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Saigon (April 24 - April 30)
Note: We have referred to Ho Chi Minh City throughout our blog as Saigon for three reasons: (i) It's shorter and so requires less typing from us, (ii) Most people that we have met in Southern Vietnam also call it Saigon and (iii) Roger refuses to use the name given the city by communists.
We really enjoyed our time in Saigon and liked it much more than Bangkok. It’s a pretty city and from the area around Pham Ngu Lao in District 1, a nexus of backpacker friendly accommodations and services, you can walk to most of the places that you would want to go (although there are many motos and taxis for hire as well). We felt like Saigon (more than anywhere else we have been so far) is definitely a place we could live for a couple of years.
Monday
Monday was a pretty low-key travel day for us. Our friend Chris (detailed in the entry on the Mekong Delta) had one of his Vietnamese friends set up a bus reservation for us to Saigon. We were told the bus (or transportation to the bus) would pick us up
Capitalism and Communism
Uncle Ho, Col. Sanders. Col. Sanders, Uncle Ho. Just wait 'til you meet Ronald.at our hotel. When we checked out of the hotel, the owner of the hotel asked where we were going and we told him we were waiting for the bus. He made a couple of calls and told us we didn't have a reservation but that he had made us a reservation and they were coming to pick us up. For all we knew he called and canceled our reservation and booked us a reservation with a different company where his friend works (and where the hotel would get a commission - the extent to which the Vietnamese infrastructure works on kick-backs is impossible to measure). But we needed a ride and a car pulled up to take us to the bus station so in any event it worked out.
We took the 8:30 Meilinh Express bus to Saigon. It was a smaller bus than we had been on so far and probably had seats for 12 people (and contained only 12 people). It was not a bad ride although a little tight for comfort. The driver was careful and we were able to listen to our ipods and read. We stopped at a restaurant less than an hour
outside of Saigon where we were able to stretch our legs, use the toilet and pick up some unusual buns with meat, egg and mushrooms inside. In keeping with our effort to report on the toilets of the world, the rest stop offered an as yet unseen men’s room feature - the tiled trough - a six inch wide “shelf” that runs around the three walls and slopes slightly to one side and drains all of the urine to a hole in the far corner. You can pee at nine o’clock and watch the trickle run around to six. If, uh, you were interested in that sort of thing.
We arrived in Saigon about noon. When you pull into the Saigon bus station, the bus is stormed by moto and taxi drivers trying to get you to come with them. We usually try to avoid this at all costs and Chris had told us that there was a free Meilinh Express car that would take us to their main office (and hopefully closer to our ultimate destination in the heart of Saigon, although we weren't sure). When we arrived at their headquarters no one could tell us where we
were on the map but we thought we knew roughly where we were so we took a metered taxi (rather than the many motorbikes waiting) to our hotel of choice. We stayed at a guesthouse in the Pham Ngu Lao area which is the backpacker area of Saigon. It has a lot of western restaurants, bars and touts like Khao San Road in Bangkok but was not nearly as annoying to us as Khao San.
There is a tremendous amount of competition in the Saigon hotel market. Our guesthouse was cheap but the main reason we chose it was because our guidebook said it had the fastest internet connection in Saigon and it was free if we stayed there. After checking in Amy napped because she was still exhausted from witnessing the dance off two nights prior and Roger used that time to work on our Angkor entry on the blog. The rest of the day was pretty slow and involved eating, getting our laundry done and emailing.
We also took a break and stopped in at a cafe with bubble tea. The cafe was very nice with air conditioning and the drinks were surprisingly expensive. After sitting
there a few minutes we started to wonder if we had stumbled into some other type of business. We were the only customers in the café of nine tables but there were at least 10 young women working and they took turns shuffling between the front and an area in back behind a door. We were waiting and watching intently to determine if it was a front for prostitution (or if they were hiding donuts - one of us is going through withdrawal). It may have been a new cafe that hired about 9 too many young women to work, but there were all sorts of weird vibes. Amy even sent Roger back alone a few days later to see if he could ferret out the situation without a lady holding him back but he was not able to learn anything new. Sadly, we'll never know the truth behind the bubble tea cafe.
