Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) street with Tet decorations

Although Vietnamese is a tonal language which Europeans tend to find fiendishly difficult, some phrases are surprisingly easy to read. Go ahead, say it as it looks and should you encounter a passing Vietnamese they will be delighted and repeat the wish back to you. Chuc mung nam moi. Daughter No 1 was saying it to everyone and getting smiles left, right and centre.

Shop window in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) with Tet decorations – a painted apricot branch

I was a bit more circumspect about trying Vietnamese, not being sure of getting it right and having in mind the story of a friend’s mother who was visiting her son, a researcher in the British embassy in Moscow. She was told that hello in Russian – zdravstvuyte – could be fairly accurately rendered by saying ‘does your arse fit you’ very quickly. Lost in Red Square, she confidently approached a Russian policeman and, in a moment of confusion came out with the unfortunate ‘Goddam your arse”. Happily,  the words were understood in neither Russian nor English and she went on her way but this story has remained with me as a salutary lesson in how easy it is to get things wrong.

Hotel reception in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) with Tet branch

With these blog posts on Vietnam I am going to try to avoid “and then we did this …” approach which would bore you to death reading it and me to death writing it. Instead I shall focus on a few themes that made us go ‘ping, why did I never know about this before?’ and brought joy to our trip as we tracked their regional variations from the south to the north.

Hoi An: Tet apricot blossom in hotel

Hoi An hotel with Tet tree (kumquat)

The first thing we became obsessed by were Tet trees. Tet is Vietnamese New Year which is reckoned on a lunar calendar. Like Christmas, excitement starts some weeks before when the streets are hung with festoons of lights as fine as any in Oxford Street. The best lights were to be seen in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC but also still referred to as Saigon) where the streets were swagged with lights decorated with big yellow flowers. Popularly known as the Vietnamese Micky-Mouse plant (no idea why), this is Ochna integerrima or the apricot. Shop windows were painted with branches of these yellow flowers which could also be seen in the hotel reception. The Tet trees of HCMC were mainly fun fakes and prepared us not a bit for the glorious examples we were to meet in Hoi An, a coastal resort and Unesco World Heritage Site in central Vietnam.

Hoi An: trailing flowers in old town

Hoi An was a delight and perhaps being a little nearer to the Tet holiday had pulled out all the stops. Apricots were in full bloom almost everywhere – in pots at the entrance to shops, in earth in the courtyard in front of people’s houses, in pot upon pot ready for sale on street corners. This is the Tet plant par excellence of central and south Vietnam where it is big business. Some villages have become famous for their bonsai apricot trees – a 10 year old bonsai Ochna can cost thousands of dollars. Some growers nurture these trees so carefully that selling just one can bring in enough money to build a house. An English language digest of local news left on our hotel door in HCMC suggested Tet trees were now so expensive people preferred to rent them rather than buy them outright. What a good idea.

Hoi An hotel Tet tree – apricot blossom

Our hotel in Hoi An had the most splendid apricot tree, gnarled and obviously trained into a most lovely shape. Little decorations hung from its branches and without the scattering of fallen petals beneath its pot we might have thought it wasn’t real, although the regular attention of someone with a sweeping brush soon suggested otherwise.

Hoi An: flowers on street corner

But one Tet tree is not enough and in central and North Vietnam you also have to have a kumquat tree. Our hotel had a splendid kumquat tree laden with fruit and bursting with the symbolism of fertility and fruitfulness. (And it is pure symbolism for the fruit isn’t grown to be eaten and if it is, is usually found the be sour and unpalatable. The same is true of the apricot tree which is never usually allowed to fruit.) As with the apricot trees, pots of kumquats also made their stately appearance in shops and stood in serried ranks for sale on street corners.

Hoi An hotel: the arrival of a third Tet tree – peach this time

Hoi An : peach Tet tree, blossom just beginning

And just when we thought we got to grips with this whole Tet tree business, we returned to the hotel one day to find a group of 9-10 men manhandling what looked like a large dead potted twig up the stairs to the foyer. This turned out to be a yet-to-flower flowering peach and is the Tet flower of central and North Vietnam – so Hoi An being central and half way between the topical south (35° C at the time of our visit) and the temperate north (as little as 11°C while we were there), gets to be able to grow all three. We left the hotel the morning after this and by then just a few bright pink flowers had appeared. Sadly we were never to see it in its full glory. (The apricot was still there blooming away but had been pushed further into the lobby and the kumquat was further behind that.) Embarras de richesses.

