This year, we snowbirds are taking a vacation from our regular winter nest in Cairo for two weeks and are headed east to Vietnam. We will be flying Qatar Air with an intermediate stop at Doha followed by a long flight into Hanoi. Linda has never been to Vietnam and it has been quite a while since my last trip! (The one-armed keypunch operator is me in 1970.)
While this travel blog is never quite "live" I do try to keep it up to date when we travel. But for the next two weeks, it will just see a few posts from Egypt created and set to publish on a delayed basis. Vietnam pictures will come later after we return to Egypt.
In preparation for our excursion, Linda has been learning a tiny bit of the language and I have been reading a lengthy history of Vietnam. Yale professor, Ben Kiernan's 2017 history of Vietnam is a difficult read. (Criticism of his research on his Wikipedia entry is interesting!) Buying it in electronic form is highly recommended to permit searching for names already mentioned. It also allows one to easily note that the term "beheaded/beheading" appears seventeen times.
Our private tour has been arranged by Way To Vietnam where Ms. Huong Bui appears to have done a good job of combining cultural and military destinations for us. I'm looking forward to seeing 56 years of change. The pictures below are from 1970 and show the countryside near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) between Cu Chi and Ben Hoa airbase.
My subscription to the 25th Division Association Newsletter, Flashes, has had many stories of army veterans who served in the Cu Chi area where the 25th division headquarters existed during my stay in 1970. That and stories of other veterans who visited in the past few years inspired this visit.
More photos at this Flickr Album, of course.
Other posts on this blog pertaining to a particular topic can be found by entering the topic (such as Vietnam) in the search bar at the top of this post and clicking the little magnifying glass nearby.
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