Unfortunately, the air conditioning in our room did not work and there were ants all over so we decided we would have to forego the fast free internet connection for a cleaner and more comfortable room.
Tuesday
We started out early the next morning
Roger before poison hit
at Pho Binh, communist pho shop on a search for a new hotel. We decided upon Spring House which was double the price of our last hotel (a whole $15 USD) but was very clean and comfortable and was a great place to base ourselves for the next few days. After settling on a new hotel, we stopped at one of the guidebook recommended pho purveyors for a bowl of pho. It was ok but the beef was too fatty for Amy to enjoy.
After breakfast we decided to head to the Ho Chi Minh City Museum. Although there are many motorbike drivers and tuk tuk drivers that hang out around Pham Ngo Lao looking for work, we felt that most of what we wanted to see was within walking distance. We also prefer walking if we can because you can stop if something catches your eye or completely change your course if something really interests you. Beyond the difficulty of crossing the street, (click
here) Saigon is a very easy city to see by foot.
The Ho Chi Minh City Museum was kind of interesting although it is not typically the type of museum we would visit. The museum contains a variety of
Our favorite meal (shrimp on sugar cane)
at our favorite restaurant, Quan An Ngon relics relating to the founding of the city and local culture, including numerous items made of clay and wood (archeological finds are definitely not Amy's cup of tea). Most of the museum consisted of various photographs with limited captions which makes it pretty easy to breeze through without absorbing a lot of information. The most interesting part of the museum was the beautiful neoclassical architecture. Virtually every street in Saigon illustrates the influence of French or Chinese architecture and the vast colonial façade of the museum is a prime example of French influence. A bride and groom were at the museum taking photos around the building’s lovely architecture.
On our way out of the museum we passed a small counter of items for sale, including a small pile of American dogtags that caught Roger's eye. In the following days this spawned a variety of queries as to the authenticity of the dogtags and some hand wringing over their value to former American soldiers or their families. We even went so far as to copy down a few names at random from the tags for a check by a friend back in Washington. The random check and the presence of
dogtags at other popular tourist attractions (attractions frequented by American veterans) didn’t prove anything one way or another, but did put us at ease over the possibility of the tags being profoundly important. We have since seen small numbers of American dogtags in various states of decay at other tourist venues.
After visiting the Ho Chi Minh City Museum we headed to the Reunification Palace which is where the South Vietnamese surrendered to the Viet Cong on April 30, 1975. Unfortunately for us it is closed until June 2006 so we were only able to see it from the outside. We were able to recharge with some Vietnamese iced coffee with milk (nope, not skim milk, condensed milk) which we are both addicted to at this point. Amy used to drink her coffee black but after 6 weeks of enjoying condensed milk in coffee she'll probably soon start taking her coffee with cotton candy.
After coffee, we went to the museum honoring Ton Duc Thang, president of Vientam during the fall of Saigon. Because everything else in Vietnam is devoted to Ho Chi Minh we wanted to buck tradition and go to a museum recognizing someone else. Again
Che at our favorite restaurant, Quan An Ngon
Che is a mixture of fruits and veggies mixed with coconut milk and sugar the museum was pretty interesting but most of it was pictures of Uncle Ton with everyone from his kids to Uncle Ho to female fighters during the American War (in Vietnam, the Vietnam War is referred to as the American War). The museum, which encompasses numerous rooms on two floors spread over two buildings, was run by three staff who seemed surprised to have tourists. We were the only visitors during the hour we were there and the staff people attentively went ahead of us to turn on the lights in each room and to turn them off as we moved forward.
