Here I went around the former DMZ, with Mr Binh, my guide for 2 days.

I got up for the bus to Dong Ha at 04:40, as the bus left at 05:00. It had been instructed to park outside my hotel and beep when it had arrived, which had struck me as being slightly inconsiderate, but neither the bus driver or the person who had organised it seemed to mind. I got let out by the nice lady who had run the hotel and bundled myself into the back of the bus with a surprising amount of other foreigners.

I got to Dong Ha at about 10:30, with motorbike drivers literally running alongside the minibus and shouting in through the open window. I think the rest of the passengers were glad that they weren’t getting off at that stop, but we had pulled-up at a petrol station and the bus driver instructed me that this was Dong Ha. I got off and asked several people which direction the bus station was and after getting a business card off one of them with a map on the back, I used this to navigate to Tam’s cafe. Here I spoke to Tam, who helped me plan the next day or so and introduced me to Mr. Hoa.

Mr. Hoa owned a local hotel, which Tam recommended as being somewhere worth looking at. He also conducted tours and talked me through the options on the DIY DMZ tour that Tam had given me information on. When I was in Hanoi, I had picked up a local magazine which had an article on Quang Tri, the former DMZ in the American war. I used this, along with the information that Tam had given me and what Mr. Hoa was recommending, to build a list of the things that I would like to do.

Once in my hotel room, I met Mr. Binh, who had been following me around at the petrol station. I thought he had just been a taxi driver wanting to give me a lift, but along with Mr. Hoa, he was one of the main tour guides in Dong Ha. Him and Mr. Hoa had a knack for finding me over the next couple of days, as seemingly wherever I went I would bump into one of them.

The tour started with a trip to Ben Hai River, where Mr. Binh explained the role of the DMZ in the war and how it had been formed and then a treaty signed as the North Vietnamese Army had fought to re-gain control of Quang Tri City. We then moved on to Bo De school, which had been totally obliterated during the war and served as a base for both the North and South Vietnamese armies during battles for Quang Tri City. After that, we went to Long Hung church, which was in a similar state of repair. We also went to the Quang Tri Citadel and La Vang church.

The next day, we formed a custom trip, where Mr. Binh took me to the Mine Action Visitor Centre, which I don’t think he had been to before, as we got a bit lost. I spent what I thought was an hour in there, but later on, Mr. Binh informed me that he had been waiting 3 hours. Then, after that, we went to the Doc Mieu military base, the cemetery of the North Vietnamese Army and the Vinh Moc tunnels.

All-in-all, I had a deeply moving couple of days in Dong Ha. I enjoyed being in the company of Mr. Binh and as a Saigon Army veteran, he was a good person to show me around. We ended up doing a few other Vietnamese things as well, which I wouldn’t have got to do otherwise.