Day 83--Off the coast of China en route to Shanghai

13 November. 30°39’ N, 123° 18’ E. Course: 343°. Speed 20 knots.

The seas have been rough and the skies very grey ever since we left Hong Kong. Last night, in particular, the ship was rocking from stem to stern in 20+-knot winds and rain. And the temperature has fallen considerably. It’s now in the mid 50s (F) outside, and water temperature has fallen to just 70°. I remember: it’s November.

But the 100 of us who didn’t travel into the interior of China but, instead, stayed aboard MV Explorer, are staying warm and having a fine time aboard what feels almost like a private yacht. The last two evenings we’ve had table-service dinner, a wonderful break from the cafeteria-style dorm food we’ve grown used to. And the days have been very quiet, allowing me to plow through 16 formal reports from my business comm. students. They require about 30 minutes each, so I’ve spent at least 8 hours over the last couple of days reading why a sandwich shop should or shouldn’t consider expanding into one of the countries we’ve visited. This is what I get paid to do.

But back to Vietnam.

Dalat

When we heard that our Vietnam Airlines flight had been cancelled, the 5 of us started considering options: trying an earlier flight (nothing available); renting a car and driver (way too far); flying through Ho Chi Minh (nothing available). Anne and I, as seasoned business travelers, started considering wider options, like flying to an alternate destination. I knew, for example, that Nha Trang was only a hundred miles or so, as the crow flies, from Dalat, so I suggested flying there and hiring a car to take us the rest of the way. But we found that the only flight to Nha Trang left at 0700 Thursday morning, and it was already too late to book seats on the next-morning’s flight.

Jim, Bob, and Shamim decided to bag an alternative and wait it out in Hanoi for the late flight. But Anne and I both wanted to get to Dalat with some time left in the day to see the place and the wonderful hotel we had all booked into. So I checked the Nha Trang flight’s load for Friday morning and, finding plenty of seats available, Anne and I decided to chance an early trip to the airport to stand by for the flight.

Thursday morning, Anne and I checked out of the hotel and hopped into a cab at 4:30am for the drive to Hanoi airport. The drive was easy, and getting on the flight was equally easy. At 7am, we took off for Nha Trang. We hadn’t made any arrangements for a driver in Nha Trang, but we had called the hotel from the airport, and the concierge there said that getting a ride to Dalat should be no problem and would likely cost us about $60. Fair price.

We arrived at Cam Rhan/Nha Trang airport about 8:30am Thursday morning. This was the same airstrip I had flown into in 1970 on my first day in Vietnam, as I was trying to work my way to my base at Tuy Hoa, about 50 miles north. The new airport hadn’t been there in 1970, of course. Instead, Cam Rhan airfield was adjacent to Cam Rhan Bay, the U.S. Navy’s principal port during the war. One building remained from the old US installation: what looked like an office building of some sort, close to the original ramp. Otherwise, Cam Rhan looked as I remembered it when, in February 1970, I sat on the sand dunes with my F4 hosts watching the movie “Gypsy Moths,” a story of the folks who specialize in putting out oil-rig fires. As I watched that movie on the beach, I’d glance over occasionally across the bay to the Army replacement center, where the Viet Cong were greeting the new soldiers with mortar fire. That was my introduction to the war.

Today, that same airstrip is connected to the resort town of Nha Trang by a 4-lane highway designed to take tourists from their airplanes to one of the several resorts that are already operating or, according to the many billboards lining the highway, soon will be operating on the beaches of Nha Trang.

Anne and I found a driver almost as soon as we stepped off the plane. He quoted us a price of 150,000 dong (about $75) for what he said would be a 3- to 4-hour drive on the new road that had just opened connecting Nha Trang to Dalat. The bags arrived quickly, and by 9:00am, we were in the car driving the short distance to Nha Trang.

During the war, Nha Trang was the site of a large Army post, as I recall. Today, it’s a resort village. It sits on a beautiful bay ringed by white-sand beaches. Unfortunately, those beaches were littered with refuse blown about by typhoon Mirinae, which had come ashore here just two days earlier and had caused considerable damage. Still, it was clear to see that Nha Trang is rapidly developing into a major beach resort. One large development—Diamond Bay—is already open, complete with golf course, hotel, and condominiums. Several other resorts are under development.

Forty years ago, I would think to myself how beautiful the Vietnamese beaches are and how fortunate some future developers would be to get first rights to beach-front property. It’s all happening now.

We stopped in Nha Trang to get some cash and water. As Anne and I returned to the car, our driver, who had been on his cellphone while we were working the ATM machine, stopped us and announced that the new highway to Dalat had been closed because of fallen trees left by Mirinae. The only route available was “the old road,” which was almost 100km and 90 minutes longer. What’s more, the extra distance would raise the cost of the ride to about US$100. Of course, we couldn’t argue, and we had no way to validate the story—given the damage we saw in Nha Trang, the story was probably true—so we agreed to the price. We transferred to a different car, this one an SUV with high clearance, and headed south on highway 1 for what turned out to be the 5-hour drive to Dalat.

The new road to Dalat cuts a swath through the jungle and up the mountains in almost a straight line from Nha Trang. If that route were the hypotenuse of a triangle, the old route forms the right angle. It starts with a 100km ride south along highway 1 through Cam Ranh to the town of Phan Rang. At Phan Rang, the route leaves highway 1 and heads west into the mountains for another 130km or so, up the mountains and into the resort in the Central Highlands.

The ride along highway 1 was smooth and fairly fast. The highway is the main north-south road in Vietnam, running along the coast from the Mekong Delta all the way to the Chinese border in the north. The stretch we were on was smooth, well paved, heavily traveled, but fast moving. We averaged 60 to 80 kph on this segment. We passed through the city of Cam Ranh and crossed over a narrow isthmus separating the mouth of a river from Cam Ranh Bay. There we could see remnants of the old Naval base along with the large cranes I’ve come to recognize as signs of major ports. Where destroyers and carriers might have been anchored 40 years ago, large freighters were tied up waiting for dock space to load or unload their containers. It’s clearly a bustling port.

