Saigon
It’s been ages since I posted anything. Jade and I have been living and working in London for about 4 weeks and already SE Asia seems a million years ago. I’ve got a backlog of journal entries that I want to put up and it has been quite nice sorting through the diary and typing them up. I will try and get on top of it over the next couple of weeks.
Arival
Everything we read and heard about Saigon led us to believe we would be robbed at knife point the moment we got off the bus. This clearly wasn’t the case. I’m not sure if it’s due to having arrived after coming through Cambodia where there is more desperation for the tourist dollar or if Saigon is more relaxed now than at the writing of the guide books but the city was a breath of fresh air, or rather carbon monoxide. I fell in love with it within 10 minutes of arriving.
Saigon is a bustling, developed city with beautiful tree lined boulevards and busy people going about their busy business, mostly on the back of scooters. A city of 8 million people and 3 million scooters, traffic was obviously off its tits!
We got off the bus and walked straight into a guest house. Charles, a tour guide writer we met in Cambodia, had told us about a place that was just out the back of a convenience store. Literally, we walked through the store and into a mini hotel. After dumping our gear we went across the street for Italian, it was pizza, salad and wine for lunch and it was awesome.
The following day we did a tour of the city. This was a cool way to see a couple of the key sites, get an idea of the place and work out what you want to see more of.
Reunification Palace
One of the standout sites on the tour was the Reunification palace. Although it’s really only a convention center now it was once the presidential palace of the south. All the old presidential rooms have been preserved and are quite amazing.
Mostly reception and dining rooms, there were a couple of interesting ones. In particular, a massive room for reading the presidential mail and a recreation room that was decked out in full 60’s style, this could have quite easily been mistaken for a Melbourne laneway nightclub all retro and too cool for school, but was legit 60s Viet decor.
The basement level was where all the action went down during wartime. This was where the South’s campaign was waged. Simple concrete workstations with telephones and maps or radio equipment provided a stark contrast to the opulence of the rooms above. There was a large doorway that leading to a secret tunnel out to the river. Not very secret really. The big door kinda gave it away. They may as well have sign posted it, “Shhh secret passage, don’t look down here”.
In addition to the Reunification Palace, we visited the General post office and Notre Dame Cathedral. Both of these paled in comparison to the Cathedrals and GPOs at home however I did pick up a set of Vietnamese stamps with fish as the running theme. My nerdery knows no bounds. It appears that I am now a stamp collector.
War Remnants Museum
The final site on the tour was the War Remnants Museum. This was one of the most disturbing things I have seen in my life. What we in the west call the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese call the American War (makes sense really) and this museum contained a Vietnamese account of the “US invasion of Vietnam”.
History is always told by the victors and the museum was of course extremely biased (and with good cause) against the US. Yep North Vietnam won the war, the way it’s portrayed in most movies you would think the US won. What would have been interesting to see was a bit more detail on the conflict between North and South Vietnam prior to the US involvement.
The museum itself contained an amazing array of front line photojournalism, heavy artillery, reconstructed torture cells, protest materials and a graphic account of the impact that Agent Orange and napalm have had on the country.
I need to do more reading to really understand how the war played out, however I don’t get how the US has not been charged/found guilty of war crimes when it comes to this conflict. There are still children being born malformed today because of the ludicrous amount of chemical weapons the US dropped on this country. Weapons that continue to wreak havoc on the people and landscape here for years to come!
On a lighter note
We loved the city so much that we spent the next three days just cruising around from district to district checking out whatever we came across, eating mad food and drinking Vietnamese coffee. It’s funny how coffee in Thailand and Cambodia is rubbish but the Vietnamese have got it in spades, beautiful thick chocolaty goodness.
We ate a restaurant “Pho 2000”, made famous when Bill Clinton ate there on a world tour. The restaurant was a McDonald’s equivalent for Pho. A delicious noodle soup and a staple usually served from street carts throughout the whole country, I wonder how long it’ll be before they change the name to Pho 3000?
We found a massive marketplace where I bought fucking awesome, way kitsch Chinese New Year Lamp. It even says “Kong He Phat Choy” (Happy New Year) when you turn it on. I only had to carry it through 3 countries before I could plug it in.
Vietnam is really well set up for tourism. No bus scams or rough rides in the back of utes. The whole country has tourist offices that sell air con bus trips all the way up the coast and drop you at the guest house of your choice (not the one they’ve sold you too). It’s almost too well set up and after a while we needed to get off the tourist trail but that’s another story.