My thirteenth visit to Saigon wasn’t until thirty years later (thirty years and thirteen days, to be exact) when my older son Nick and I arrived on a flight from Singapore on Friday, July 21, 1995. We stayed in Saigon Star Hotel and spent the evening at a restaurant in Read More …
Thirty years later, in 1995, my son Nick and I hired a car and a driver in Biên Hòa and set off to find the village of Tân Ba. I had a general idea of how to get there, but didn’t know where to turn off the main road, so Read More …
I realize that this photo from the year 1965 is quite blurry, but I’m posting it here anyway because this house with the little steeple is the only building I recognized when I returned to Phước Vĩnh thirty years later. Unlike Tân Ba, which was basically unchanged when I returned Read More …
In the summer of 1995 my older son Nick and I went to Vietnam to see some of the places where I had been stationed as an American soldier thirty years before. Nick was 24 in 1995, and he wanted to see where I had been at the same age. Read More …
From Da Nang I took a day trip on the back of a Honda motor scooter (driven by a young man named Van) to Hoi An, the Marble Mountains and China Beach. Actually Hoi An was a place I had never even heard of up to then, but in Da Read More …
Officially this train was called the S4, but everybody referred to it as the Ho Chi Minh Express or the Reunification Express. This is one of several trains that run daily from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, by way of Biên Hòa, Xuan Loc, Nha Trang and lots of Read More …
My train from Hanoi arrived in Hué at 11 in the morning. I met my son Nick at the Thai Binh Hotel, 10/9 Nguyen Tai Phuong St., as we had arranged the week before. We both rented bicycles and spent our first day in Hué riding around town and around Read More …
From Hué we took a “DMZ-tour” — DMZ meaning the so-called “demilitarized zone” along both sides of the former border between North and South Vietnam. Despite the name, this was actually one of the least “demilitarized” places in the world during the 1960s and 70s. On our day tour we Read More …
On August 7, 1995, we took a twenty-four hour train ride on the S3 from Hué to Saigon. The first photo shows a typical view from the train in central Vietnam. I think it was on this train ride that I met a man of about my age who turned Read More …
Towards the end of our Vietnam trip in 1995 Nick and I took a three-day bus tour of the Mekong Delta at the southern end of Vietnam. This excellent tour was organized by the original (and at that time only) Sinh Café, which is now called TheSinhTourist to differentiate it Read More …