We had a nice room on the 5th floor at the exorbitant price of £5 a night. We managed to sleep for a few hours before being rudely awakened by a cacophony of sound from a tent down the road. There was an abundance of beautiful flowers and a big placard with reference to someone and the date 1949. We assumed it was a funeral and a crowd of people were eating at a long bench. We went for a walk and entered a large building with a huge sign saying “coffee” to be told that they don’t do coffee, and another man came running to entice into his coffee house on the 4th floor of an adjacent building. After trying to make him understand what we wanted, we eventually got cups of very black and strong coffee which was freezing cold together with ice, and a little pot of thick condensed milk. It was delicious so we had another one. We then walked down the street to see a huge statue at the top of a hill with 359 steps. I walked to the top to learn that it was a commemoration of the destruction of the French Camp “Dominique-2” in 1954; the French General, De Castries, is said to have named the 8 camps at Dien Bien Phu after 8 women he had impregnated. Dominique-2 is on the highest hill north-east of the French HQ, which gave it an excellent view of the battlefield, and was only one mile from de Castries’s bunker. It was captured on March 30th after the Vietnamese suffered horrifying casualties during human wave attacks.
I also booked places for tomorrow on a tour of the battlefield including the museum, the bunker which was the HQ of de Castries, the hill from which Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap directed the battles.
Lobby of our hotel
Funeral tent
Long thin building I mentioned in a previous post
Vietnamese construction method
River running through Dien Bien Phu
Coffee shop man with bottle of cold coffee
Sign for Dominique-2 battle site
Memorial to the Vietnamese dead
Looks like the Vietnamese don’t like burning candles. So the burn cigarettes instead
The city from the monument
Frieze showing how guns were hauled up to caves where they could fire on the French but the French couldn’t bomb them
Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap directing the battle
Poster commemorating creation of an independent state after the Japanese were driven out.