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Published: January 3rd 2008
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Saigon gridlock
The bloke at the front was happy From Phnom Penh we headed across the border into Vietnam, country number twenty eight since departure. The first port of call was Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City if you like). The four weeks in Cambodia was one of my longest single country stints thus far, and a tough act to follow, especially with my first impressions of Vietnam being traffic chaos and dodgy, misinformation peddling cab drivers.
Having gone almost two months without eating McDonalds (possibly a record for me), I enquired of the cabbie whether or not they had Macca's in Saigon, to which he assured me in no uncertain terms that they did. He then ripped me off blind when I settled the cab fare - with 13,500 Vietnamese dong to one Aussie dollar, my brain isn't used to computing such large numbers when it comes to money. I took solace in the thought of some comfort food though, and was excited enough to spend much of the next day walking around looking for a franchise. Sadly the cabbie was very much mistaken, as further research revealed that not only was there no Macca's in Saigon, but none in the whole of Vietnam. How on earth did
A potent drop
The snake and scorpion are real they win the war?
Apparently there are three million motorbikes in Saigon, and it seems as though every single one of them is on the road twenty four hours a day. Just crossing the road as a pedestrian is a perilous sport in itself. With no discernible enforcement of road rules, I figured out that the best way to cross the road is to forget looking left, then right, then left again, but rather to just walk straight out and move at a very slow, predictable pace. Watching the oncoming traffic is hazardous insofar as it might impact on the predictability of one's movements. Once you start to duck and weave, the less precision the motorcyclists have in their efforts to swerve around you, and that's where I think the greater danger lies. Having survived the first couple of days in town, we thought we'd check out the surrounding areas.
Seeing as there was no specific place that any of Greg, Gem or I wanted to see in the nearby Mekong delta, we decided we would just do a two day package tour to see all the highlights. The tour was one of those ones where on reflection
Rice paper mill
Making rice paper, old school style not one single thing we did could be considered remotely close to unmissable in isolation, but when recalled as an overall package it was reasonably good. I think it could have been better if the guide at least pretended to be interested in anything we saw or did, although I sympathise with him in the sense that getting off a boat and walking through some random fruit trees for five minutes would become rather tiresome after doing it one hundred odd times before. I'd had my fill after two or three minutes and decided to entertain myself by inciting a cumquat fight with Greg, which I'd like to think I won.
If nothing else, heading down to the delta was a nice way of escaping the humidity and chaos of Saigon, which was obviously waiting for us upon return. I had sweated a couple of litres and almost been mown down by a dozen or so motorbikes on the ten minute walk from our hotel to the War Remnants Museum, and upon arrival spent the first few minutes mopping my brow and making myself presentable enough to enter. Though pretty much all the photos were absolutely incredible, it was
Snap, crackle, and pop!
Making rice bubbles using Vietnamese methods generally those located adjacent to the fans that I gave most attention. Undoubtedly the most powerful and disturbing sections were those dealing with the victims of Agent Orange and napalm bombing. If the photos of women and children fleeing a blast zone with horrific burns all over didn't drive home the point of how immoral the use of such weapons and defoliants is, seeing a jar containing a horribly deformed fetus did.
The scale of the war's unpopularity was highlighted in the section that dealt with worldwide demonstrations in opposition to it. What amazed me was where some of the demonstrations took place. While I was aware that marches on the streets and university campuses of the participant nations were standard at the time, I didn't know that they were also taking to the streets in places like Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Bolivia. While the eroded American strategic prestige was almost completely recovered by the end of the Cold War, one wonders what lingering difficulties in winning hearts and minds to the noble causes of democracy, liberty and human rights still remain around the world now, thirty five years after the last troops were withdrawn. They are ideals
Package tourists
Greg and HJT looking sharp in our free t-shirts worth fighting for, but surely the fight must be clean or else it is lost before it begins.
The war history tour continued the following day when we headed out to the Cu Chi tunnels, an hour or so out of Saigon. If anyone has seen the movie 'We Were Soldiers', that is exactly what the tunnels were like. We only saw the tiniest fraction of the network, which it total is over 200km long. After a brief crawl along one short stretch of tunnel it was clear to me that life down there would have been unimaginably tough, especially knowing that enemy soldiers were thick on the ground directly above your head. I'm not the biggest fan of confined spaces at the best of times, but when it's in almost complete darkness, stuffy and with thin oxygen levels, I find it almost unbearable.
I lasted a couple of minutes before I started to feel very uncomfortable, and emerged puffing and in a lather of sweat. Considering this section has been strengthened and enlarged to allow Western tourists to squeeze through, and is now cleared of ants, spiders and malarial mosquitoes (among other nasties), it would be difficult
Look out for the 'potholes'
American tank destroyed by a land mine to imagine what it must have been like to spend days on end down there during the war. I know that I wouldn't have been putting up my hand if I was in the US Army and they were asking for volunteers to be 'tunnel rats' - soldiers trained to edge their way along the tunnels with only a knife, a gun, a torch and a ball of string and flush out Viet Cong.
Further deterring me from such an assignment was the hundreds of booby traps in the tunnels, and on the surrounding area above ground. In view of my criticism of the Americans for fighting dirty, it would only be reasonable of me to make mention of these traps. To my eye it looked like most were designed not with the purpose of capturing a soldier or killing him instantly, but rather to subject him to a long, drawn out, and agonisingly painful death. It was a war where both sides fought dirty and one scored a resounding victory, which foreshadowed an era of supremacy for the loser. One could draw parallels with the 1985 Grand Final in that sense.
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