We had read about Wild Horse Saloon, a steakhouse featuring a Vietnamese house band playing country western tunes, and we did not want to miss it. Unfortunately, after walking over there we found out that the music didn't start until 8 and so we went to a nearby restaurant recommended by our guidebook. Quan An Ngon is a very pretty restaurant that looks expensive but features traditional dishes prepared by a collective of specialty chefs at very reasonable prices. We loved this restaurant and probably ended up eating here five times over the course of our stay
in Saigon. It is the best restaurant recommendation in our Vietnamese guidebook. Every time we went we tried different dishes but always had the Banh Hoi Chao Tom Cuon Banh Trang (pounded shrimp hash fried on sugar cane served with rice vermicelli, rice paper and vegetables) that we tried during our first visit. Basically, it was a "make your own spring roll". We also usually had the sweetened black sticky rice which is an amazing dessert. The food was so good that during our first visit sitting outside it didn't deter us when a rat ran across the courtyard - we chalked it up to being outside.
We followed up dinner with drinks on the rooftop of the Rex Hotel which is famous for having housed the US Information Service during the early 1960s. Today it's famous for having drinks that were almost twice as much as our meal. It was expensive but the very nice view of the city and Nguyen Hue Plaza (with the requisite statue of Uncle Ho) down below made it worthwhile.
Wednesday
By the time we woke up, ate, and walked to the Southern Women's Museum, it had closed for lunch and
would not reopen until 1:30 (none of which was detailed in our guidebook). We decided therefore to walk to Pho Binh for an early lunch. Pho Binh is a small diner where American soldiers and officers ate pho during the Vietnam War unaware that the shop owner permitted the Viet Cong leadership to secretly meet upstairs to plan the Tet Offensive. Following the Tet Offensive in 1968 the man was arrested and imprisoned for his acts of treason against the southern government. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975 the man was freed and, as you might have guessed, is considered a hero of the Communist revolution. Regreattably we didn't get to meet the owner but we were given some scrapbooks and other information to peruse along with our delicious pho. It was a pretty interesting place to be just thinking about what happened in the building and we left with a quaint feeling having sampled the soup still being sold by such a significant figure in Vietnam’s recent history. We really enjoyed it until about an hour later when Roger became convinced that "that communist bastard" poisoned us. We both had wobbly stomachs for the rest of the day,
the worst manifestation of which meant that Saigon was again “bombed,” this time from the slippery and humid squat toilets of our next stop, the Southern Women’s Museum.
The Southern Women's Museum provided a fairly interesting look at the variety of activities of southern women, particularly those activities that enabled the unification of communist Vietnam. We had to rely mainly on pictures with English captions to tell the story of women in Vietnam as many of the descriptions were solely in Vietnamese. In addition to generous praise for the women who aided the revolution the museum included artistic tributes to Uncle Ho and Uncle Ton as well as a variety of documents portraying the cruelty of the Americans during the war.
We spent the afternoon at the War Remnants Museum which focuses mainly on the American War. As Americans this museum was much more relevant to us and was really interesting and we left feeling badly for the suffering so many Americans and Vietnamese suffered during the war (the graphic depictions of the impact of Agent Orange were particularly powerful). Among the museum’s exhibits are representations of opposition to the war, pictures of war brutality (including the My
Lai massacre) and problems from Agent Orange, reconstructed facilities like those that held prisoners of war, and American and Vietnamese military equipment. One of the most interesting exhibits was the photography of war photographers who died while documenting various war operations (any of which might be familiar to Americans from the pages of Life Magazine).
The breadth and nature of the exhibits and the frequent use of English made theWar Remnants Museum the best we visited in Saigon. It was also mobbed by visitors which made it hard to see everything and to really focus on some of the more profound exhibits. As with all other museums we have been to the only perspective given was the one of the communist government. The only view given here in the museums is that the North Vietnamese liberated the South Vietnamese from the imperialist Americans (for example, even though much of the fighting was done by Southern troops, no acts of war by southern forces are depicted). No matter what you think about the war what happened in Vietnam was more complicated than that.