Hoi An: hollyhock corner

Few street corners in Hoi An were unoccupied by plants – those not selling apricot/kumquat or peach trees had others – usually just one type per site. There were massed yellow chrysanthemums, golden marigolds, bright red celosia and, my favourite, red hollyhocks. So disappointed was I not to have got a picture of  these ramrod straight plants of perfection that daughter No 1 directed the taxi driver to turn round and stop in the middle of an intersection while she took a couple of photos. (The traffic is crazy, there are no traffic lights, signs or other directives so you can do this sort of thing – sort of. Crossing the road is a similar free for all which my family – always inclined towards the jaywalker – found quite unproblematical, even if it did look like the front line of the battle of Waterloo was heading straight at you – on motorbikes! I will allow myself an exclamation mark here – if not two!!)

Hanoi: Tet branches of peach blossoms

Hanoi: taking the peach blossom home for Tet

Hanoi: Tet peach blossom

After stately Hoi An, Hanoi was something else. The traffic was crazier (roads were wider) and really rather frightening – even in a taxi. The peach tree was queen here, sold in still twiggy, woody bunches from the side of the road rather than in pots from elegant plant corrals (Hanoi’s street corners were not sufficiently generous).

Hanoi: Tet kumquat on the move

Hanoi: Tet kumquat

The fun here lay in peach and kumquats on the move – sometimes there’d be a family of 4 on a motorbike plus peach twigs. At other times single riders would sail by bearing an ancient earthenware bowl and giant kwumquat, fruits all of a wobble in the slipstream. Daughter No and I spent happy times trying for Tet tree action photos while daughter No 2 increasingly boiling with frustration tried to hail a taxi (difficult to find during Tet). As daughter No 1 got a few good shots and even dragged herself away from the action to successfully hail a cab, further frustration was averted and we piled into the taxi trying not to think about whether we’d find one for the return journey. (We didn’t but – quite surprisingly – we did find a bus. For daughter No 2 – four years in Hanoi – it was her first commercial bus ride!)

Hanoi: apricot Tet tree (apricots a rare sight in Hanoi)

I can’t resist showing a photo (below) of the sign relating to the transport of greenery that greeted us at Hanoi airport domestic terminal as we began our way home. Daughter No 1 and I had no worries about peach branches but were just hoping our rather large hand luggage – one normal sized suitcase each, packed full of ginger jars, salad bowls and a porcelain elephant lamp would raise no eye brows. Chuc mung nam moi we trilled at Check in in an attempt at diversionary tactics and the charming Vietnamese chucked us back. (A tactic which was not to work at Saigon airport where an overzealous and perhaps newish recruit charged us $75 for overladen hold luggage. (phew only $75).)

Hanoi: Vietnamese Airline’s notice about taking Tet flowers onboard

Hanoi : bicycle flower seller

The pictures on this blog post are miles away from the relevant text – this is because I didn’t have enough photos from Saigon and because I have waffled around too much in my introduction. I may try to sort this out later but this,  my first post after my break,  has exhausted me.

Tet

The New Year Holiday: some people are only allowed 3 days but most people take a week.  Sunday Feb 7 (New Year’s Eve)  to and including Saturday 13 Feb.

The Vietnamese War: The Tet Offensive

People of my generation will remember the Tet Offensive of 1968 in Vietnam and if they are anything like me they won’t have realised that Tet referred to the New Year. In fact when it came to it my knowledge about the Vietnam War in general was minimal, so if you’re as hazy, here’s a short resumé.

On the Tet holiday of 1968 the combined forces of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong launched a surprise but co-ordinated attack on 100 plus cities and towns in South Vietnam. They hoped this show of strength would persuade South Vietnamese support for the regime in Saigon to collapse and for there to be an uprising leading to the south coming over to the North’s side. It was also thought that US alliance with Saigon was unstable and that the Tet attacks would be a wedge to drive them further apart to the point at which the US would leave Vietnam.

In fact the US army and South Vietnamese forces held off these Communist attacks and inflicted heavy losses. But news coverage of the fighting in the US turned a victory into a public opinion disaster which led directly to a weakening of  public support for the war. Despite their heavy losses, the North Vietnamese claimed it as their victory and they weren’t entirely wrong. The war was in the balance.

More US troops were needed and the costs of continuing the war were escalating. However, the US was at the time in dire financial straits – a new tax bill was needed, budgetary cuts were being called for and inflation was increasing. There was also the possibility that the monetary system would collapse. By March de-escalation seemed the only path and negotiations were sought with Hanoi. Saigon was left to fight alone. Johnson, the US President decided not to run for another term as his support fell away. Nixon succeeded him and oversaw a complete withdrawal from Vietnam.