Nancy’s Blog

There’s an article in today’s NYT about Jeff Greenwald and Ethical Traveler, the website and organization. I first met Jeff and heard about this effort after my trip to Viet Nam last year, which raised lots of questions for me about how to travel in a developing nation and the effects of the growing tourist industry on that country. No easy answers — but I was happy to find that others are thinking and talking about these issues.

No news on Papert’s condition, but I ran across this article that says he was interested, as I was, in the emergent behavior that organizes Viet Nam’s motorbike traffic, instead of rules and traffic enforcement. However, as his accident shows, and as my experience showed, it doesn’t always work. Especially for those who can’t react quickly.

In Saigon, I saw how children cross the street: one stood across the street and shouted until she got the attention of a man (probably her father) who came across and got her. And the blind: I saw a blind man shaking a stick and blowing a whistle, which didn’t affect the traffic, but a young man (a stranger) crossed to where the man was and then crossed back with him.

Along with Seymour Papert (about whose condition I see no updates), a prominent Vietnamese physicist was recently hit — and killed — by a motorbike in Hanoi, causing some discussion in the Vietnamese press about the traffic situation and how foreigners see it. In the sequence above, start with the right-hand image; if you look near the white van you’ll see a group of schoolgirls crossing the street. Then look at the left, earlier image and see them starting into the traffic. You’ll see that they just walk THROUGH the traffic. What this misses, of course, is the action, the speed, and the bikes going down the wrong side of the road ready to ram the girls while they watch those coming from the other direction. These pictures are from Saigon, where the streets are wider and the traffic not QUITE so crazy.

Foreigners in Viet Nam are obsessed with the traffic — for good reason.

Seymour Papert, known for his work on children and technology, is close to death in Hanoi after being struck by a motorcycle while crossing the street.

I wrote in my old blog about the complexity of the traffic in Viet Nam, the vast numbers of motor scooters and the improvisational nature of the traffic interaction: the way pedestrians have to cross the street is to simply walk out into the traffic on a predictable trajectory and trust the motor scooters to go around you. Which they mostly do. Scooters routinely go the wrong-way on one-way streets, go down the wrong side of the road against heavy traffic in multi-lane streets, and use the sidewalks whenever they please. They are often aggressive and reckless. I often saw scooters race through crowded markets full of pedestrians and stalls.

Looking back I see that I tried to stay upbeat reporting from/about Hanoi. I hated Hanoi. It was much more aggressive, and more hostile, than Saigon: the traffic, the selling, the cheating, were all extremely aggressive — in general, and especially toward tourists.

Old town Hanoi, where most of the tourists spend their time, is narrow streets. The sidewalks are filled with things that people are selling, parked motor scooters, and in the evenings families sitting outside their small stores cooking and eating on the sidewalk, all this leaving pedestrians nowhere to walk but in the street with the wild motor scooter traffic.

Just walking around was intensely anxiety provoking. I would wait for a sort of break in the traffic before venturing to cross the street, but then the vendors and motorscooter “taxis” would take that as an opportunity to importune me. I would be trying to cross and a motor scooter would pull up and block my way: “Motorcycle, Madame?”

And it’s not that the system works and we simply don’t understand it. I was not at all surprised to learn that Hanoi has fewer motor scooters but a higher death rate than Saigon. I saw a fatal truck-motor scooter accident on the highway outside Saigon — it wasn’t clear to me whether the fatality I saw was a passenger from the truck, or the cyclist. Although there may have been more than one.

Below is actually a relatively quiet side-street (of which there are few) in Old Town Hanoi, but the sidewalk is typical; if anything, it’s less congested than on the major streets (which are no wider, just busier). I have no pictures of the crazy Hanoi traffic because I wasn’t in much of a picture-taking mood.

