Photo courtesy of www.vietnamtravel-asiatravel.blogspot.com

From WIRE REPORTS

          The tourism high season kicked off last month, but few foreign visitors have come to Viet Nam so far.

          The economic crisis in some main markets such as the U.S. and Europe is a cause, but persistent problems like high prices and poor tourism promotion are also to blame, industry insiders said.

          “The situation has never been difficult as now,” lamented Nguyen Cong Hoan, deputy general director of travel agent Hanoi Redtour.

          “The global economic slowdown has forced people to reduce spending, including on travel. The number of our customers coming from Europe, the U.S. and Australia has plummeted by 30 percent this year.”

          The current economic downturn has hurt Viet Nam’s tourism industry more seriously than the previous one in 2008-09, he said.

          “The spending on tourism was higher then. After the economic slowdowns, their purse strings are obviously tighter.”

          Nguyen Minh Man, head of communications at Vietravel, said the number of customers has fallen sharply since the beginning of this year.

          “There have been few foreign customers booking tours.”

          To attract customers, Vietravel has launched a promotional campaign worth more than $140,000 that lasts through Nov. 30.

          According to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, the number of international arrivals dropped 14 percent month-on-month in September, a fifth straight month of decline.

          The number of visitors from France fell by half, while there were 22 percent fewer South Koreans and 15 percent fewer Americans.

          Hoan said that although hotel tariffs in Viet Nam are now down compared to a few years ago, they are still high compared to other Southeast Asian countries. For example, customers have to pay $100 to $200 for a luxury room in Ha Noi, while a similar room in Bangkok costs only $80 to $90.

          Food, spa services and transport also cost 20 percent to 30 percent more than those in Thailand and Indonesia, he said.

          Besides, the hotels and restaurants, transport, tourist guides, and entertainment options are not good enough to attract tourists, he said.

          Ha Long Bay, recognized as a world heritage site, might be beautiful, but it cannot attract visitors if they are worried about boats sinking, Hoan said.

          Several heritage sites in the central Quang Binh Province are very attractive, but the place does not have a single quality hotel apart from the Sun Spa Resort, he added.

          The Dong Van stone plateau in Ha Giang Province is a global geo-park, but there is not much infrastructure there either, Hoan said.

          “Our infrastructure and services are not good, which has dissuaded foreign tourists from returning to Viet Nam or recommending the country to others.

          “Viet Nam is one of those countries that see few foreign visitors returning.”

          Another drawback, he said, is the lack of cooperation between operators. He cited the examples of Singapore and Thailand, where inbound tours are priced low because of solid intra-sector cooperation; the operators earn more from other services that visitors use.

          But in Viet Nam, tour prices are high because transport operators, hotels and restaurants, and travel agents do not work together, he added.

          Man of Vietravel also blamed the situation on the monotonous tourism products and poor marketing for the lack of visitors

          The director of a travel agency said until a few years ago, her firm used to take four or five groups of foreign tourists to traditional craft villages like Bat Trang ceramic village and Van Phuc silk village every month. Now it seldom does, she said.

          “Most customers want to participate in making handicraft products. They want to know about the production process, the villages’ customs and culture. But the villages do not provide them that information.

          “At the villages, tourists can only visit showrooms. So their tours are often boring, and they do not want to return.”

          Hoan said the biggest problem is that Viet Nam does not have effective promotion. It is only tourists who have visited other Asian countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia who come to Viet Nam.

          Viet Nam is not a preference for those booking an overseas tour for the first time, he said.

          “Our tourism promotion campaigns are poorer than those of other regional countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. This is mainly because of our lack of experience.

          “All provinces have tourism promotion steering committees, but they do not know what foreign visitors really need. All of them organize street festivals and trade fairs to promote tourism. But visitors do not need them.”

          Localities that can offer marine tourism should strengthen promotion of that aspect, while those that have caves should promote their caves, and so on, he said.

Domino effect

          Not surprisingly, the slowdown in the tourism industry has hit the hotel and aviation industries.

          Vo Huy Cuong, head of the Civil Aviation Administration’s Air Transport Department, said the aviation sector is facing difficulties due to falling demand from both local and foreign travelers as a result of the economic slowdown.

          The aviation market shrunk by 1 percent in the first eight months of this year, against average growth of 14 percent to 20 percent until a few years ago, according to the department.

          A Hoi An official said the town is an attractive tourism destination, but with the number of visitors falling, hotels are struggling to survive. Many owners want to sell out to cut losses.

          According to property consulting firm CBRE, the occupancy rate for Ha Noi’s 8,533 rooms was only 53 percent in the first nine months.

          “Four- and five-star hotels are aggressively competing against one another to gain market share through reducing their rates,” it said.

          Man, of Vietravel, warned that the number of visitors from Europe, the U.S. and Australia would decrease further next year. Viet Nam, however, may see more visitors from Japan, Thailand and Myanmar, he said.

Philip Nguyen. Photo courtesy of www.oudaily.com

A music student at the University of Oklahoma and a pastor embarked Sunday on the Homeless Project, a 10-day journey. The student, Philip Nguyen, said the goal is to better understand the needs of Oklahoma’s homeless population. Read the story by Emma Hamblen from The Oklahoma Daily.

