land of the past

I am moving South, from the tiny, but always packed streets of Hanoi with its never ending noise and streams of people and vehicles to the magnificent Ha Long Bay, further, further into the very center of this country. The country curves, land becomes ever narrower with the sea threatening to overcome more and more of what people could use to survive. This land has been the dividing line, the front on both sides during the war that lasted so many years. They say, every grain of sand here is soaked with blood, rivers, land and sea, they have all become graveyards of people on both sides. Moving south I feel the air becoming hotter with every hour, bright, perfectly white sand appears alongside little fields in which the rice seems to be less green than the rice paddies in the north. Poverty written on the face of people and land. And yet, it is such a beautiful land, with wonders beyond imagination. I reach out to touch the sun, sweat streaking down my body standing in the heat for only 5 minutes. How do people here survive? How did they survive bombs, battles, sorrow and loss? The same way they survive the hardship of nature, the hot wind that blows not to cool but to dry up every living things and the unbearable heat. The same way they survive against the sea that threatens to take over the last pieces of usable land. They never stop fighting...