In Hanoi I saw a woman hit by someone on a motor scooter: a French woman crossing the street with her daughter, an Asian girl of about 5, somehow made contact with the body of someone on a scooter as she crossed a small street in the Old Town. (I was similarly hit in Hoi An: I stepped off the curb, and motor scooter coming up from behind me turned in front of me, and someone on the scooter made body contact with me.) In Hanoi I wondered if it was deliberate, and if it was because she was a Western woman with an Asian child. The tenor of Hanoi was such that that would not have surprised me.

On the plane from Hong Kong to Saigon I was sitting near an overseas Vietnamese who said that he didn’t think Viet Nam would be able to develop as a country until they reformed their driving habits. At the time I didn’t know what he meant.

Me in front of Ahwahnee Webcam

Originally uploaded by NVH.

I keep the browsers on my various computers set on one or another of the webcams hosted by the Yosemite Association, Ahwahnee, Sentinel Dome, and Turtleback Ridge. So, of course, when I’ve gone to Yosemite I’ve tried to track them down. This time I not only tracked down the Ahwahnee webcam but had a cellphone signal and called around and found my friend Morgan by a computer to capture the image. (Morgan also posted one of these images.) My Flickr stream shows the site of the webcam. I’m that tiny figure at the bottom of the image — you need to click on this image to get to a larger version to actually see me.

So for those of you who weren’t parked at your computers watching the Ahwahnee webcam yesterday, here’s one of the images. I’m waving my hat and I’ve got a cellphone to my ear as I moved closer to and further from the webcam (over the door of one of the employee housing units on Ahwahnee Meadow, aimed up at Half Dome, so I had to go way out in the meadow to get into the frame).

And my apologies to any strangers who were monitoring the webcam, as I do, and watched all our jockeying around as I moved closer to the camera and further back and Morgan captured the images.

Others had evidently done the same: there’s not a trail, exactly, but a path through the meadpw where the grass has been walked on, walking out from the webcam to where I was.

(The Tioga Pass webcam has been a bust — it has been on the same image since July 1. The Turtleback webcam appears to be at a PG&E site atop the tunnel between the Valley and Glacier Point road. The Sentinel Dome webcam may be accessible from Glacier Point Road –I almost tried looking for it this weekend, but I was feeling the altitute up at Glacier Point.)

I’ve been following reports of Typhoon Xangsane that hit the central Viet Nam coast at Da Nang, Hue, and Hoi An over the weekend. It took roofs off, and collapsed buildings. Current reports are 7 dead — I suspect that’s optimistic. One of the travellers I met in Viet Nam was a civil engineer from Australia who was appalled at the buildings she saw under construction — poor quality, not strong walls, despite growing heights. Hoi An is a small old town full of tourists, with major resorts on the ocean and the town itself on the river not far inland. Queries have been posted on the Lonely Planet’s Thorntree Forum, but it’ll be a while before anyone who was in Hoi An will be able to post.

On a lighter note, I happened across The Amazing Race on TV last night and they were in Saigon, so I stopped to watch. One of the rules was that participants were not allowed to drive or ride motorbikes at any time in Viet Nam, for safety reasons. Travelling in Viet Nam and NOT riding a motorbike is near impossible.

On my old blog I posted a query about some companies I had run across that organized service trips overseas –doing volunteer work of various kinds. Someone who found that post asked me what I had learned, because she was considering a trip with one of the companies I listed — but I had heard nothing. So she stayed in touch and just emailed me about her trip with Global Volunteers. She was very enthusiastic about the experience (she went to rural China to teach English) and the organization.

Saw the documentary The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. I’ve been meaning to see this since my trip to Viet Nam. When I was Hanoi, this was playing in the middle of the morning on the movie channel in my hotel, and I was tempted to stay in and watch it, since I realized it would help me understand Viet Nam and the war.

McNamara was Secretary of Defense, not only during the Viet Nam War. but also the Cuban Missile Crisis, and during World War II he was an officer on the staff of the general who ordered the fire-bombing of Japan. This documentary consists largely of him talking — organized around eleven “lessons” — supplemented with audiotapes of conversations (phone and meetings) of McNamara, Johnson, and others, and historic news footage.

