This is a series of posts from my three month studies and travels across Vietnam. Basing out of Hồ Chí Minh City, I’ll spend a few weeks traveling, learning tiếng Việt, and exploring a nation on the opposite side of the world from home. The following is a sort of journal entry, reflecting both my experiences as a tourist in Da Lat – a vacation town north of Saigon – and visiting the now-tourist-attraction-meets-war-memorial of the Cu Chi tunnels.
“Does anyone here do this for fun?” I asked the guide as we scrambled up the muddy cliffside to get around a crevasse. Below us murky coffee-colored water was shoving rapidly around rocks and through the narrow cliffs, erupting out at a cliff a few meters distant.
“What do you mean?” he asked in broken English, as he gestured to a stable vine I could use for the next bit of scramble. “I mean locals – does anyone do this just because it’s here and it’s fun, not as a guide?” He laughed. “No. Why do that?” he said grinning, before pointing at that same no-longer-distant cliff. Pantomiming a bound into the air and then pointing to an old candy wrapper that apparently marked the last spot of contact for a foot, he said “one-two-three-jump!” before putting me in place and starting his countdown. He was conspicuously unable to understand my protests (the first English that day that appeared be entirely meaningless to him). There was nothing to do but leap right into the pounding waterfall as it emerged from the crevasse.
I was touring the Vietnamese “backcountry” with Pine Track Adventures, a company I’d found through the classic just-send-them-an-email method earlier in the week. I went to visit them as soon as we arrived in Ðà Lat, expecting a simple conversation, and at first I got just that. I met with the director, Duong, and we chatted briefly about our work. I came with the intent of finding potential partners for international trips through my own program, Crystalaire Adventures, so we had plenty in common to discuss. But the natural inclination for both of us is to want to get outside, so when he offered to send me out with them for the afternoon I couldn’t say no.
Pine Track is a serious outdoor program, complete with the certifications and experienced guides to prove it. Duong and Dinh, his business partner, both had to go to Singapore for some of their climbing certifications and appear to be distinct within the local outdoor community in having taken such lengths. As one might guess from my guide’s surprise at the notion of running canyons just for fun, clients are almost all from outside of Vietnam. Australians lead the pack in Pine Track’s clientele, alongside a few less British and very few Vietnamese. They also have become quite popular amongst Koreans, thanks to a critical blog post by a Korean woman on a popular travel blog three years ago. American’s are sparse. “I talk to Americans” Duong said, “and it seems that they are scared to travel to Vietnam.”
The irony in that is that Americans are exactly the sort of audience programs like Pine Track could court. Outdoor activities are engrained in our culture in a way they don’t seem to be here. As my guide suggested, almost no one in Vietnam is running to go abseiling down waterfalls for fun. Nearly everyone I talked to at Pine Track studied Tourism in university, finding their way into recreational waterfall jumping through education. In the United States a lot of my peers in recreation used school as an excuse to continue existing hobbies and passions – here it seems school is far more often the introduction to outdoor recreation, seen more as a career than a hobby.
The economic impetus for this was obvious. Pine Track shares the street in front of with almost a dozen tourism programs, at least half of which include an adventure component. The advertising materials for every one of these was English, and even when Koreans show up the common language is more likely to be English than either Korean or Vietnamese. While few of these programs maintain the same certification requirements and safety standards of Pine Track, they run a brisk business. Nearly 100 people run the same river we did on a good day, my guide Thu informed me, and Pine Track is typically running multiple day trips every day of the week. My own group (two Koreans and I) is typical of their clientele: foreign, and affluent enough to sit comfortably while paying for services at Vietnam’s higher-tier “tourist” prices (which, it should be noted, are still darn cheap by the standards of the USD). They do occasionally see other Vietnamese, but almost exclusively through school and youth programs coordinated with organizations in and around Saigon.
I’ll be honest. These thoughts were far from my mind as I rappelled down a 30 meter waterfall, slid on my back into rapids, got pulled deep into jungle rivers only to pop up meters downstream, and was unceremoniously dropped into a spinning, churning, rushing crevasse of water called the “washing machine” (since that’s how you feel while you’re in it). But as someone who makes a living off of outdoor recreation and adventure education, the reality that even our precious wilderness experiences are part of a broader economic reality is a daily truism.
Tourists like me are the reason Vietnam has outdoor recreation at all, starting with the French businessmen who Duong explained first brought abseiling, climbing, and similar activities to the country. It now continues due thanks to the citizenry of the various Commonwealth nations, Korea, and others who come from abroad to leap off Vietnam’s exotic waterfalls. Other economies are different, at least in terms of their user base, but they follow a similar approach: providing luxury goods and experiences to international audiences that are often out of reach of or interest of many in the nation. Many – though certainly not all – of the exotic foods I’ve enjoyed and commented on here are proving to be unique even to the Vietnamese palate as well.
This is, of course, not a surprising narrative. Essentialist notions are critical to successful tourism, whether that is exoticism for Vietnam or notions of wilderness and adventure for programs like Crystalaire and Pine Track. This commodification of narratives related to Vietnam’s natural offerings mirror the same process in its cultural and historical heritage. In Alneng’s “What the Fuck is a Vietnam?” he does an excellent job identifying a similar process by which the Vietnam War has been turned into its own brand of war tourism, allowing visitors to play out narratives of the ‘60s ranging from climbing on tanks to firing guns to crawling through Viet Cong tunnels. In what Schwenkel (2006) calls a “transnational economy of memory” isn’t so different from the “transnational economy of adventure,” drawing as it does on a huge berth of cultural narratives surrounding high-adrenaline activity in wild and foreign climes. The Vietnamese, intentionally or not, are mastering the subtle art of making meaning of Western narratives for the sake of profit, and as I can personally attest, we have every incentive to join in.
But ultimately it is no surprise that this is happening. Every once in a while, to keep a bit of English in my life, I take time in the heat of the day to read a novel. This week I finished Edgar Rice Burrough’s classic “Tarzan of the Apes.” A 1912 novel whose plot has only the vaguest relationship with the 1999 Disney classic of the same name, it features a heroic and adventuresome jungle-raised outdoorsmen with superhuman muscles and a chiseled jaw, who proceeds to escape his jungle for the fruit of civilization and subsequently travels the world in pursuit of adventures. His world is a colonial one, and so he goes to the far flung imperial claims of France and Britain on the rest of the world, leaping off cliffs and swinging on ropes in ways not so dissimilar from what I myself did in Da Lat in a post-colonial Vietnam. We have been telling ourselves stories of travel and adventure and war and drama in colonial nations for at least a century, and almost certainly belong. Is it any surprise that our narratives are being used to lure us now?
Check out the video below, or Dinh’s YouTube page here for more visuals on what Pine Track does. I would definitely recommend their program to any Vietnam travelers!
Alneng, V. (2002). What the Fuck is a Vietnam?’Touristic Phantasms and the Popcolonization of (the) Vietnam (War). Critique of Anthropology, 22(4), 461–489.