The evening involved another dinner at Quan An Ngon, internet and the purchase of some additional
cds and movies. We also booked passage north on an open bus tour through Meilinh Express. Although we had to use public buses while we were south of Can Tho, beginning in Saigon there is a pretty well traveled path and many cafes sell open bus tickets which allow you to use them at any date to get from one location to the next. Our open bus tickets from Saigon to Mui Ne to Da Lat to Nha Trang to Hoi An, more than 900 kilometers of road, cost $23 per person.
Thursday
Thursday we took a tour to the Cu Chi tunnels about 70 kilometers outside of Saigon from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm. The tour, transportation, entrance to the tunnels, and a well informed English speaking guide cost us $5 per person from Kim Travel. The extensive tunnels here contain three levels, the first of which is where most of the living occurred while the other levels were created in case the Viet Cong needed to move lower to escape bombing above. The tunnels contained kitchens, hospitals and weapons facilities - everything you would need above ground to conduct a war. One of the most impressive
aspects of the tunnel infrastructure was the extensive network of pipes used to disseminate the smoke from cooking, releasing the smoke low and under cover of forest floor foliage making it difficult to spot. Holes for air were similarly concealed and even partially stuffed with clothes from dead American soldiers to confuse and throw off the dogs American forces would use to try and identify tunnel locations.
A small section of the network is open to the public and we were eager to get in for a peek. Once down there, however, we were eager to leave because it was hot, stuffy, tight and extremely dark. We’ve never been as claustrophobic as we were in there and we exited at the first of three opportunities (having moved about thirty meters underground).
Around the tunnels we saw a variety of man traps employed by the Viet Cong in both water and on land. Although the traps were very simple (made mostly with bamboo, and recycled pieces of metal) they were very lethal and very effective. A well-trained and well-equipped American soldier, for example, could do nothing to spot barbed spikes on the floor of a muddy river or a
“tiger trap” of rolling spikes on bamboo that actually use the weight of a falling victim as the force driving the spikes in to their midsection. The traps were both frightening and ingenious in their lethal simplicity (our guide pointed out that some traps were so well concealed that unlucky Viet Cong troops would stumble upon them).
Near the tunnels the shell of an American tank remains as a war trophy. The tank was disabled by a Viet Cong mine and the crew was then finished off by the VC. The tank has been stripped of any easily removed metal and is now a play thing for tourists who can climb on and over the machine that held a handful of men fighting for and losing their lives. Like many of the sights around southern Vietnam the literal representation of war and lives lost was profound and disturbing.
Our guide, who we were very impressed with, also showed us the Ho Chi Minh sandal, a shoe made entirely from discarded tires. The thick sole of the shoe, cut symmetrically and in line with the tread, does not reveal the direction taken by the wearer. The straps of the
Post Office Interior
As ever, Uncle Ho is watching you (mail postcards)! sandals, also made from the same tire, were adjustable and replaceable. Like the tunnels and the man traps, the Ho Chi Minh sandals reveal an effective and elegant way of thinking that we believe demonstrates a lot about the Vietnamese.
After coming back we were pretty tired and took a long nap until dinner. Instead of going back to Quan An Ngon we decided to go to the restaurant next door, both because it looked nice and because they had free wifi. We have found that free wifi often comes with higher prices and this restaurant was much more expensive than Quan An Ngon. Dinner was good though and we got to try a few things we hadn't tried before. After dinner we finally made it to Wild Horse Saloon for live country music. One of us enjoyed a beer while the other ordered a whisky and a banana split (everyone guess who ordered what). We enjoyed the 3 piece band and the outfits of the waitresses who wore either Pocahontas-style fringed leather outfits or western shirts and jeans. Wild Horse Saloon was voted "best saloon style" restaurant in Saigon in 2004 and we can only imagine the amount
of competition. The steaks and other "western" food looked pretty good especially to Roger, but the prices were much higher than we could afford so we stuck to drinks. We had intended to head over to a bar near our hotel called “Guns N' Roses.” If you guessed that this is a biker bar which plays nothing but G'n'R all night long please pat yourself heartily on the back. Sounds great, right? Well, no one else agreed because it has been closed (or, hopefully, is just undergoing major repairs - in either case insult has been added to injury as someone stole the “N” from the sign).
