South Vietnam - Mekong Delta

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Saigon

Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City as it’s officially known, although bigger than Hanoi is not the capital of Vietnam. I’d been looking forward to going as I’d read and heard about the millions of motorbikes in the streets and people’s heart in throat near death experiences, as well as the jovial nature of the southern Vietnamese people.

After spending the night on another night bus from Nha Trang I arrived rather tired at 6.30 in the morning on the tourist street of Saigon. Being greeted by a horde of taxi drivers and guest house representatives as I stepped off the bus was not exactly the good morning I was in the mood for, none the less I found myself following one of the guest house ladies a little while later when I’d successfully retrieved my bag and figured out exactly where I was. I was very intrigued when she walked into a little alley off the main street. It was only about a meter or two wide with houses on either side at least 3 stories house, filtering the early morning light. The lady went around a corner and into a house with a metal gate for a door, and motioned for me to follow her stepping over a sleeping girl on the floor of what appeared to be the front room of the house. By the stairs I could see into the kitchen which was stacked high with the plates from last night’s dinner. We went up the curvy stairs and she showed me a room to the front which was so small that I was amazed they had managed to get the big double bed in which now occupied most of the floor space. The price was $5, but I couldn’t stay in such a cramped space even for that price, to which she replied that she had another room upstairs. To get there you had to navigate another set of steps that steeply ascended up through a trapdoor in the ceiling upon which you entered a large, airy and bright room with twice as much floor space as the bed took up, its own bathroom towards the back of the house. Suspiciously I asked her how much this room was then, and was very surprised to find that it was also just $5. It wasn’t exactly the cleanest or tidiest of rooms (acting partly as storage for a jumble of stuff in a corner behind the bed), and it had a strange smell which I later found out was moth balls, but I’d decided that Saigon was going to be the place where I saved money, so I accepted the room and began the process of manoeuvring my bags up the steep steps.

After some food a much needed shower, I went out to explore the city, but I didn’t get far before I ran into Morgan and Brian - the two Australian guys that Anita and Karin had befriended in Nha Trang. They were also going on a city tour that day and had made friends with a local girl who was our guide for the day as we went to the independence palace and the War Remnants Museum.

The Independence Palace was the presidential palace for South Vietnam and was the place where the famous tank drove through the fence signifying the capitulation of South Vietnam and the end of the war. Today it is still the offices and official reception place for the government when it is in session in Saigon rather than in Hanoi. It is a big, fairly soulless building (if you ask me) with big meeting and reception rooms in different colours with beautiful tapestries and ornaments. However, the most fascinating part of the palace was the fact that it has its very own cinema with plush red velvet chairs and a lovely antiquated projector in a proper projection room.
I also quite liked the rooms that were left as they were during the war - like the communications room with a row of old-fashioned telephones in greens, browns and light pink. In front of this room was a little room with just a desk and an old chair, which looked straight out of a film from the seventies. I could just imagine some sergeant sitting there receiving messengers and requests and deciding which of them were important enough to be let through to the next and more important parts of the war machine…

After a short walk through the city with its thousands of motorbikes that were relentlessly driving around in the midday heat, we got to the War Remnants Museum. This used to be called the American War Crimes Museum, but in later more PC times the name was changed to the less accusatory War Remnants Museum. My tour through the various sections of the exhibition started in a room dedicated to the war correspondents of the American-Vietnamese war. It was very a room filled with the pictures taken by these correspondents showing the war from the front rows. Many of them had died in their pursuits to show the world what was going on in Vietnam, and there were pictures from their last rolls of films along with stories of what happened to them. It was a very sombre experience walking through the halls seeing pictures of dead and dying Western soldiers, Viet Congs and journalists and imagining the reality of this war. It must have been a very strange experience for a young man from Iowa or wherever to be sent halfway across the world to march through jungles and rice paddies in 30 degrees heat in full armour, army boots and helmet, fighting an enemy that was hardly ever seen as the VC were on home turf and could hide in tunnels underground.
The rest of the museum showed the war from the Vietnamese perspective, showing how many foreign soldiers were sent there and a brief outline of the progression of the conflict. The last, big hall was dedicated to showing the horrors that were inflicted on the Vietnamese people, from massacres of whole villages, to pictures of American soldiers holding up human carcasses shot to pieces, to before and after pictures of areas that were bombed with napalm or agent orange. A large section also showed the after-effects of the agent orange victims and their families. Even today, kids are still being born in Vietnam with deformities due to the toxins showered over large parts of Vietnam by the Americans.
They tried to end the tour on a more positive note, though, showing drawings made by Vietnamese children on the subject of peace, hope and a brighter future for all mankind living together in harmony. However, as you walked out into the courtyard again, you were surrounded by bombs the size of silos and helicopters with machine guns poking out of the side. It’s hard for me to find meaning in the atrocities of mankind in the name of politics. Was fighting the threat of communism really worth the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people as well as future generations of deformed children?
I wish I had a better understanding of the forces at play leading up to the Vietnam war, and can obviously only base my reactions on the brief history I learned at school and the Vietnamese side of the story I had presented at the museum - but the horrors of this war and the unfairness of it all to the Vietnamese, including the problems they still have today as a result really stuck with me.

