Advertisement
Published: January 28th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Greetings & happy year of the buffalo!
We are holed up in Hanoi for a few days while Vietnam essentially shuts down for Tet New Years celebrations--seemed like a good time to blog about our week in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and the Mekong Delta.
We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City via bus from Cambodia. The ride was uneventful except for (1) the pronounced change in scenery that occurred immediately upon crossing the border, as the fallow fields and bony cows of eastern Cambodia morphed into the emerald-green rice paddies and au jus-y heifers of western Vietnam; and (2) the fact that we fell victim to our second scam of the trip, after the meter on our taxi from the bus station somehow shot from 16,000 dong ($0.95) to 160,000 dong ($9.50) as we were getting out, and our harsh words towards the Vietnamese-speaking driver proved futile--particularly once he made it clear that we weren't getting our bags out of the trunk until we ponied up the cash.
After deciding to cut our losses and skip an afternoon at the National Tourism Administration Office, we hit the downtown museum circuit--impressing ourselves along the way with our
ability to navigate the five to ten lanes of motor scooters speeding down every street (the trick, we learned, is to suppress your natural urge to run, and instead just walk slowly and steadily into the maelstrom, letting the drivers do their best to swerve and avoid a collision). After making it across town, we really enjoyed the Reunification Palace. Built in the mid-'60's as the Presidential Palace for the U.S.-backed Diệm administration (but finished after he was assassinated), the palace was a nice break from the many colonial numbers we've seen to date, featuring a concrete, geometric facade, lots of shag carpeting, and an expansive maze of war and communications rooms in the basement that were left in good enough shape after the palace fell to the North in 1975 that we could still sit back on President Thiệ's chair and contemplate his wall-sized maps showing troop locations throughout the country. From there, we visited the War Remnants Museum, which, despite being recently rebranded from its original name--The Museum of American War Crimes--still primarily features exhibits proving up the dual aphorisms that war is hell, and the winner gets to write the history books. Although it also included a
Girl on a boat
Floating market, Mekong Delta new wing housing a well done, neutrally placarded exhibit of photographs by American and Japanese war correspondents, with a gut-kicker at the end when we learned that all fourteen of the photographers whose works are displayed were either killed of went missing in action during the war.
The morning after our museum tour (and, really, for about the next week), we woke up amazed that there weren't Vietnamese lined up outside our hotel waiting for the opportunity to kick our assess--we had stories of how we love living in Toronto ready to go and everything. But we've gotten nothing but big smiles from everyone in this country--even after telling them that we're American.
The best part about our first week in Vietnam, though, was realizing that the food here is incredible. Our two favorite dishes in HCMC (which ran between $1 to $2, depending where we ate) were (A) Chao Tom--shrimp ground into paste, wrapped around sugar cane and grilled, which you then strip off at the table and roll in rice papers with basil, lettuce, cucumbers and star fruit; and (B) Banh Xeo--crispy fried pancake filled with shrimp (Jub) or pork (Anna), that you break apart and
self-roll in fresh wasabi leaves with mint, basil and bean spouts and then dip in sweet & sour sauce. We ate the latter on our last day in town, followed by a tour through the traditional medicine seller's row in Chinatown, where we couldn't muster the courage to drink cobra wine (due largely to its 7th-grade science class appearance), and where Jub made a few shopkeepers nervous with questions about their displays of ivory trinkets and bear paws. We then closed out our visit with disco bowling, where the alley was packed with laughing, strobe-lit families rolling strikes to the sounds of bass-heavy American hip-hop.
Next up was a three day tour through the Mekong Delta. Given the logistics--which included six ferry crossings and four long-tail boat rides--we signed on to a six-person group tour, which allowed us to sit back and soak up daily life in the Delta (and also served as a reminder of our good fortune, as the super sweet, honeymooning Irish couple we traveled with had recently given up hope of being reunited with their luggage). Constantly replenishing our energy levels (and putting our fillings at risk) with coconut candy that we bought at a
Ho Chi Minh City
Hotel de Ville and Ho Chi Minh statute family run operation on our first day, we toured through a series of floating markets, where produce was bought and sold en masse before being thrown from boat to boat. Throughout the tour, we were amazed at the number of people living permanently on the river in all manner of wood and concrete-hulled boats replete with pets, house plants, laundry lines, and open air kitchens, as well as the number of small skiffs being rowed slowly up and down river by solitary woman in traditional conical hats. We spent our last day on the Delta in the small town of Chao Doc, visiting a small, ethnic minority (and Islamic) Cham village, strolling through the local market and doing our best to steer clear of the heaping piles of incredibly pungent, fermented shrimp that flavor the local delicacies, and then taking in a sunset over seemingly endless fields of rice from the patio of a cliff-side Buddhist monastery.
Thanks for reading everyone--stay tuned for more stories from Vietnam and our trip through China, which starts next week!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.06s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 11; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0355s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb