Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [227]
Thuan An is 14km from Hué by road, through flat rice country and via a causeway which floods easily in the monsoon season (late Sept to early March), when the sea here also gets very rough. On the way you pass through Duong No Village, 8km outside Hué, where Ho Chi Minh once lived with his father. It’s a pleasant cycle ride or, alternatively, you can take a local bus from Hué’s Dong Ba bus station, beside Dong Ba Market on the river’s north bank, for the thirty-minute ride, but note that the last bus back leaves around 4pm. If you have your own transport, you’ll have to pay a nominal parking fee at the beach.
The central provinces - Part 2 |
The DMZ and around
Quang Tri and Quang Binh, the two provinces either side of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone; see "The DMZ"), were the most heavily bombed and saw the highest casualties, civilian and military, American and Vietnamese, during the American War. Names made infamous in 1960s’ and 1970s’ America have been perpetuated in countless films and memoirs: Con Thien, the Rockpile, Hamburger Hill and Khe Sanh. For some people the DMZ will be what draws them to Vietnam, the end of a long and difficult pilgrimage; for others it will be a bleak, sometimes beautiful, place where there’s nothing particular to see but where it’s hard not to respond to the sense of enormous desolation.
North of the DMZ is one of the region’s main attractions – the tunnels of Vinh Moc, where villages created deep underground during the American war have been preserved. The area’s other points of interest lie south of the Ben Hai River, and while it’s not possible to cover everything in a day, the most interesting of the places described here are included on organized tours from Hué (see "Listings" for recommended operators). Alternatively, it’s possible to use Dong Ha as a base or cover a more limited selection of sights on the drive north. If you have limited time then the Vinh Moc tunnels should be high on your list, along with a drive up Highway 9 to Khe Sanh, both for the scenery en route and the sobering battleground itself. Note that, although you can now visit the DMZ without a local guide, this is not recommended as most sites are unmarked and, more importantly, the guides (arranged in Dong Ha; see "Dong Ha") know which paths are safe – local farmers are still occasionally killed or injured by unexploded ordnance in this area.
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The central provinces - Part 2 | The DMZ and around |
The DMZ
Under the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, Vietnam was split in two along the Seventeenth Parallel, pending elections intended to reunite the country. The demarcation line ran along the Ben Hai River and was sealed by a strip of no-man’s-land 5km wide on each side known as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. All Communist troops and supporters were supposed to regroup north in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, leaving the southern Republic of Vietnam to non-Communists and various shades of opposition. When the elections failed to take place, the river became the de facto border until 1975.
In reality both sides of the DMZ were anything but demilitarized after 1965, and anyway the border was easily circumvented – by the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the west (see "The Ho Chi Minh Trail") and sea routes to the east – enabling the North Vietnamese to bypass a string of American fire bases overlooking the river. One of the more fantastical efforts to prevent Communist infiltration southwards was US Secretary of Defense