I don’t know if this was why I didn’t feel great when we got back to the part of town we were staying in, or if I ate something bad, but I was supposed to have dinner in an Indian restaurant with all of my current travel companions - this was almost the end of Karin and Anita’s holiday - but I felt so nauseous I could hardly stand the smell of the food in the restaurant. So without ordering any food and declining various offers of drugs to make my nausea go away, I went back to my loft hoping I’d be better by the morning when I’d booked a tour to see the Cu Chi Tunnels. Unfortunately, my nausea didn’t go away but turned out to be my first encounter with the “travel stomach” which kept me in bed for the whole of the next day. I shouldn’t complain, though, as I’ve been travelling for well over two months without any food poisoning and I’d expected to be sick on a regular basis.
Luckily, my bossy landlady managed to defer my booking for the tunnels to the next day, and by dinnertime I felt well enough to go and say goodbye to Anita and Karin. It was a bit strange to see them go, as they’d been my companions for over three weeks sharing a lot of my experiences of Vietnam. At the same time, I felt the need to be on my own again and was looking forward to going to Cambodia after such a long time in Vietnam. I’m very glad to be meeting so many people on my way, though. It’s nice to know that I have friends and acquaintances in so many places now. I’ve never really been to Austria, so maybe I’ll go skiing there one day :-)

Cu Chi Tunnels

The trip I’d booked to the Tunnels of the Viet Cong soldiers also included a stop at the Cao Dai Great Temple. Caodaism is an indigenous religion in Vietnam founded in the 1920s. It combines secular and religious philosophies both from the east and the west, and is based on séance messages revealed to the group’s founder. In the temple there is a plaque dedicated to their three saints:
“Sun Yat Sen (1866 - 1925) leader of the Chinese revolution in 1911.
Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885) France’s famed poet full of compassion for the miserable.
Nguyen Binh Khiem (1492 - 1587) or Trang Trinh, Vietnamese first poet-laureate famous for his prophesies, revealing himself as the Master of a Heavenly Lodge named White Stanza. Victor Hugo and Sun Yat Sen were among his disciples.
Being entrusted with the mission of realising the 3rd alliance between God and mankind (the first realised by Moses, the second by Jesus Christ), these saints give spiritual guidance and assist the caodaists in spreading the new holy doctrine.”
Our guide furthermore explained that the religion encompasses aspects of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism represented by the three colours red, blue and yellow in the ceremony. We arrived just before the noon ceremony, and were guided up to the balconies lining the whole length of the temple on either side. From here all the tourists had an excellent view of the space, the altar, and the believers as they filed into the temple all dressed in white - women on one side, men on the other - except for senior members of the congregation at the front who wore red, blue or yellow robes. There was no priest leading the ceremony, but instead a choir and a group of musicians playing a continuous song in the background, which seemed to guide the worshippers in their prayers. They were all sat cross-legged on the floor towards the back of the temple, in neat rows, and would bow their heads to the floor in synchrony at regular intervals.
The caodaists come to the temple three times a day, six in the morning, six in the evening, and then the midday ceremony which I attended. It seemed a good time for reflection, although I doubt I myself would be able to dedicate my life to that level of spirituality. On the one hand it seemed like it must be a nice community to belong to and that they must live calm and serene lives, but on the other hand, it was a bit like a cult, taking over such large portions of people’s time and lives. I would have liked to talk to some of the followers and hear from themselves what attracted them to the religion. As it was, we only really heard a bit about the religion from our tour guide on the bus, who, although he liked to talk a lot, wasn’t always the easiest to understand…

He himself was a catholic and had fought on the American side of the war. He was the first pro-American Vietnamese I had encountered, and it was very interesting to hear his stories from the war, how he had been to America to be trained, and how the Americans tried to place their bases strategically in the area north-west of Saigon around the Cu Chi tunnels in their attempt to win over the Viet Cong. He also spoke with a measure of pride of how ingenious the VC were in building the tunnels in three layers and running in big loops with emergency exits into the river, where they could slip away hidden under the water breathing through bamboo shoots. He told us how the small size of the Vietnamese was a definite plus as they could slip in and out of the narrow holes into the tunnels and run through them crouched down, as well as being able to shoot their rifles and guns from the typical Asian crouched position, sitting on their heels resting on their haunches. If a Western tried that they would lose their balance and topple over backwards as the gun recoiled.

