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Published: August 1st 2008
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Saigon at night
Just a taste of the streets in Vietnam Team,
Apologies for the delay, we are back, we are in Cambodia, and we are currently in the midst of a dogfight trying to get our laundry back from the guesthouse we are staying in. Such is Cambodia.
We descended from Da Lat to Saigon, and were amazed at Vietnam's southern city. Countless residents of Hanoi had warned us about the traffic in Saigon, how hot it was, how wet it would be, how expensive, etc. Chalk it up to regional rivalries, as to us, Saigon was splendid. We did nearly get rained in at a restaurant and certainly crossed some crazy boulevards and traffic circles, but none were any crazier than their counterpart in Hanoi if you ask me. Visits to the War Remnants Museum as well as the Cu Chi tunnels just outside of Saigon were strange experiences to us two Americans. On one hand it was illuminating to hear about the Vietnam-American War from a non-American perspective, however on the other hand some of what we read and heard seemed like outright lies if not heavy propaganda. The war remnants museum did a remarkable job of showing the horrifying effects Agent Orange continues to have on
the Vietnamese, and prominently featured American atrocities like massacred villages without ever so much as admitting that the Viet Cong were capable of doing the same. Crawling through the Cu Chi tunnels, a tunnel complex which at one point stretched hundreds of kilometers and housed 20,000 Viet Cong, gave us an appreciation of how far the Viet Cong were willing to go to defeat the Southern Vietnamese and the Americans, as well as a taste of the horror which US troops faced in the jungles and tunnels of Vietnam. All sorts of pit traps were on display, and every one of them made you wince at the size and placement of the nails and stakes.
The food in Saigon was some of the best in Vietnam if you ask me, particularly the charcoal fired rice cakes and tiny, salty fried gobie fish at Com Nieu Saigon, a restaurant we borrowed out of Anthony Bourdain. We tried to get a hold of Madame Ngoc, the owner of the restaurant, to see if she would sign our copy of Bourdain's book. Our waiter seemed to point downstairs as though to say she certainly could sign our book, enjoyed browsing the photos
The mighty Mekong
Paddling up a canal off the Mekong outside Can Tho, Vietnam at the middle of the book, showed the book to a few more of his coworkers, then returned to tell us, "She's dead." We don't know if this is true, but the food was great. Also terrific were Vietnamese ommelettes/pancakes/turnovers, a crepe-like yellow cake filled with prawns, bean sprouts and vegetables the size of a large platter.
Sadly, our visa in Vietnam was just about up, so we booked a bus and boat ride to Cambodia through the Mekong Delta. While in the Delta we saw coconut trees, tried coconut candy, viewed fish farms (see this post's video), tasted banana rice wine (not bad at all), took long skinny boats through the dark accompanied by skipping fish and bats to floating markets, and generally saw more tourist oriented manufacturies than we knew existed in the Mekong. The muddy waters of the Mekong during the wet season make for somewhat slow going, but the three day trip to the border was great and we recommend it to anyone who's not in too great a rush to leave Vietnam for Cambodia.
Vietnam was very good to us. The rush to unburden tourists of their money or push by people in
Rice paper
Rice paper drying in the sun, awaiting being sliced into rice noodles. a crowd to get to the front of a line may at times have left us out of sorts, but each time we sat down on the side of some street to have a beer, a meal, a nuclear-strong coffee or a sugarcane juice drink we were reminded of the friendliness of the Vietnamese, and these interactions are what leave me hoping to return some time soon. Strangers would raise their glasses of Bia Hoy with us shouting "Yo!" (cheers) and offering us tastes of the meat treats on their table, or computer programmers enjoying iced coffee on their lunch break would go out of their way to try and help us find a restaurant we had read about in a publication from 2001. Whenever we could have a face to face interaction with Vietnamese it was always pleasant, and you get the feeling like they would have bent over backwards to help us, two strangers from a country which napalmed and defoliated their country. In the words of Jack Black, "That's f**king teamwork."
Today we visited the Killing Fields just outside of Phnom Phen, Cambodia's capital. The grounds consists of a large number of innocuous looking depressions in
Can Tho's floating market
Vendors/captains selling cabbage and dragonfruit at the floating market in Can Tho, Mekong Delta. the earth until you realize that each of the craters held at least a hundred massacred Cambodians less than thirty years ago. At the middle of the memorial there is a three-story tall memorial tower chillingly filled with the skulls of the Khmer Rouge's victims. The killing fields themselves are extremely sparse, the truly horrifying information on the Khmer Rouge's insane policies of extermination are to be found at a high school turned torture facility in the center of Phnom Phen, S-21. At various points during their rule in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge "liquidated" professionals, the educated, the urban, and eventually even the rural in their paranoid attempt to revert Cambodia to "Year Zero," and do away with such things as the family, education, commerce, and possibly worst of all, trust. Children were indoctrinated by the state to turn in anyone and everyone who might be suspected of anything and everything. Many of them passed through S-21 where they were tortured and made to confess to crimes and treasons they never committed before they were taken to the Killing Fields. To further our education on the madness that ruled Cambodia for five years in the 1970's we caught a showing
Crocodile farm
A crocodile farm we visited on our way to the Cambodian border. of "The Killing Fields" which was absolutely incredible. Suffice it to say that if you haven't seen it, you ought to.
Next up we head to the coast of Cambodia for some more beach time, and to prepare ourselves for our upcoming visit to Angkor Wat. We will keep you updated. Wish us luck in our upcoming struggle to regain Tucker's underoos.
Tucker and Katie
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Gretchen
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Like Poetry
Beautiful. Makes me feel like I'm there. Might have to put this on the "to visit" list.