01.09.09 – Saigon (a.ka. Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam

Yesterday morning we stopped at China Beach en route from Hoi An to the Da Nang airport. Phu had told us that China Beach is rated as one of the ten best beaches in the world. It sure didn’t look that way to us, but there are luxury hotels going up all over the place.

When we boarded the plane at Da Nang, Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” was playing. After we were seated, there was a seductive woman singing a sensuous version of “Silent Night” on a video on the TV. As the video continued, a man dressed as a Dickens character pursued her. Surreal.

We were met at the Saigon airport by our guide, Thao Trang Cindy. To us, she goes by Trang. She’s representative of yet another aspect of Vietnam’s recent history. Her father was in the North Vietnamese army and her mother was a Viet Cong guerilla. Just a month ago, she married a man from a family much of which had fled Vietnam after siding with the French. She showed us her wedding album in miniature.

On Saigon, first things first: The government renamed this city after Ho when the country was reunified, but this place is not now and I feel fairly certain never was Ho Chi Minh’s city. Practically everyone still calls it Saigon, and Saigon it is: a bustling city of commerce, fun, and Western (French and American) influence.

It’s very different here from the north and central parts of the country. Phu had an environmental determinist explanation for the differences. The north is colder and the people work harder. They can only get two crops of rice per year. In the south, it’s different: hot and four rice crops per year. People don’t have to work as hard. They can spend, because there will be another crop coming in soon. In the central part of Vietnam (from which Phu comes and where he now lives), it’s in between: like Goldilocks, just right.

I’m sure that the explanation involves more than that. Certainly there are cultural factors, such as the long and large American influence in the south and in Saigon in particular. But the general differences are very evident. In Hanoi, Ngoc told us that the only holidays people take all year are three days at Tet. In Saigon, Trang said, people take ten days off at Tet. This morning, as we were driving out of town, she said we might be wondering why so many people were sitting at sidewalk coffee houses and not at work. She said many people clock in at work and then leave for coffee. After lunch, they have a siesta time.

Saigon is an overcrowded city. It has an official population of about 8 million and at least another million undocumented people who are there unofficially. Trang said there are 4 million motorbikes registered in the city, and many more unregistered ones. There are far more cars than in Hanoi or other cities. Traffic is wild.

Trang says Vietnam is seeking to become “The World’s Kitchen” – spread Vietnamese food worldwide. Sounds like a good idea to me.

We visited the former presidential palace, where a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the front gate when Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Trang discussed South Vietnamese President Thieu and Vice President Ky and it suddenly dawned on me that Ky was the prototype for Dick Cheney—the vice president who runs things over the president.

The most remarkable thing Trang told us at the former presidential palace was it had been built along auspicious lines to represent a dragon and that the North Vietnamese / National Liberation Front used feng shui to cut off a dragon shape of the arrangement of the buildings that supposedly made the palace impregnable.

We visited Notre Dame Cathedral and the post office in downtown Saigon. The latter has the most beautiful post office interior I have ever seen. Trang took our photos in front of Notre Dame because, she told us, it is said that you haven’t really been in Saigon unless you have a picture of yourself with Notre Dame in the background. The church wasn’t going to be open again (lunch and siesta) until 2:30, so we didn’t see the inside.

I saw a Vietnamese girl walking in Saigon wearing a t-shirt with an American flag inside a large heart on the front.

The War Remnants Museum (formerly called the War Crimes Museum) is fabulous. It has a moving exhibit of photographs by photographers who were killed in the wars, along with exhibits of the massacres at My Lai and the one led by Bob Kerrey. Preserved deformed fetuses and horrifying photos of people with terrible birth defects because of Agent Orange may be the most disturbing exhibits. They also show the “tiger cages” in which the South Vietnamese government kept political prisoners.

I was approached on the grounds of the War Museum by a man with no arms from above the elbows down. He said, “I am unlucky. I stepped on a land mine. Where are you from?” I resisted the temptation to say “Canada,” and I told him I’m from the United States. I tried to give him money, but he said he didn’t want to be given money. He asked me to buy a book. I bought a handy Vietnamese phrase book.

This morning we drove out to the Cu Chi tunnels, a Vietcong stronghold area throughout the war we were startled to find out how close it is to Saigon. The guerrillas used ingenious methods to redress the huge advantage the US had in high tech weaponry. We saw demonstrations of all sorts of low-tech booby traps—leaf-covered holes with fungee sticks, for example, that the VC used. Both George and I opted out of crawling through the tunnel complex after getting a short distance in. The film shown there was old and more propagandistic than what we seen and heard in other places around the country.

On the way back to town, we stopped at a rubber tree plantation and then at a pagoda.

Back in Saigon, we went for iced coffee at a sidewalk café. As I’ve mentioned before, the coffee is great in Vietnam. Trang claims that Vietnam is the world’s second largest exporter of coffee beans.

Although Christians are a distinct minority in Vietnam, Christmas decorations are everywhere. This afternoon we saw three legless Santas being moved from a display. George suggested that they might be Agent Orange victims.

I went up to the fitness room late this afternoon. No one appeared to be around, and I got on a treadmill. A hotel employee quickly materialized, turned on the lights, opened a window, and put on the television for me. She looked at me and set the TV to a Russian language station. I guess she thought I look Russian,

On to Cambodia in the morning. I just realized that we’re withdrawing from Vietnam in the same direction Nixon did—by going west into Cambodia. It seems like the long way home. I think our incursion into Cambodia will have better results than Nixon’s did.

— RSM