Friday
Despite having been in the neighborhood for several days today was the first day that we tried sinh to (fruit shakes) from Banana Cafe in the Pham Ngo Lao area. The shakes are so good (maybe the best we have had) and only cost 5,000 dong (approximately 35 cents). We are sad to think of the many times we could have had a shake but didn’t. The late morning was spent on the internet and then watching the second half of a Denver Nuggets playoff game over lunch (their only
post-season victory on the way to, say it together Denverites, another huge, embarrassing failure). ESPN and Star Sports are kind enough to broadcast NBA games some mornings, though Roger appeared to be the only one interested.
We went to the Fine Arts museum in the afternoon which is located in a beautiful French colonial building. We liked this museum more than most. Art is easier to enjoy without a lot of explanation and requires little translation. Also, in general, we tend to prefer art museums to other types of museums.
After the art museum, we had coffee at the local chain here, Trung Nguyen. Starbucks better look out if Trung Nguyen ever heads to America. Like most of the cafes in Vietnam, Trung Nguyen serves unlimited tea or iced tea with the drink that you order which probably isn’t a great idea for increasing profits or encouraging customer turnover, but we like it. Re-caffeinated, we walked to the bus station to see if it would be possible to take a bus to Can Gio to see the mangrove swamps but decided that the trip would not be worth the effort.
It is about a month from rainy
KFC Treats
on a real plate! season but it seems as if there is a very heavy downpour each afternoon for up to a couple of hours. We were near Ben Thanh when the rains started so we decided to duck into the market to wait out the storm. Ben Thanh is a popular tourist stop but we were not too impressed as far as markets go and would have left much more quickly if it hadn't been for the rain. Roger was finally able to get his dad an Uncle Ho t-shirt and Amy contemplated buying a nightgown until a rat, scurrying in to the market to get out of the rain, persuaded here to instead stand frozen staring at the floor on watch for other vermin. As the drainage system was unable to keep up with the pouring rain the market floor started flooding, stranding us a few inches above the creeping waters but dry. Having determined they were not going to sell many fake watches in the flood some teenagers working a watch counter instead whipped out their vocabulary workbooks to practice pronunciation with us. It was definitely the best way we could have chosen to pass the time and we enjoyed the
ambition of the kids.
Eventually the downpour slowed and we snuck out to a coffee shop to pass the time until the water could drain from the streets. We read some magazines and books and watched two fat old western men share a drink with three young Vietnamese girls. It appeared that one of the Vietnamese girls (who was already with one of the old western men) invited two of her friends hoping one of the old western men would like one of her friends. As always, disturbing but entrancing to try to determine what is actually going on.
We found a restaurant we wanted to try in one of the magazines at the coffee shop so we headed there once the rains stopped completely. After sitting down and looking at the menu we realized we had misunderstood what the restaurant served and so because the restaurant was very busy and we did not appear to be likely to be served anytime soon we decided to duck out. It sounds simple, but being the only non-Vietnamese leaving a packed restaurant before being served makes you feel like you are OJ at a Ginsu display. We decided to try a different restaurant we had read about in our guidebook but after walking there discovered that it was closed. Walking back through our neighborhood looking for a restaurant became annoying because the streets were packed with people arriving in Saigon for the weekend. Instead of fighting it, we got Lotteria and brought it back to the room to enjoy with Scrubs. There are no western chains in Vietnam except KFC so when you need a burger fix your choice is Lotteria or whatever a traditional Vietnamese cook can make look like a cheeseburger. Luckily, it was pretty good and the french fries come with chili sauce rather than ketchup, which we highly recommend and now eat instead of ketchup. We “supersized” our meal making it almost the same size as a “small” in America.
