Hoi An to the rescue

Hoi An rules! This is where I'm sending mum and dad for their next holiday. As a holiday spot, this place sort of has it all; a brilliant climate, sunny and warm but not the sweltering heat of Cambodia, a Unesco World Heritage rated old town by the river, a lovely isolated beach a few kilometres out of town (an easy ride through green rice fields), excellent massage parlours that manipulate bus-seat-formed backs back into their correct shape, unlimited amount of charming cafes and restaurants and even a bakery that makes excellent cinammon rolls! Ye gods, after the last four days of marathon travelling, this is a little slice of heaven and I've decided to stay a third day as well.

I'm also wondering what all the travellers I met who complain about the Vietnamese are on about. The people are great! Yes, there are the occasional rip off artists and you have to haggle all the prices down from the dumb-tourist-price, but the man on the street, the average Vietnamese, is very friendly indeed. Just goes to show that you have to check these stories out yourself - or failing that, send Kati, since as you all know, I write only the absolute truth and nothing but the absolute truth!

It's also a kind of relief to be in a country, where people are clearly doing better than the sweet people of Cambodia are doing. Vietnam is the poster-boy (or girl) of the developing world; in the last few years no other country in the world has increased its standard of living as much as Vietnam. And the comparative affluence of this country shows itself in all kinds of big and small ways; people's clothes are better quality and cleaner here than in Cambodia (well, it's pretty hard to hand wash dirt from a manual labourer's clothes with poor detergents in river water), the dogs are better looked after and fed, only one or two people ride per motorbike rather than the three or four, which was the norm in Cambodia, houses have well tended decorative gardens... and above all, there is a general feeling of going places, that people are not so blasted poor and without prospects as the people of Cambodia are.

The poor Cambodians have had their future destroyed twice in the last few decaces. First the Khmer Rouge in 1975-78 killed off the middle classes and all the educated people. So the people who were most likely to succeed in rebuilding the country were exterminated and the next generation of Cambodians didn't have anyone to really educate it. The country still has a lot of catching up just to make up this educational deficiency. Coupled with that there is the mismanagement and blatant corruption of the government. The worst thing it has done is to steal the future of the country a second time; by selling the best bits of the country off to foreign investors (thanks to Sami and Anna's blog for the link to the Guardian article telling about this - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/26/cambodia). Over half of Cambodia has been sold to foreign investors within the last 18 months (april 2008 situation - and no doubt the figure has only risen since then). For example the Angkor temples are now owned by a Japanese corporation, which generously invests 10% (only!) of ticket revenues into the renovation of the temple area (but someone just claimed that Walk Disney has bought Macchu Picchu... can this be true? Does anyone know?) The World Bank reported last year that corruption, coupled with a lack of transparency, was "choking economic growth in Cambodia" - no kidding!

But as I said, Vietnam is a whole different ball game. Entrepreneurship abounds and people seem to be making a decent living off it. The communist government certainly isn't "choking the economic growth" but embracing capitalism as openly as its Chinese party colleagues. And good for them, since it seems to be good for the Vietnamese in this instance!