From My Lai to Cave Hospitals—What to See in Vietnam

Motorbike speedometers never seem to work in Vietnam. You can only guess at how fast you’re driving over the occasionally smooth but typically uneven pavement, and the time required to travel from here to there is always dubious.

In Vietnam, time itself sometimes feels unreliable. Depending on where you happen to be, it might be the high point of the war in 1968, or the end of it in 1975. In certain streets of Hanoi it has the feeling of the old French colonial days, whereas in Ho Chi Minh City you often feel the immediacy of the present as the country struggles to modernize. Sometimes you even find yourself in the uncertain future, for Vietnam is very much a country attempting to march forward and away from its troubled past. But the past is everywhere.

I’m thinking these thoughts as I bounce along the old highway between Da Nang and Sơn Mỹ, the latter better known by Americans as Mỹ Lai, where American soldiers once committed an infamously savage massacre. But we’ll return to that emotionally charged place in a moment. For now, let’s start your itinerary where your journey through Vietnam’s war-torn past will likely begin.

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