The museum which is “attached’ to the tunnels, was quite disturbing. First, they showed us a video made just after the war, glorifying the way of life of the Vietnamese and in particular the brave men and women who fought the Americans. Then we went for a walk through the area which took us past actual entrances to the tunnels, as well as replicas of the types of traps the Viet Cong set up in the jungle and tunnels - vicious bamboo contraptions that were generally designed to pierce either men or dogs who might be following them - and past remnants of war machinery, like tanks, where mannequins were dressed as Viet Cong soldiers, beside or on top of which the tourists could have their pictures taken. Finally we reached an entrance to a tunnel we could crawl through. It had been widened, as the actual tunnels are simply too narrow and low for most people from Europe to navigate. It was really humid down under the earth, and it quickly got really hot, trying to run through the tunnels doubled over trying not to hit the roof or stumble in the semi-darkness. There were lights set up with regular intervals, so we could orientate ourselves down there, and I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to run through them in complete darkness scared for your life. It was hard as it was, suddenly coming upon a hole down, and trying to lower yourself into an opening only just the size of your body, then trying to get into a position where you could move forward again. At one point we also reached a part of the tunnel where it suddenly became very narrow. Apparently they had similar features in the real tunnels, as a hindrance in case an enemy soldier managed to get into the tunnel, chances were they would be too big to get through the narrower spot, and would be slowed down in their pursuit.

Slightly disturbing, when we got back to the visitor centre and gift shop, they were selling bullets for AK47s and other wartime weaponry that you could try to shoot in their shooting range if you felt so inclined. After seeing what war does to people, I only felt like running back and joining the first, the best peace promoting organisation I came across, and I find it hard to understand why anyone would feel the need to shoot guns after that…

Mekong Delta

I didn’t feel quite ready to move on after the trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels, and having met a nice English girl on the tour, I moved out of my moth ball smelling room and shared a room with her for my last night in Saigon. The next day we took it easy, booked our onward tickets (in my case a tour through the Mekong Delta, ending up in Phnom Penh), and then went to one of the famous covered markets in Saigon to buy the last few Christmas presents that I planned to send home when I got to Bangkok again.
I wish I could say something interesting about my last day in Saigon, but it really was just a matter of needing an extra day to get back on my feet after my stomach upset…

Unfortunately, the same goes for my Mekong Delta trip. The name of the Mekong always conjures up images of a slow moving river running through jungle and big trees hanging over the water from banks obscured by vegetation, widening as it runs through Asia until it flows into the South China Sea full of fishing boats and river markets. I had visions of myself flowing down the river on a small boat lying in my hammock, but I am yet to find a boat with hammocks on it :-( In reality the river is a lot bigger than I ever imagined, especially in the delta it’s sometimes difficult to imagine that you are actually on a river because it’s so big it looks like a massive lake rather than a river, several kilometres wide… The tour I booked was very ‘organised’, meaning that we kept being rushed from one ‘cultural experience’ to another, such as a coconut candy factory, rice paper production and fish farms, which were all interesting to see, but felt like a show just for the tourists.

I spent a night in a pretty shitty guest house, and then the next day was all about getting to Phnom Penh. It was very beautiful spending the day on a boat going up the river, with little dwellings on small pieces of land managing to stay above water level. The border crossing was the most entertaining… There was no actual border, just a building by the side of the river, where our tour guide took our passports to get stamped out of Vietnam while we had some lunch, and then we went next door to stand in line and get our entry stamps for Cambodia. It was just a small police station in the middle of nowhere, and if we hadn’t been on a guided tour, I have no idea how we would have found it - but travelling in Asia can be so easy: you get guided everywhere, and hardly ever have to carry your backpack. I don’t know what I was worrying about :-)

The last leg of the journey was by minibus, which turned into a bit of a circus as a burnt smell started emanating through the cabin… It turned out that the brakes were stuck and were overheating. All the men in the group suddenly turned into amateur mechanics and were inspecting the wheels and giving advice to the driver. He seemed to have the best solution, though, cooling the wheels with water and eventually we all got back in the bus and managed to get to Phnom Penh in one piece. As in Vientiane, the water festival was starting that day and it seemed that the whole population of Cambodia were flocking into their capital. But together with some international students from Singapore on a mini-break, I managed to get on a motorbike taxi with all my bags and found a hostel on Lakeside, readying myself for another capital full of people celebrating their national day…


More about Cambodia later.

Lots of love,
Kristine

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Photos

One of the massive meeting rooms
I especially liked the mustard wall-to-wall shag pile

Morgan in front of a "fighter jet"
Can't remember why it was displayed or what kind of flying machine it was... sorry boys. Just thought Morgan's pose was funny

Me doing the Asian photo pose
In front of a tank much like the one that drove through the gates of the Reunification palace on 30 April, 1975 signalling the end of the Vietnam war

War Remnants Museum
From the exhibition on war correspondents