Bien Phu was made the capital of Lai Chau Province in 1993, but partly by default. The previous capital kept suffering devastating floods, caused mainly by deforestation, and may soon disappear altogether under the reservoir of a huge hydro dam. But of course, there was also another reason to elevate the status of DBP: patriotism. Giap’s great victory is an event celebrated in school books, songs, and public art; in street names, memorials, and museums.
I met up with Christopher at the Hanoi airport on the specified day and off we went. What we saw almost immediately on landing is that the town’s place in history has brought a certain amount of tourism, leading to such modest local institutions as the Lottery Hotel, the Construction Hotel, and the Beer Factory Guesthouse (none of which had room for us that day). Development has chewed up some of the edges of the battlefield, but not enough to keep visitors from getting a clear understanding of what the fighting must have been like. In contrast to China, which will often raze some historical site to build a modern replica of it, Vietnam tends to skilfully redo or replace lost or damaged elements without taking away from the original. Examples include some parts of the French blockhouses and bunkers. Others include the surprisingly deep trenches dug by both armies during their deadly and deadly serious game of cat-and-mouse.
In brief, DBP, though interesting, is a very small and isolated place with little commotion and less cosmopolitanism. Let me illustrate. I have one badly arthritic knee that will need replacing in the next few years. Until then, it acts up from time and time, buckling at inopportune moments. I had one such incident in DBP while climbing stairs at the only place with a vacancy: a combination hotel/massage parlour. The next day, I had to hobble about in search of ice with which to bring down the swelling. The only supply I found was in a mobile phone shop that also sold beer from an ancient fridge badly in need of defrosting. I paid the owner a few dong for the ice that had built up at the bottom. For days afterwards, I was a famous personage in town: the Westerner who spends good money on frozen water!
The community, whose local crops include rice and (in nearby tribal areas) opium, sits on red clay soil that reminded me of Prince Edward Island. In the dry season, the stuff is hard and dusty, but by the end of the rainy season has the consistency of pancake batter. For the past fifty-seven years, as it has dripped down the hillsides and embankments at the conclusion of each monsoon, it has revealed artifacts, including bits of human bone and sometimes teeth (French teeth, presumably). Without any effort whatever, we found three mud-caked brass cartridge casings. Two days before our arrival, a history buff from Britain discovered a French helmet. Inside was a scrap of scalp. But that was exceptional. After the French War, just as after the American War two decades later, the Vietnamese picked the countryside clean of valuable scrap metal.
The Englishman’s discovery of the helmet was also somewhat out of the ordinary in that relatively few Western visitors spend time in DBP. Groups of Vietnamese school children on field trips — certainly. People with parents and grandparents buried in neat rows in the huge Viet Minh cemetery — of course. But the ranks of Frenchwomen widowed by Dien Bien Phu are pretty thin now, and the place is so far away and so difficult to reach even from the major Vietnamese cities. In fact, it’s hard to get out of, as well.
I went with Christopher to meet some Black Thai women who lived nearby so he could see what common ground there might be between his contemporary Thai and their own dialect. The answer to the question, he said later, was that he could pick up some of what they were saying, but the extent of their mutual comprehension was probably the same as that between a modern Spaniard and some nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century Portuguese person. What I found interesting is that the women and young girls who were married wore their hair in a sort of giant beehive, through which they stuck a metal rod, somewhat like a giant knitting needle, to which a large coin was affixed. I could tell that the coins were replicas, made of cast aluminium. But one of the older wives (the youngest were only thirteen) had a genuine silver piece. I ask her permission to take a closer look. The lettering read INDOCHINE FRANÇAISE 50 PIASTRES and bore the date 1922. I imagine it had been handed down from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter.
Christopher had to be back in Bangkok on a certain morning so that he could say goodbye to his wife, Od, a human rights worker, before she left Thailand to participate in a conference. We had arranged a flight that would get us to Hanoi in time for him to make the Bangkok connection he needed. The tiny airport at Dien Bien Phu is built on the site of the French military airstrip whose destruction by Giap’s artillery ensured the Viet Minh victory. After an hour or so on the ground, the empty Vietnam Airlines flight to Hanoi hadn’t refuelled or allowed us few ticket-holders to board. Eventually, two workers came and removed everyone’s luggage from the hold. Then mechanics, overseen by an official with a clipboard, began to disassemble part of the fuel system, leaving the components on the tarmac before quitting for the day. Eventually we heard an announcement that no other plane would be available for a day or two.
There being no bus and of course no train, Christopher and I decided to hire a taxi. The fare was astonishingly low, but the journey took the rest of the day and all night, over narrow mountain roads, unpaved for long stretches, with rock cliffs on one side and drops of maybe three hundred metres on the other — with no guard-rails or even white lines. The driver played loud Vietnamese rock on a CD player the whole time and honked the horn whenever he feared another vehicle was approaching in the darkness or when, as sometimes happens, a water buffalo, trying to stay cool, had taken refuge in a mud puddle in the middle of road. Veteran traveller that he is, Christopher crunched his hat into something resembling a pillow. “If we’re still alive in the morning,” he said, “then we’ll know that we’ve made it.” Whereupon he fell asleep.
We did indeed make it of course, but it was a wild night. We pulled up to the Hanoi airport with moments to spare as Christopher grabbed his rucksack and ran into the terminal, dishevelled-looking and with his shirttail hanging out. I still had a few more days to kill in Hanoi. I asked the driver if he could drop me off at the old Metropole Hotel, the equivalent of Bangkok’s Oriental. He said yes, but got lost three or four times, for he was after all as much a stranger in Hanoi as I was, if not more so. In any case, I wasn’t certain whether I’d be allowed in the dining room to treat myself to a fine breakfast. During the French Time, the Metropole was a great magnet for movie stars (Charlie Chaplin honeymooned there), Parisian debutantes, visiting mountebanks, French officials, and senior military officers, and I was rather scruffy in appearance by this time.
We passed along a street where there were several outdoor barbers plying their craft, and I got out there. I could see only the top half of the men’s faces, as they wore the usual cotton masks because of the pollution. There was one obviously elderly fellow, frail-looking and with a head somewhat like a turtle’s. I figured that he had probably gone through the French school system when he was a boy and that, between us, we could have a halting conversation. In the end, though, neither of us seemed able to remember as much grammar as we wished, and so I pulled out my Canadian passport and showed him the photo. He nodded understandingly. I had taken the seat looking somewhat like a holy picture of St. Jean Baptiste. Now I left it looking like the expressionless dolt staring into the lens at a little shop in a mall, having his passport photo taken. I thanked the barber for his courtesy. He took off his mask and smiled a nearly toothless smile. I thought he said, “Le plaisir est le mien.” The traffic was deafening.
Photo Insert Part 1
A quiet street in the Old Quarter of colonial Hanoi in 1922. Note the rickshaw passenger wearing a sola topi.
France’s hold on Indochina began with the acquisition of Saigon, occupied in 1862. These scenes show how thoroughly French the city looked six decades later — by which time Cambodia and Laos had also been assimilated.
