Vietnam
24 March 2026
Good morning, Vietnam! What memories, pretty much none of them good. I have been fondly remembering Robin Williams, though, in the movie “Good Morning Vietnam.”
We’re just south of the Gulf of Tonkin, where America unwisely found cause to join the Vietnam War, and also just south of Haiphong Harbor, the nearest harbor to the capital city of Hanoi. Still lots of bomb craters up there, and maybe a few mines in the harbor.
We docked in Chan May Bay, 27 miles/43 km from da Nang to our south and 35 miles/57 km from Hué to our north. We’re in the narrow part of Vietnam, just about 35 miles/57 km from the border with the country of Laos and about 60 miles/100 km south of the DMZ, the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam during the war. The Battle of Khe Sanh took place at the DMZ.
Da Nang was the site of a major U.S. air base and the landing point for the first American combat troops (3,500 Marines) on March 8, 1965. It was heavily utilized for operations, saw significant action during the 1968 Tet Offensive, and was captured by North Vietnamese forces in March 1975 shortly before the war ended.
Hué was the sight of a major, month-long battle during the 1968 Tet Offensive where U.S. and South Vietnamese forces fought North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong troops for control of the old imperial capital. It featured intense house-to-house urban warfare, resulting in heavy casualties, widespread city destruction, and a strategic political loss for the U.S., despite a tactical victory. The Pentagon was saying victory was at hand, until the Tet Offensive showed that the north had plenty of fight left in them. It was a turning point in the war, leading to most Americans deciding that the war was a bad idea.
I’m surprised at the high mountains in this area. I always pictured most of Vietnam as flat jungles and flat rice paddies. I frankly had no desire to revisit the horrors that must have been da Nang and Hué in the 60s and 70s, so we opted to spend the day at a seaside resort called Langco Bay Retreat. Google it and visit their homepage and you’ll see it’s a nice place.
A few years ago I read the excellent “Up Country,” a 2002 thriller novel by Nelson DeMille, featuring retired Army CID investigator Paul Brenner, who is called back to Vietnam to solve a murder that occurred 30 years prior, during the Tet Offensive, leading him on a dangerous journey through his past and present-day Vietnam. A lot of the novel takes place right where are, and they spend some time at a seaside resort right where we are, so this day at the resort has a bit of special meaning to my imagination.
I was thinking about how we’d be treated by the Vietnamese, that there will probably remain some hard feelings. But a twenty-six-year-old in Vietnam today is as far removed from the war as I am from the Great Depression. I’m sure they still hear some talk of the war from the elders, but it is distant past to most of the current population.
So our visit to the resort was great. After we got out of the Cunard shuttle bus, all the young Vietnamese we pressed through were friendly. They just wanted us to hire them for a guided tour in their car, or something. I pressed on without listening to them. There were about 40 of them, looking for a little tourist money. Can’t blame them. The QM2 crowd each paid just under $10 to have the day’s use of the resort, and that included a free beverage at the bar, so you might say our day was free.
We first walked along the beautiful beach and got our feet wet in the ocean, then headed to the bar to get our complimentary free drink. David and Linda had bottled water. I had a Vietnamese beer and it was cold and good and welcome.
We chatted a while with an old US Navy man who’s also on QM2 and he told about his ship shelling the coast along that part of Vietnam during the war. He said the Vietnamese fired back at them, but never hit anything.
Turns out the ship he was on was the same ship David, also a Navy man, had taken from Bremerton, Washington, to Hawaii in the Vietnam days! Small world! David was released from the Navy during a military downsizing just before his ship headed on to Vietnam.
We had a great meal at the resort’s nice restaurant, then took the shuttle back to QM2. We’re becoming good at seeing and doing without wearing ourselves out. For more on our tour of duty in Vietnam, see the captions on the photos I’ll post. Having set our clocks back an hour last night, we’re currently 12 hours ahead of Pocahontas time, which makes time easy to deal with. Five a.m. at home is five p.m. here, the same day. But tonight we head on for 2 days at sea before arrival in Singapore, and tonight we set our clocks back another hour!
Vietnamese Fishing Boat Passing the Ship
25 March 2026
Linda and I spent some time today booking more excursions for our upcoming ports of call. We’ve realized that we’ll never be this way again, and it’s not the time to pinch pennies. Our main criterion on an excursion is that it not include too much walking. We can handle an hour of walking, but some of the best tours feature “3 hours of walking on irregular surfaces” and “bring bottled water, a broad-brimmed hat, and wear sun screen.” We’ve reached the point that walking to and from a bus, and a 2-hour ride, wears us out, so some of these tours are just not worth it to us.
I attended a lecture by “the Royal Butler,” a guy who spent 2004 to 2011 as butler to Prince Charles, now King Charles III, and his sons. He told several funny anecdotes related to his job, including managing the late queen’s corgis, and about the time he got to join Queen Elizabeth II in Scottish dancing (he’s from Scotland). Before the lecture began, I listened to two English ladies, who went on for 20 minutes about how wonderful the queen was, and how the country will never be the same without her. They seemed OK with King Charles, so far. They mentioned that he has a hard act to follow.
I spent a couple of hours on my balcony this afternoon, looking at boobies. Specifically, beautiful brown boobies.
The brown booby is a sea bird that sort of looks like a goose (I’ll post a photo). They have webbed feet, but they’re big, nearly 3 feet/80 centimeters in length with a wingspans up to 5 feet/150 cm, and a very sharply pointed beak. There were about 8 of them flying along beside the ship, some passing within 6 feet/2 meters of my balcony. I could almost reach out and touch them.
It seems they’ve learned that moving ships frighten flying fish, causing the fish to instinctively leave the water to escape the area. The boobies fly along, high over the water, watching. When they spot the flying fish, they swoop down, dive into the water, and, I suppose, swallow them whole. Their webbed feet are not suitable for holding prey in their talons.
I finally spotted some flying fish, a couple of dozen of them, soaring just above the water. From my distance, they looked like moths, but I read that they are up to a foot long.
