Head in the sand.

I’m in the beautiful old city of Hoi An. The last week or so I’ve been making my way up the coast along the beaches of Vietnam.

Nha Trang: I exaggerated when I wrote that Vietnamese women go to the beach fully dressed, although not by much. I did see a few one-piece bathing suits and even a couple of Annette Funicello-style bikinis to go along with all the long-sleeve t-shirts and pajama pants, but compared to their Western counterparts–those hussies–Vietnamese beachgoers are about as provocative as, well, Annette Funicello.

This is not just a case of cultural modesty; many Vietnamese women have a vampirical aversion to the sun. As in most of Asia, white skin is highly prized here. Skin-bleaching creams fill the shelves, and it’s common to see women dressed like a cross between Michael Jackson and Rita Hayworth: floppy hat, sunglasses, surgical mask, and the kind of arm-length evening gloves last seen in Gilda. They even commit the ultimate fashion sin in their quest for beauty–socks underneath their sandals, all so as not to expose even an inch of skin to that pigment-arousing solar devil.

Nha Trang (pronounced to my ears like Nyah Treng) has the full complement of active beach-y things to do, such as kitesurfing, jetskiing, snorkeling, and scuba diving, but I opted mostly to stay on the sand and read Francois Bizot’s The Gate, a chilling memoir by the only foreigner to survive a Khmer Rouge prison. Fun in the sun!

While swimming in the sea one afternoon, I tried to add up all the different places I’ve stayed on this trip and it turned out to be something like 54, not including sleeping on buses, trains, and at the airport.

Quy Nhon (sounds like Kwee Nyon) was my next stop, a couple hundred kilometers north. It’s a coastal city with a developing beachfront, but is still hardly visited by foreigners. As far as I could tell, the only Westerner in town besides me was Barbara, the very friendly New Zealand-born owner of Barbara’s Kiwi Cafe, where I stayed a few days.

The night I arrived, I made friends with a local radio journalist named Bao, who invited me to join him and a friend for beers as Vietnam played Iraq in the Asian Cup. We sat outside a bar and I popped peanuts with chopsticks while he introduced me to Vietnamese bar snacks: flat rice cakes with fish sauce, sausage wrapped in a single guava leaf and tightly bundled in a cube of banana leaves. It was a fun night, interrupted only by the mildly disconcerting sensation of watching America’s two biggest military disasters playing each other in soccer on television.

The next morning, Bao picked me up and took me for a typical breakfast at his sister-in-law’s place: banh hoi chao long, or thinly sliced cow liver, kidney, heart, and stomach served over bundles of vermicelli noodles. It was good! Look out, Anthony Bourdain. I still think Thai is probably the most refined cuisine in the region, but on an everyday basis I’ve enjoyed Vietnamese food the most. I love all the fresh herbs, the black pepper, the grilled meats and seafood, the nuoc mam fish sauce, the subtle characteristics of even the simplest dishes. (Although it’s also true that I have a short culinary memory and tend to think the last noodle soup I ate is the best one I’ve ever had.)

Bao, in jeans and a Nirvana t-shirt, then drove me around Quy Nhon all day, pointing out with civic pride the development going on: the bridges and resorts being built, the land being cleared, the fishermen being moved into new housing. He took me to see some of the ancient Cham towers still standing on hilltops around the city. GIs were stationed all over this area during the war, and there was the odd piece of graffiti carved into the old brickwork: name, company, date. As much as anything I saw in Saigon, these war remnants gave me a shiver.

The war seems far away from most people’s thoughts here. For one thing, more than half the population was born after it ended, during Vietnam’s own baby boom. And then there’s the difference, obviously, in what it meant to both of our countries. The physical suffering here was immense, but it was America that ended up with the historical and psychological scars. Vietnam has really moved on.

Still, Bao and I did talk about the war a bit, and I think he relished the chance to needle an American. While we were on top of one hill, he swept his hand over the rice fields and the small villages below, where GIs fought against an often invisible enemy, and jokingly made the point: “Who are the VC? Where are the VC?” I laughed, but inside my heart sank a little–I can only imagine, on an individual level, how much this war sucked.

Later that evening, we went out for seafood and some bottles of the strong local rice wine. He explained to me the Vietnamese way of eating, food not just as pleasure and sustenance but also as medicine, “hot” foods and “cold” foods creating a balance inside the body. We drank rice wine; one shot glass between the two of us, in the Vietnamese way. I drank, and poured for him. He drank, and poured for me. We got drunk, but I no more drunk than he: an impressive accomplishment, if you ask me. Afterwards, we did the only sensible thing left to do and went out to sing karaoke.

I found myself slipping into the local pace of life. I couldn’t sleep past dawn the next morning; I just had to get outside, onto the new esplanade with the rest of the Vietnamese doing their morning power walks. The whole waterfront was wide awake. Some fishermen had already pulled in the catches from their giant offshore nets. Other were setting out to sea or repairing their ships, going back and forth from shore in little bowl-shaped boats that looked like floating coconut shells. Ghost crabs scuttled back into their holes as I walked along the beach. Grandparents doted on toddlers. Great rows of fish dried in the sun. This was one of my favorite places in Vietnam.

Going further up the coast, I passed through Danang, and spent a couple of nights on China Beach, the old r&r spot for GIs during the war. There are a few resorts around, but pretty much every backpacker goes to Hoa’s Place. Mr. Hoa himself seems like he’s hung around surfers most of his life, and has a really funny, laid-back air, rare among the Vietnamese I’ve met. He puts out a communal “family dinner” every night that he and all his guests share. It’s the opposite of Quy Nhon; here, it was back to hanging out with fellow travelers, talking and drinking into the night with Canadians, Germans, Aussies, Brits, Dutch; I even met a New Yorker who lives a few blocks away from where I used to.

Right across the road from Hoa’s are the Marble Mountains, a group of marble and limestone hills named for the five elements: metal, water, wood, fire, and earth. There are caves and grottoes with Buddhist temples built into each, and an impressive pagoda high on the side of one that’s visible for a long way around. I visited probably the most popular site, Hades Cave, in which you can ascend to the top of the mountain on a cheesily allegorical road to heaven, and down to the bottom on the road to hell, menaced by funhouse-like demons and suffering sinners.

I have to say, though, that all I really wanted to do was stay on the beach, taking long, barefoot runs as the sun went down and swimming in the ocean with new friends late at night, bobbing in the dark surf, shouting and laughing beneath the stars. For a few days, anyway, it was like a vacation from my travels.