It’s impressive to hear from someone who was not only involved in such major events, but went back later to find out more about what they didn’t know at the time, and has reflected on what he learned and reconsidered what they decided at the time. Some of the things that I either hadn’t known or hadn’t fully understood that I learned from this documentary:

• In WWII the US firebombed 67 cities in Japan, killing 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in one night. McNamara says that they had bombers that flew low enough to be hit by anti-aircraft fire. Then B-29s flew higher, but weren’t accurate. So the general decided that fire-bombing from low altitudes would be most efficient.
  • he quotes someone — this same general, I think — as saying that, if we had lost the war, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals.
• During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were already warheads in Cuba, unknown to the US. McNamara later met Castro and asked if he would have advised Kruschev to use them, and he said he had. McNamara exclaimed that that would have resulted in the destruction of Cuba, and Castro said he was willing to do that. After the crisis, a US general recommended that we go in and bomb Cuba anyway, on the grounds that we would have do so sooner or later, so better sooner. What even McNamara didn’t know, but Castro did, was that we had already tried to assassinate Castro, twice.
  • One of McNamara’s lessons here is: “Empathize with your enemy.” But how can the decision-makers empathize, and predict how the other side will react, when they don’t know what the CIA is up to?
  • Another is “Rationality will not save us” — Castro was definitely not being “rational.”
  • Another lesson is: “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.”
  • He says that this is the closest we have ever come to nuclear war. I was in grade school at the time and I remember the tension, and everyone’s belief that we were on the verge of nuclear war, day by day, waiting.
• Under Kennedy, McNamara announced that we would reduce the number of US advisors in Viet Nam (predecessors to the fighting force) and had begun the reductions. Johnson countermanded this decision.
• I had heard that the Tonkin Bay incident, which caused the US to bomb North Viet Nam and resulted in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution giving Johnson the power to conduct the war, had never happened. We hear McNamara’s analysis, and the real-time audiotapes of the inquiry, as people in Washington try to figure out whether there was a torpedo attack on the US ship. We hear McNamara ask the captain if he’s sure there was an attack, and the captain says, “I’m sure — I think.” On that basis, we escalated the war. The evidence was sonar readings, and the interpretation of the sonar crew, but in rough water there’s a lot of noise on sonar.
  • Again — “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.” The question then is — what if you’re wrong?
• McNamara makes it clear that people in Washington had great difficulty figuring out what was going on in Viet Nam, and how to proceed. He wanted the US to pull out. Johnson too felt that the US had no good choices, that the whole situation was a mess. But Johnson insisted that we couldn’t leave. McNamara resigned; not long after that, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. At this point, only half the US soldiers who would die in the war had died.
• The documentary repeatedly, graphically emphasizes the US belief in the “domino theory.” When I was in Viet Nam, I wondered at our strong insistence on this. When in 1992 (I think) McNamara met the former North Vietnamese foreign minister, the foreign minister exclaimed that the US didn’t know Vietnamese history; theirs is a history of a thousand years of fighting for their independence from China, then from France. So they were never going to let either China or the Soviet Union rule them, and they assumed that we wanted to colonize them as France had. And that is indeed the message that I got from the history museums in Saigon and Hanoi: the long history of fighting foreign domination from all sides, especially China; the bitterness at the French domination; and the US as yet another colonial power.
  • What do we not know about Iraqi history? And how it leads them to think about us? In Rory Stewart’s book, The Prince of Marshes, he talks about driving into Nasiryah, past a statue commemorating a 1920s Iraqi uprising against the British, showing an Iraqi shooting a British soldier in the back of the head.

McNamara is asked why he didn’t publicly oppose Johnson after he left the administration, and whether he feels guilty. He refused to answer both these questions.