Photo courtesy of www.ucispace.lib.uci.edu

By AMY TAXIN, Associated Press

            IRVINE, Calif.  — The knock came at night more than 30 years ago. Hugo Van, then a young man, had a chance to flee newly communist Viet Nam and walk to freedom.

            There were no guarantees, but Van didn’t hesitate to take the risk. With a few hundred dollars, he and his younger sister got a car ride to a Vietnamese village, then a boat to Cambodia and began the trek across barren land until they were caught by Cambodian soldiers. For nearly two weeks, they were held in a camp where they were given wormy rice to eat, and Van found himself staring down the barrels of six guns as guards attempted to attack his younger sister.

            “Everybody knew: boat or walk,” Van, now 57, told his American-born daughter in words she was hearing for the first time. “When you escape … you use your life to bet.”

            Van, a retired pressman, had never shared the harrowing tale of his journey with his daughter, Viola, until she began recording it as part of a project to capture the experiences of Vietnamese refugees — many now well into their 70s and 80s — to preserve their memories before it’s too late.

            His story is one of 300 being collected by the University of California, Irvine, in an effort to create a digitized history of the Vietnamese American experience and bridge the generation gap between refugees and their American-born children who are helping conduct the interviews, said Thuy Vo Dang, the project’s director.

            “They have survived extreme types of experiences — war displacement, the death of half their family, the immigration process, refugee camps — the experiences have left a silence in the community,” Vo Dang said. “When it comes to the home space, it is very difficult to share these stories.”

            The oral history project comes amid new efforts by Vietnamese Americans across the country to keep elders’ stories alive. Community groups recorded stories in Louisville, Ky., and Austin, Texas, where volunteers amassed 500 video histories that are now being donated to universities. Another oral history project is being considered in Maryland.

            In his interview in California, Nguyen Van Lanh, 71, recalled spending nearly eight years in a communist prison camp after fighting in the South Vietnamese military during the war. He was told he would spend a month being “reeducated” by the communist government. But he wasn’t allowed to return home to his wife and six children until 1982 after spending countless days planting sweet potatoes and cassavas as a jungle prisoner and surviving on old rice and whatever protein they could get their hands on — rats, lizards, termites.

            It took another decade for him to immigrate to the United States under a humanitarian program aimed at helping former prisoners leave, he recounted in one of the nearly 100 interviews made available for the public to download starting on Wednesday.

            The oral histories — which are logged as audio recordings with transcripts and translation into English — are being housed at the school’s Southeast Asian Archive, as well as online. The collection also features interviews conducted in the Austin project, which dates back to 2008.

            Nancy Bui, who started that effort, said the idea began two decades ago when her daughter got a failing grade on a paper about the Viet Nam War after drawing from her mother’s experiences. Bui spoke with the teacher, who said the curriculum she was given offered a different portrayal of Viet Nam’s communist leaders than the refugees did.

            “I told my daughter, ‘Someday Mom will try to do something because your teacher has a point — we have so many stories, we need to tell our story so the world knows what really happened in Viet Nam in the war and our journey to freedom,” said Bui, president of the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation.

            Nearly 1.9 million Vietnamese live in the United States. It is the fourth-largest Asian American community in the country, according to U.S. Census data, with sizable populations in Little Saigon — located just a short drive away from Irvine.

            Many Vietnamese arrived in Southern California as refugees after communists took over the country in the 1970s. Some fled Viet Nam by boat on rough seas. Many were sheltered in refugee camps in other Asian countries before being flown to the United States.

            Until recently, there were few efforts to collect their stories on a large scale. The experience lies in contrast to communities such as the Japanese Americans who survived internment during WWII and have amassed vast collections of photographs and stories to teach future generations about their plight and resilience.

            “There are people who have been highly skilled writers who have documented their own stories, but we don’t have a large body of material,” said Franklin Odo, former director of the Asian Pacific American program at the Smithsonian Institution. “It is not enough to have one or two ‘boat people’ stories.”

            Pulling together a large-scale project requires money and time. Few Vietnamese refugees had such resources in their early years in America when they were focused on learning English, getting jobs and settling with their families.

            Now, a sense of urgency at the passing time and improved technology have inspired many to record stories to bridge the generation gap with their children and grandchildren, many who have never been to Vietnam and don’t speak the language.

            Vo Dang, who teaches a class at UC Irvine where students produce oral histories for the project, said the experience has opened up a world that many refugees’ children didn’t know.

            That’s precisely why Van wanted his interview to be recorded — so his three children and others can truly appreciate the opportunities they have growing up in the United States.

            His daughter Viola, who graduated from UC Irvine earlier this year, said she remembers her father telling the family not to waste food when they were growing up because he never had enough to eat during his time in a refugee camp. But she said she never could have fathomed the sacrifices he made until she interviewed him.

            “We didn’t really understand what he meant by these camps,” said the anthropology graduate and aspiring doctor. “It opened my eyes to what they really went through.”

            For more information, visit http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1614