Vietnam

Vietnam Vanni and I land at Danang with Tiger Airways A320, in the centre of Vietnam. Already on landing I see crumbling houses, shacks all around the airport. On top of that the runway, as soon as we touch down, is bumpy. Down there two two-blade helicopters, like the CH ones I used in the army for jumping, but these are ugly Russian copies. I film non-stop from the window while I can, and they're military helicopters at that. As soon as we get off we see the airport is what it is. Imagine it for yourselves. I put the camera away in my backpack; I don't want to show it, I don't want them to confiscate it. A Vietnamese girl sitting at a little table is the tourist office; she speaks a bit of English and we squeeze plenty of information out of her. She points us to a hotel on the beach not far from there and has us take a taxi, a little Daewoo.

We immediately notice a hive of motorbikes and very few cars. In the taxi I whip out my camera and film non-stop; everything is interesting here. Nobody respects the road rules; the power wires on the lamp posts dangle and are knotted. At the hotel reception they ask us what category of room we want, first, second or third? We choose second; we don't quite understand how it works but never mind. We ask about a travel agency; she makes a call and two of them arrive on motorbikes and take us to the agency to talk and organise a tour for the coming days. After two hours of how is it, where is it, how much does it cost etc, we have everything organised. We set off in a nine-seat minibus, with a driver and the agency guy, for four days. So we go back to the hotel, pay without having even slept there, and set off at once for the north.

What we see along the road is incredible: motorbikes carrying anything at all. One Vietnamese on a motorbike carries another motorbike on the luggage rack; one has two live pigs jammed into an iron net; one has thirty live chickens in mini cages; one carries five people; one 150 pots, and so on. Here the engine size of motorbikes can't exceed 110 cc; more than that, only the police. We arrive for an excursion on a riverboat, a pirogue kind of thing, and they take us to a cave where the Viet Cong took refuge during the American bombings. We drive alongside the tracks; every now and then a train full of people goes by; we'll take it later too. At the roadside there are thousands of gravestones lined up neatly in rows, just like those of the American fallen in the United States. We sleep in a small hotel and eat in little roadside restaurants.

Vanni eats a fish soup with crab that is still moving in the boiling broth. And if after dinner you fancy a drop, they give you a liqueur from a glass jar full of dead snakes. And when you're lucky they're snakes; there are also various foetuses. Vanni, at one of the many stops, also sees a gruesome scene of a dog being slaughtered. Yes, because here in Vietnam dogs are eaten like rabbits. The result is that you don't see many around. We arrive to board for a night on a 30-metre wooden boat like Sandokan's, to visit Halong and its thousand islets. The scenery is very beautiful, a pity it's cloudy. The cave with stalactites and stalagmites is gigantic and very beautiful. By boat we pass little villages floating on the always-calm water, where to move around they use canoes rowed with their feet; here they breed fish and go fishing.

That night we're at anchor and before it gets dark, with an Australian girl and a two-seat canoe, I row all the way to the little island down there. Well, look where I am, I think to myself; incredible this place, and with a pretty girl too. I've almost run out of mini DVs; I didn't think there'd be so much to film. The next day we return to Halong Beach and, with the usual minibus, set off for the capital Hanoi, where the traffic is super chaotic. The guy goes back alone to Danang while the guide gets on the train with us in a sleeper berth. Here too I see things I wouldn't believe if I hadn't seen them: when the train passes we can, from the window, touch the awnings of the little shops that sell everything, practically half a metre from the tracks.

You can see all this in my video Vietnam by Daniele Somenzi that I've put on YouTube, not to mention the level crossings that don't go up but are barriers with wheels that slide back and forth, moved by men. As soon as the bars close, hundreds of Vietnamese on motorbikes stop; they're like red blood cells halting in a vein, and setting off again as soon as the train passes. On the train we're in first class, the equivalent of second class back home in Italy. Dinner is brought by an attendant with the little trolley, broth soup sealed so it doesn't spill with the movements of the train, in multi-compartment trays like on planes. We sleep well and early in the morning here we are back at Danang, just in time to go to the airport and catch the usual Tiger Airways Airbus departing for Singapore. Bye