Saturday and Sunday
The weekend was fairly uneventful. We had seen most of what we wanted to see in Saigon and if Saigon Liberation Day, April 30, had not been on Sunday we would have left. With visions of Soviet-style parades and forced celebrations in our heads we were curious to see what the celebrations were like and so we stayed a couple of extra days. This was probably a mistake as, aside from numerous banners and communist slogans hanging on lampposts, there was nothing to see. We heard that last year’s celebration (the 30th anniversary) was quite grand but this year’s felt more like President’s Day in America (you know there are probably events celebrating the day but you do laundry and watch Jerry Springer reruns). We walked past the Reunification Palace, the Ho Chi Minh City Campaign Museum and the American Embassy but found no parades, no celebrations, nothing.
So without communist revelry to enjoy, we enjoyed fruit shakes in the morning at Banana Café, had lunch both days at Quan An Ngon and had Lotteria at least once more We went to the post office, the park, a mall and department store, KFC and bought a couple of movies and cds. We went to a popular bar and restaurant for travelers to sit outside with our drinks and French fries and watch the people go by. We also watched really bad movies on HBO. It appears that the only movies HBO shows here are either really old or really bad (or both!). Movies like - we are not making this up - a Tony Danza movie that centers around Tony hiding a pair of orangutans in his apartment, or the SciFi Channel production of “Python Versus Boa” which was not nearly as cool as the title would lead you to believe. There are no remotely current quality offerings on HBO.
Despite the lack of decent material on HBO we found ourselves in on Saturday night and picking up take out from a restaurant specializing in food from Hue. While we waited for our food we had another in our string of strange conversations with local young people, this one centering around how pretty Amy and a woman in their group were. We are often approached by people, mostly young people, who just want to try out their English. Apparently they are also occasionally eager to flirt with American ladies and attempt to demand the American men return the “compliment” to their women.
The highlight of the weekend was the circus we stumbled across at the park near our hotel for a mere 35,000 dong per person (barely over $2 USD). We were not able to tell whether the circus was in town for a short time or whether it is a fixture of the park. Our guess is that it is permanent because some of the living quarters for the performers looked very well lived in, though conditions we have witnessed in some residences make it hard to tell the transient from the humble.
The charm of the circus was really irresistible. There were no signs in English and very few tourists in the small crowd of mostly Vietnamese families. The tent and the seats are somewhat ragged and a little faded and the stairs creak underfoot just a little as you walk in to see the show. As the show approaches smoke machines add a fog to the room and a small live band sets the mood. The ringmaster is an older woman decked out in a sequin evening gown and her commanding voice lets you know that they take great pride in the show you are about to see. As the acts come out and the music plays we forgot all of the humble surroundings and the less than half full arena and became completely enchanted by the spectacle of this circus.
We really enjoyed the evening at the circus, probably even more than we would have in America, and definitely recommend it as an entertaining night (particularly considering the price of admission). Amy preferred the single ring to the overwhelming stimulus of P.T. Barnum’s three rings that rob her of her focus. We saw mainly acrobats doing aerial and balance tricks and a few segments with clowns that were actually funny (more vaudevillian than clownish). The most popular animal feature was the trained dogs, although they also had a segment with elephants and monkeys (who don’t appear to be trained and instead are jerked around on leashes). The best part of the circus was watching the kids who were captivated by the evening’s events, glassy eyed and wowed by every dramatic display. There were a few kids alone, with an older sibling watching the younger, and their parents waiting outside on motorbikes after the show. We sat next to a little boy who was so entranced with everything that happened around him that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the show. It was really great to see wonder on the face of a child after seeing so many kids working in the streets and struggling with poverty.
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Nikola Simon
Nikola & Simon
Amazing!!!
What an amazing journal, I have read this one with great delight and made notes on where to go etc when we get to Saigon in December. Have a fantastic time - Nikola