Water Buffalo Against B52s

It is in agriculture that the lack of technology is most evident. Water buffalo are still pulling wooden ploughs in the paddy fields, while water is often shifted from one irrigation channel to another by the time-honoured means of primitive scoops, suspended on lines and swung by hand.

And yet the people had just defeated the most sophisticated technological world had ever seen

I realised once and irrevocably that such a people could never be defeated when I was taken to visit Ho Chi Minhs' mauseleum. Every morning thousands of people line in front of the mauseleum and file quietly up the marble steps to where lies the imbalmed body of Ho Chi Minh.

The amazing adoration of those people show to this great leaders quite overwhelming. Cynics may scoff and make comment about the professional filers-past who perform for the benefit for foreign visitors; but there was absolutely nothing contrived about the grief these people still feel at the loss of their Uncle Ho.

I arrived in the land of Ho Chi Minh on the third of December aboard an Aeroflot flight from Vientiane in Laos where I had spent the last three days. After flying over the mountainous terrain of Laos I found the tight paddy fields of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam a sudden transition to one of the most intensively farmed parts of the world.

From the air especially, the flood plain of the Red River showed much greener than the fields of Northern Thailand or Laos. Yet the appearance could have been deceptive for the harvest in the latter two countries had not yet been gathered, while in Viet Nam the ploughing and much planting was already taking place of the vegetable crop that would fill the fields before the next rice cropt was due to begin its season at Tet, the lunar year, at the end of January.