12 January, Hue
Phong Nha Hotel 230,000VND

Our first bus backtracked us north up the AH1 to Dong Ha; our second took us west toward the Laos border on the AH16. Our destination: the Dakrong Bridge, built in 1975 after the reunification of Vietnam. The original bridge was considered the beginning of the Ho Chi Minh Trail network, and was hotly contested during the Vietnam war. The Ho Chi Minh Trail “was a logistical system that ran from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) to the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) through the neighboring kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia. The system provided support, in the form of manpower and materiel, to the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (called the Vietcong or “VC” by its opponents) and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), or North Vietnamese Army, during the Vietnam War ... According to the United States National Security Agency’s official history of the war, the trail system was ‘one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century.’” (Wikipedia) There is in truth nothing to see of the Trail, but we took the trip anyway...

Dakrong Bridge

Dakrong Bridge