Haiphong - Growing Industrial City

Haiphong seemed to me a rawer city than Hanoi. There was less of the quaint old French architecture and more of the busy and growing-industrial city. The growth was akin to that of a trees new shoots from a severed yet still very much living stump. We stood on a bridge over the river and looked out over the city to the houses built since the destruction of the 1972 bombing. Only by following a pattern of comparatively new thatch on the houses in Haiphong could I establish the area once destroyed so completely that a foreign journalist had described it as being like the surface of the moon.

The bridge itself was a rather amazing creation; or rather creation. More than ten times thee American planes had severed the jugular vein of Haiphong's industry and on each occasion the Vietnamese engineers had, within five or six days built the bridge again so it could take the heavy industrial traffic.

The docks at Haiphong also bore the unmistakable signs of intense bombardment, the railway lines had been twisted back into shape many times. Everything once again built and rebuilt.

I visited a hospital in Haiphong, a contribution to Viet Nam from Czechoslovakia. In twenty years North Viet Nam has eradicated malaria, smallpox, polio and trachoma, at least in epidemic proportions and they have controlled TB and leprosy, a remarkable achievement for a country in a war time situation.

Late that day we drove back to Hanoi. It was night as we left Haiphong for the capital and yet the job of increasing production was still going on, even at that late hour. On occasions, the road ahead would seem to be alight and we would come across a lorry far too short to accommodate its load of reinforcing wire so that much of it was dragging on the road behind, setting up an eerie shower of sparks on the roadway.

My visit was now almost at an end and I had few more places to see or people to meet. Kham Thiem street, so utterly blitzed during the Christmas bombing of 1972, now indistinguishable from the other streets of Hanoi but for a mute reminding monument erected where a house once stood.

I also went to the Polytechnic university and was told once more of the difficulties and struggles of the students at the university during the war years, the battle for produciton, the Marxist-Leninist emphasis in education and the application of scientific discoveries to the concrete conditions of life in Viet Nam.

All too quickly, it was time to leave Viet Nam, and the tour of a number of foreigners was ending too. The physical situation as a whole had been almost as I had expected it and my ideas were not drastically transformed during my stay. What I am left with though is an overwhelming impression of the generosity and happiness of the people, truck after truck on the bridge over the Red river was piloted by a beaming eupeptic driver.

I left Viet Nam on the twelfth of December bound for a connecting flight out of Laos, which had transformed quite markedly in the week I had been there and thence onward to another disciplined society, Singapore. Singapore with the discipline imposed by a tyrannical headmaster as different from the Vietnamese self-imposed discipline which is analogous to that of the diet and exercise regime of the athlete in training. This is the last contrast I make, perhaps the most important of all.