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Published: March 11th 2006
Bread Sales Woman
They seem to pop out of hidden spaces everywhere when u least expect them.Oh dear. I fear these LONG blogs are becoming a habit. The last one I warned about you getting a cup of tea. This time, how about cooking dinner also. I'm expecting 100s of comments soon from you all to tell me to stop waffling. To be fair, Cambodia and Vietnam are two countries with incredibly interesting histories. After I leave Vietnam, the history lessons will hopefully disappear and a nice, simple blogs will be left. Until then, brace yourselves, and enjoy. PS - lots of photos this time, as the connection here is mega-quick 😊
Welcome to the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, home of rice, rice and more rice. At 40,000km2, it's one of the world's largest deltas, yet is still expanding by around 100m every year from the silt, most of which has been washed 4500km downstream from the Tibetan Plateau. The Mekong is so large, it even has 2 daily tides, and yes, there's a lot of rice. At 83million people, Vietnam is the 13th most populous country, yet the rice harvested in the Mekong Delta alone is enough to feed every single last person, with leftovers too, packed in doggy bags and shipped to China, Europe, America
The first of many Mekong Delta pics
The height of these stilts is slightly scary.. - well, everywhere really, since only Thailand ships more rice around the globe than Vietnam. It's a laborious process: every seed is manually and individually planted, then later uprooted and transplanted on holiday to another field to avoid root rot, while irrigation involves water simply transferred by baskets - and not a piece of machinery in sight (unless you count the multitude of women everywhere, who do this work, but I doubt immensely that women's rights campaigners would be too happy with that statement).
I spent a far too brief (as these things always are) 3 days doing a tour of the Delta, as a means of getting from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh. Although I'm not a big fan of tourist-style tours, it's very difficult and more expensive to travel around this region independently (and it makes crossing the border that much easier, as we sat in hammocks waiting for our passports to be processed, luxury), so I packed away the travel book for a few days and went with the flow. There aren't really many funny stories to tell - though that isn't to say it was dull - I was just happily in a trance
for 3 days watching Vietnamese life go by. A man washing himself on the edge of a river while a boat of bananas drifts past. Another, with wrinkles and a look of deep wisdom planting rice in a small field. Motorbikes and bicycles playing dodge, while 2 oblivious men play Go at the side of the road. And everywhere people are eating - little fires on boats, at the side of every street, and smells wafting from every building. Although this way of life is normal here of course, being different to what I'm used to, I don't think it'll ever stop being fascinating.
"You'll visit and learn about a fish farm" turned out to be going past a rectangle with 10,000 fish that the driver briefly fed, while the 'Sarong Factory' involved more selling than making, and the 'homestay' was really a home-run guesthouse. But I'm not complaining, because the time spent just mesmerised, zombie-style, sitting on little boats, watching the world carry on as usual and visiting a couple of well-known floating markets, was time spent well. Even just exploring the homestay village was great. I spent a couple of hours wandering around and when the village
consists of 1path either side of a narrow river, it's hard to get lost. I did, however, lose track of the number of 'hellos' to kids I made - as I was walking, I would hear them practising (adults too)...whispering to themselves "hallo...hallo...hello.", then I would walk past.."HELLO!". Children would cycle past me in their school uniform that wouldn't look out of place on a Star Trek set, taking effort not to step on little chickens everywhere, grain spread out to dry and women starting fires with an ease that would have made Baden Powell jealous. So much going on everywhere, it was great. Finally, in this village, I managed to stumble across a gravity-defying Monkey Bridge, as they have been christened, since one pretty much requires the skills of a monkey to get across. It's a good thing one of my nicknames at school was Monkey Boy then, but my (!) was I nervous walking across, as the one piece of bamboo would crack and bend considerably under my weight. Many childrendie each year falling into the rivers from these bridges, so the Government's finally trying to replace them all, to stop people like me stupidly walking across them.
After 3 days seeing endless rivers and busy markets, we took one final bus to Saigon, which was made the more interesting by our guide telling his life story for 2 hours to a captured coach crowd; born in the Cu Chi Tunnels, his son's operation, fighting in the war, saving money for his motorbike etc. Ironically, it's moments like that, that I'll remember most about
the tour. "If you die, it was your duty; if you don't die, you were lucky" was a fitting line he said.
And then I arrived in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh city (before/after the war), a city brimming and bubbling with life. I thought Phnom Pen had a lot of bikes, but this city is on a whole other level. 8 million people and 4 million motorbikes, not including commuters. To walk across the road is an art I'm slowly developing, that involves being able to spot the smallest of gaps and
going for it, and then going at a slow, precise and most importantly, predictable speed, so bikes know how to dodge you. By the evening, after finding a nice hotel (with hot water, TV and fridge all for $6, woo!), and
eating kebabs, I met up with a couple of people from the tour, and went for some drinks. Arriving in Saigon, I expect to be having noodle soup on a street corner that evening. Instead, I had a cocktail in a jazz bar! If it wasn't for the endless motorbikes outside booming past, even at midnight, I would have been forgiven in thinking we were in a post part of the West End. But that's a perfect example of how Saigon's evolving - the wealthy, middle-class population is rapidly growing as the Vietnamese continue to work extremely hard. The city appears far wealthier than I was expecting, and certainly more than any other Asian city I've visited besides Singapore - even Bangkok, which is, for want of a better phrase, harder and less confortable than Saigon. Capitalism and communism appears to be going a good job. The war has been forgotten, and there's a taste of optimism about. Great city, and as a result, I decided to stay an extra day, on an already squeezed schedule.
