never destroyed in thirty-five years of warfare. I crawl down the tunnels to see preserved hospitals, war-rooms, and the kitchens with their special system of underground ducts which funnelled cooking smoke two miles away before letting it out above the surface. The tunnels are hot and tight, and I found my back scratching and scraping painfully against the mud wall. The Cu-Chi underground system could accommodate five thousand people for up to two weeks. My guide, Le Di Phuoc, has shown high-ranking American generals round the tunnels. I ask him what their reaction is. "Well," he says, with a trace of a smile, "they understand why they lost." SALON | Nov. 18, 1997 Excerpted with permission by St. Martin's Press. © Copyright 1997 by Michael Palin. + + + + + + + + An interview with Michael Palin