I'm going to begin this with a complaint and a recommendation to anyone who plans to travel in the future. I'll get it off my chest then tell you about the wild experiences we had in Vietnam. First tear up your American Express card and throw it away. Visa and Master cards are useful everywhere unless yours is stolen. We had one stolen. The people at the bank knew this was a 5 month trip around the world and we would be using this card on a regular basis. Generally that means profits for them. Did they bend over backwards to ship us another card? No way. Bottom line no business for them for five months. I'd call that down right stupid.

So we're relying on American Express and American Express Travelers checks which are useless. You can spend all your precious travel time standing in a bank for an hour only to be turned down when you want to cash a traveler's check. Again, that's time that you could be spending money. In addition the American Express card is rarely accepted.

Now, get this. The card is not even accepted at an American Express bank. That's right. We could not get cash using an American Express card at an American Express Bank. Okay, so the clerks kindly explained that if we wanted to take a cab across town to the only American Express ATM in all of Singapore we could get a small amount of cash. Again shopping/spending time lost. Their profit loss and your time loss.

Enough of that shit. It's 2000 hours and we just started pulling out of the Hon Gai harbor in Vietnam. Its located almost dead center of the infamous Tonkin Gulf. We were anchored 35 miles from our true destination of Haiphong. I'm going to run down some stories about the area and the people, but first I'm a three time ship- bound Vietnam veteran. I never had a member of this race stick a gun in my face. With that as a background there was some hesitation to arriving to Vietnam. I know that many veterans have returned here to help sort out their own feelings. I wanted to come back for a simple reason. I wanted to see the people and the land I bombed for three years straight. I was curious about this land and the people I had never seen up close. I had a gut feeling that I would like it here and I did.

I'm sure for some WWII and Vietnam veterans there's a wonderful sense of the untamed and natural beauty of these lands like the Philippines and Vietnam. There's the notion of grass shacks and people who can live their lives barefoot near pristine beaches without the consumption of asphalt and concrete, bushels of laws and government. I loved the Philippines for those reasons. Tahiti is much the same.

Yesterday we crossed the Tonkin Gulf and met our pilot off the coast of Haiphong past several island separating us from the coast. The jade green seawater in this region is shallow to 6 and 7 meters and we could not enter the area since we draft 9 meters. Take into consideration rocks and tides and we were stuck waiting outside for the pilot.

I stood on the bridge when the pilot was delivered. As usual the time announced from the harbor and the actual time of pilot arrival was an hour different. The captain was frustrated setting dangerously close to the bottom (less than one meter of space between the sea floor and the hull) waiting. The pilot's boat, a tug like craft motored in our direction at a slow six knots, but finally arrived.

This was our first greeting from the Vietnamese and unlike most ports in Europe three gentlemen boarded the Leon when usually it's just the pilot. The pilot was a small native wearing a navy blue uniform suit, shirt and an odd paisley tie. He was wearing a ball cap with scrambled eggs on the brim and a pilot sticker on the front. With him was an associate who also wore the scrambled eggs on his white brim and some sort of black industrial company nylon parka. It had the name of a company silk-screened on the back. The other gentleman was a tall military man wearing an olive drab dress uniform and pink socks. He was crisply dress except for the socks and wore an officer's hat that was tall in the front like you would imagine a Russian officer. It had a wide red band and a yellow star in the center. It was an impressive uniform.

It's a strange sensation to be standing somewhere foreign to you and be confronted by a strong imposing uniform on a man nearly my size. I found myself somewhat apprehensive, flicking my knife in my pocket. I left the bridge and returned to my cabin. An hour later I discovered that we were entering a series of small rock-like islands. I grabbed my camera and dashed back to the bridge. As I started to take some shot of these beautiful rocks jetting from water as smoothed as polished jade the tall young office approached me and said in very broken English. "Free, take pictures, or video camera." At the moment I didn't really understand was he was trying to say and continued to be mesmerized by the beauty of the light green sea and the group of islands. Unfortunately a gray mist hung over us the entire time we were in port.

I immediately felt that if I was a kid and had a small boat or even a kayak I would be in seventh heaven.

