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Published: March 29th 2011
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I took the Mekong Express bus to Saigon despite it being a bit more expensive than the alternatives, and the journey was correspondingly pleasant and the border quick and easy. Having experienced bus company people that you can trust handle the passport-stamping and visa-checking definitely makes a difference. Also, the bus finishes up in Saigon right in the Pham Ngu Lao area which is where the majority of the budget guesthouses are located meaning not having to deal with moto drivers or taxis straight away, instead I was able to start checking out places to stay immediately. Well, almost immediately because almost as soon as I got off the bus it started pouring with rain so I stopped for something to eat in a backpacker cafe. I needed the sustenance because it took a lot of traipsing around with my pack before eventually settling on one, the Red Sun Hotel (review
here). A lot of the ones that were recommended in the Vietnam guidebook had either put their prices up or had no single rooms available. Another that I found that had some decent reviews offered a great room at the right price - unfortunately they also had a small dog
that yapped all the time. I decided that coming downstairs to that in the morning would surely not be a good start to my day!
What's Saigon like? Very big and very busy. The city's population has grown rapidly in the past 10 years or so, and although Bangkok remains the largest city in mainland South-east Asia it also covers a substantially larger area, meaning that Saigon is crowded by comparison. Saigon's downtown is very much a place of wealth and global business - Rolex and Louis Vuitton outlets there wouldn't look out of place on Regent Street, and more tower blocks for Vietnamese and international banks and insurance companies are being constructed as I write. The hammer & sickle flags that fly from some of the lamp-posts in District 1 just don't seem to belong, though of course Vietnam remains ostensibly a communist country. On the 49th floor of one of Saigon's modern skyscrapers, the Bitexco Financial Tower, a 360
o viewing deck called the Saigon Skydeck gives fantastic views right across the city. From up there I could appreciate the true scale of this rapidly modernising metropolis.
I say 'modernising' - In so many other ways Saigon
could not be mistaken for a Western city. Street vendors wearing the conical hats that are such a symbol of Vietnam offer noodles, limes, fruit juice and a hundred and one other things. Chickens wander around in the street. And the roads are filled with motorbikes that are driven like you've never seen. I was glad I had some practice crossing the road in not quite so busy Phnom Penh because it sure is intimidating at first - if you try and wait for a gap in the traffic before crossing you'll never get anywhere, so instead you have to wait until there isn't a bus or truck coming then start walking across at a slow consistent pace and let the motorbikes pass either side of you. At first it's probably best to find someone more experienced at it and cross with them, though. As well as the challenge of crossing the road, there's also the 'honking'. As I've travelled east from Thailand to Saigon the use of the horn has increased, and even away from the busy throughfares here I haven't gone 30 seconds without hearing "beep beep beep". Larger vehicles quite often play a little tune with their
horns - I'm not sure what that's all about. The sounding of the horn basically means "I am here, be aware" - particularly important when motorbike riders never indicate - and you seldom hear the aggressive horn blasts here that you do at home.
In central Saigon it's easy to forget that just over 35 years ago this country was at the sharp end of the Cold War. The Vietnamese refer to the conflict as the 'American War'. I took a tour from well-regarded operator SinhTourist to the Cu Chi Tunnels, the site of a Viet Cong base within a complex network of underground passages that has been turned into a sort of outdoor museum. At the beginning we watched a bizarre propaganda type video - grainy war scenes overdubbed with a Vietnamese woman speaking English in the most measured, deadpan voice saying lines like "This girl killed three Americans. She was awarded 'American Killer Hero'". I wasn't surprised when a couple of visitors walked out. After that, we took an above-ground tour of the area of the tunnels, seeing some examples of spike traps that were set up to catch out unsuspecting soldiers and how explosives from unexploded
bombs were salvaged and put to use. Walking around here, gunfire can be heard which adds some atmosphere to the place - there's a shooting range next to the cafe where visitors can fire mounted AK-47s or M-60 machine guns. Finally those who were up for it took a short, stooped walk through a section of tunnel, however I was later told that this had been enlarged for tourists as the average visitor is somewhat bigger than the Vietnamese who used the original tunnels! In the afternoon we toured the Reunification Hall; the most interesting part of which was seeing the archaic-looking communications equipment in the South Vietnamese president's basement 'war room'; and the War Remnants Museum (formerly the Museum of American War Crimes). As the latter name suggests, the display there are unsurprisingly heavily skewed towards the North Vietnamese perspective with some graphic photographs of the effects of chemical weaponry and the killings of civilians perpetrated by US soldiers at My Lai and elsewhere. Providing some counterbalance, another exhibit featured some photographs and newspaper clippings of anti-war protests across the world - including one in London - and resistance to the draft in the US.
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Mark Iles
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Saigon
Interesting that you call it Saigon. Do they not call it Ho Chi Minh City any more? Also see this Ealing connection for Ho Chi Minh - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3725891.stm