On my first full day, after becoming a millionnaire getting out 2 million (dong) from an ATM, I did a walking tour of
the area around the backpacker centre, taking in a number of sights, the most noteworthy being Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum. The former was pretty much where the war ended in April 1975, when the North Vietnamese stormed their tanks through the gates as a gesture I suspec wasn't overly friendly. The entire building is open to the public, from the President's Office to the Casino, from the Receiving Room to the bunker with more maps than I could shake a Duke of Edinburgh Award's book at. The latter is a museum that's nearly as horrific as the Tuol Sleng museum - the difference being most of the attrocities on show this time (massacres, tortures, deformities) were causes by the American saviours , not Pol Pot's regime...
On the morning of the second day, with Martin, a dutch guy I met on the Mekong Tour, we visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, These tunnels are full of history and stories and it was an interesting trip, as I tried to cram more inciteful information into that brain of mine (and in Cambodia and Vietnam, there's plenty of information to absorb). A brief history of the tunnles
The fish farm
feed the little fishies - all 10,000 of them if I may (courtesy of Lonely Planet, as always):
Built over 25 years from the 1940s onwards, at their height, the tunnels extended from Saigon to the Cambodian border, with more than 250kms of them in Cu Chi District alone. They were invaluably used by the Viet Cong as a means of communication and infiltration; in the France-Vietnamese War, The VC's National Liberation Front insurgency in the early 1960s and during the famous War. By the time the Americans entered the picture, infiltration from the tunnels was becoming such a huge problem that they nearly resulted in an early 1968 VC victory of the entire war. So American decided drastic action needed to be taken.
Plan A: 'Spot the tunnels if you can' - the tunnels were so well hidden, with entrances in rivers, or under foliage, and some over 10m underground that even with enough troups to fill a Glastonbury Festival, the US failed to locate them.
Plan B: Destroy the VC's food supply - which for the American's involved a typical "let's destroy everything" technique - jungle was bulldozed, rice paddies defoliated, villages burnt, chemicals sprayed everywhere and the now-drying vegetation napalmed. But rains came and
Incense factory sticks drying
These were drying along about 100m stretch of road! VC were just fine 'n dandy.
Plan C: Troops found and went into the tunnels, but with high casualties from booby traps, they sent rockweilers in instead, which worked until the VC started washing with American soap, recognised as a friendly smell. These VC were very cunning, one must admit.
Plan D: American therefore declared Cu Chi a free-strike zone, thus all the unused bombs were dropped here on return mission, and the whole area carpet bombed, resulting in "the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated, and generally devastated area in the history of warface", according to the authors of 'The Tunnels of Cu Chi'.
Actually seeing and going through them though, really brought home to me how incredible the system was. I got to go into a number of tunnels - all of which have been enlarged to allow us fat westerners to not get stuck, and still they were small, even for a dwarf like myself. Martin, at 6'2" was having problems. There are 3 levels of tunnels, going down to 10m as I
mentioned, and large rooms for eating, working and healing. One was so small it took me to go down first and not scream before
others dared to follow - the claustrophobic might want to think twice. There were a couple of dim lights, similar to what would've been used at the time, and bats occasionally flying past me causing me todrop my camera. And humid, so so humid. One 25m stretch was plenty - and the VC lived down them for months at a time. It really put it into perspective. Before leaving, were also shown some booby traps mostly involving long, metal spikey things, and I tried some Cobra Whiskey - complete with said cobra in the bottle.
That's about it for Ho Chi Minh. I got some lengths in at a 50m swimming pool, spent half a day at a Water Park (complete with wave pool! Oh yes..) which brough back lots of childhood memories, and bumped into the Kampot crowd at a bar!! Bumping into people when travelling is surprisingly a very common experience, but always a pleasant surprise when it happens.
Finally, 'Good Morning Vietnam', Apocalypse Now, 'Nam, The War: everyone's got some sort of impression of Vietnam, true or false, mostly thanks to America and Hollywood. What's happened in the last 50 years is far too complex
Returning home from the market...
Beats getting the car home from Tescos to begin to describe in this blog, but let's just say it was screwed up. Take the war for example, costing America $200B, it bombed every rail
bridge, and 70% of all villages, while over 50,000 Americans died. However, as one VC once said, if America killed 10 times as many 'Charlie', they would still lose. There were some horrific attrocities I've been reading about, including the My Lai Massacre and the Tet Offensive. 200,000 South Vietnamese were killed, over 1 Million North Vietnamese and VC, while nearly 4 million civilians were injured or killed. Another 300,000 people are still 'missing' and today, over 3 million have been badly deformed physically and mentally, mostly by the Agent Orange chemicals that are still present throughout the land. Leaving, after more than 10 years of military involvement, and using more than 7 times the amount of bombs and ammunition they used in WWII, America left, without ever declaring war on Vietnam. I know everyone likes to blame the Americans, but I'm afraid this time they would be right to.
After the South fell, and communism took over, besides recovering from a truly battered country - economically, socially and physically, even today
there's still a few rifts. 1000s of the former educated population of the south were sent to "re-education camps" (or to you and me, forced-labour camps) - sometimes up to 7 years in horrible conditions. Even today they are not allowed their old jobs back as teachers, doctors etc, but instead can be found all over Saigon as moto drivers.
I'll stop suddenly here to give you something to think about. Don't let this give you a negative impression of Vietnam today though. It's an awesome country and I'll be hoping to discover this more over the coming days. Hopefully that's the last of the educational and LONG blogs you'll have to endure. I'm now about to go on an epic 22-hour bus journey north to Hoi An -
god help me! But with FAR too many books (15) currently in my bag (including guidebooks though), I doubt I'll get bored.
Missing all of you! Simon
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Well, if you don't like working for John Lewis, you can certainly make it as a travel writer; that way someone else gets to pay for everything! Great use of similes! Got any ideas for new ways to cook rice?