From Cam Ranh, we continued down highway 1 to Phan Rang. Somewhere outside of Phan Rang was the air base where the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing—sister unit of the 31st wing at Tuy Hoa—had been located during the war. I spent one night at Phan Rang sometime during the summer of ’70 when my flight of 2 F-100s was diverted because of thunderstorms over Tuy Hoa. That was the night I watched a squadron commander being locked into an ice-making machine, had the Velcro patches eaten off my flight suit, had that same flight suit ripped almost entirely in half by a nameless fellow pilot, and spent a short night in a bunk bed before getting up early the next morning and, with far too little sleep and far too few hours ‘tween bottle and throttle, climbed back into my airplane for a brief but painful flight back to my home base.

Phan Rang is bustling today, and I didn’t see any remnants of the old air base. I took several pictures as we pulled through town, thinking that some former 35TFW folks—Roger?—might recognize a storefront or traffic circle . . . assuming they had ever gone into town during the war. What they wouldn’t recognize were the decorative banners on the light posts, alternately displaying the yellow star on red background of the Vietnamese flag, and the hammer and sickle of the communist party. It’s as if the government must constantly remind the Vietnamese people, going about their business of doing business and making money, that they still live in a communist country. Without the occasional reminders on street lamps and public buildings, it would be impossible to tell this is a communist country amidst the bustling shops, ever-present commercialism, and new construction in all directions.

The 3-hour ride up the bumpy, pot-holed, sometimes-dirt “old route” made it clear why they’d built a new highway. But the scenery was spectacular! We wound back and forth through villages, past rice fields, and up the mountainsides lined with the stair-step patterns of cultivated fields. It was like passing through the pages of a National Geographic pictorial on Southeast Asia. And, as we went higher and higher, the images I remember of Vietnam—lush jungles, small villages, the sharp peaks of karst jutting out of the mountainsides—came back. I was looking down on the same country that, 40 years ago, I had seen from almost the identical vantage point. The only thing missing—thankfully—were the occasional swaths of bombed-out jungle left over from earlier B-52 missions, and the burned scars from napalm and high-explosives. The jungle had reclaimed the land.

I was battling a bad head cold all day, so one of my memories will certainly be seeing all that we passed through weeping eyes and bunched up Kleenex. But Anne provided an excellent narrative and didn’t seem distracted by my constant sneezing and blowing.

We pulled into Dalat about 2:30pm, right around the time we would have arrived had our flight from Hanoi not been cancelled. So the early-morning get-up and the risk of standing by for a flight (the US$13 change fee was well worth it!) had paid off handsomely. Not only had we arrived as planned, but we had enjoyed what will certainly be one of the highlights of the entire voyage: the drive.

Dalat is a beautiful town surrounded by forest and mountains. It sits at almost 5,000’ elevation, about the same as Denver. And the flora resembles the trees of the Colorado mountains, minus the aspens: lots of pine and low scrub, but also lots of bright flowers because, of course, Dalat sits on a far more tropical latitude. The weather was cool and partly cloudy as we pulled up to the Dalat Palace Hotel, a 1920’s vintage French resort that Jim and Shamim had targeted. The place is sheer elegance in the old European sense: high ceilings, overstuffed furniture, oil paintings, claw-foot baths, and ever-present staff. It even has a 1930s-era Citroen limousine parked in front and available for chartered drives around town.

By the time we arrived, my cold was in full blossom. Anne and I took a short walk down to the large lake in the center of town and had a couple of beers at a gazebo-like café. Dalat is a honeymoon destination for Vietnamese, so, in addition to the classic French elements, it also contains a lot of Niagara-Falls-like kitsch. Anchored to the café dock were two-person pedal boats shaped like large swans. And we saw several couples on the lake pedaling their birds around the lake. Romantic.

I wasn’t going to be long for the world, feeling the way I was. So Anne and I decided on an early dinner at a restaurant just down the block from the hotel. After the dinner, a final glass of wine, and more drugs than my doctor would have advised, I was in bed by 9pm and asleep within seconds. That was probably the best night’s sleep I’d had since August.

Friday morning, I woke feeling drowsy and drugged. But we had a 9:30am tee time at the Royal Palace Golf Club. Through the haze, I got up, dressed, and went downstairs to the dining room, where Jim and Bob had already ordered breakfast. They and Shamim had arrived at the hotel around 10pm Thursday after a full day in Hanoi. They had some regrets they hadn’t joined Anne and me when they heard about the drive from Nha Trang. But those thoughts took second place to the upcoming round of golf.

I’ll say only that the golf was terrific. The course is old style: wide fairways, strategically placed yet natural trees, plenty of water lining and crossing fairways, beautifully maintained fairways and rough, and, without question, the finest greens I’ve seen: absolutely true with just enough undulation to make every putt a makeable challenge. Best of all were the female caddies, each wearing the traditional straw hat, each with expert eyes to read the greens and advise where to hit our shots, and each very supportive, even applauding good shots and feigning sadness when we missed. It was the most fun I’d had on the golf course since last summer, made even better by my playing a decent round and besting Bob by 9 strokes. Life is good.

That night, the 5 of us had a good dinner in the Dalat Palace dining room—not our best meal, but okay. The next morning, we were all up early again to catch an 8:05 flight back to Ho Chi Minh. The early flight was a little painful, but it would mean we’d have a full day to see the sights of Saigon before having to be back onboard by 9:00pm.

I’ll post this now and continue with the day in Saigon tomorrow.