Off to the starboard we could see a series of barges, tugs and small boats lined up against one of these islands. As we neared they seemed to be headed in our direction and as we discovered they were. The local Rickmers' agent had cut a deal with the stevedores. It seems that we were arriving in the late afternoon on the 10th and the 11th was the last day before the Tet festival, which I believe is the lunar New Year. It seems that we celebrate the Sun's New Year and much of Asia celebrates the Moon's. I believe it was mentioned that China parties for both.

At the same time that the captain, who intended to become an astronomer, explained the difference in New Year's celebrations he mention that when he sailed into Casablanca he discovered that the stevedores take Fridays off for the Muslim religion, Saturdays for Jewish and Sundays for Christian. Perhaps we need to add that element to the code of the west.

The Tet Festival begins the 12th of February and runs through the 15th. If we were not unloaded by the middle of the 11th we would be stuck a serious distance from land for three days, perhaps unable to get ashore. I was hoping to take a bus to Hanoi. The Cargo Superintendent told me that the city is large but safe. The agent had cut a deal with the stevedores to work all night and try to get us unloaded before the holiday. We were stuck in-between land and holidays, and we had just arrived were anchoring and testing the waters.

Within a half hour we were surrounded with ratty looking boats, large steel barges and in the distance a tug was coming flying its little communist red flag with the yellow star in the center pulling an out-of-commission ferry. As it turns out this ferry, that had seen better days, was the barracks for the stevedores, a bar and party pad complete with whores and music.

Suddenly our little calm hole in the world came alive. The ship was crawling with Vietnamese people while women cooked and set up shop on the tugs that pulled the barges. We could see high rise buildings in the distance on the shore we would never reach, but we were surrounded by grass shacks on the water. Each vessel had a pot of sorts somewhere on the ship that became alive with burning embers for cooking.

The population of guys who came aboard the ship was generally friendly and all were well dressed in a range from stevedores to businessmen to women in sampans selling trinkets. The girls weren't bad looking and it dawned on me what the officer was saying on the bridge. He was inviting me to take pictures without the influence of government.

I'm not sure if I already told you this story: The captain told me that the US fought so hard against communism unsuccessfully, but in the end, it died its own sorrowful death. Most communist countries have not been able to succeed and now welcome the ways of the west or starve to death. The officer was opening his arms to me and the west, since Vietnam has discovered that without business with the world, it will starve, its people will never have decent educations, or access to a world that is flowering around them. No matter how hard a government wants to put its thumb on its people it cannot completely hide the rest of the world from them. Sure the notion is simplistic, but I thought also fascinating. We didn't need to fight communism, which in most cases was not true communism but dictatorships. We could just sit back and build what we have while they fell so far behind by preventing freedom that sooner or later they had to throw up their hands and open their door to progress.

Okay, so the afternoon turned into evening and maze of activity. Discharging cargo began immediately and continued all night. The party fired up on the Haiphong ferry and the girls were brought aboard the Leon. According to the Romanian sandblaster the whores knew how to take care of a man unlike the stuck-up broads in Hamburg. He told me stories that I won't repeat, but he had a helluva time. He's the guy in the shot getting tattooed from the artist in Jakarta, who set up his shop on the main deck and gave him two shoulder tats for $30. The guy wasn't half bad.

So the evening started calm enough with cute girls slithering around the decks under the guards noses. There were a number of military men on board in their olive drab uniforms. As the night engulfed the ship, the guards were invited to drink on the ferry. Either through the drinking or bribes the ship was left without security and a mafia gang slipped aboard the ship and began to raid it of lashing materials and tools left all around the deck for cargo off-loading and containment. Some of the crew spotted this activity and an alarm was sounded. Many of the crew fought with the gang for their tools, some chickened out, and headed the other direction because the mafia was armed. The bottom line was that we chased them off and told the guard to get back to their posts.

Later in the evening another ship our size pulled into the channel and dropped anchor. It was another Rickmers rust bucket and they were waiting for us to depart before they could commence off-loading. The next morning went as is common in the shipping trade. The morning departure turned into 3:00 p.m. for pilot arrival which generally indicates up-anchor. Three turned to five, and it was 8:00 before the last plates of steel were removed from the hull and loaded on barges.

That's it. We came close to a boat trip around the bay, but couldn't put it together because of the erratic departure times. We're now headed out of the Gulf into the South China Sea for the 1.5 day voyage to Hong Kong. The first of three maybe four visits to China, then Korea. I'm still hoping for a box to be loaded for shipment to San Pedro post haste.

--Sailor Ball

On to Part 13