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Published: January 17th 2010
Traffic
This isn't even that heavy...The flow of cars, motorbikes, bicycles, cars, women pushing food carts, and other unidentified vehicles seems never-ending. After 5 minutes, you're wondering when the traffic light is going to finally change to red so you can cross... That's when you realize
there is no traffic light! You see the locals walking through zipping traffic unconcerned and it dawns on you that you have no other choice, but to cross. With a deep breath, you set out on to a busy street, slowly but surely, letting the motos dart around you, and not letting the cab beeping unnerve you. Like a real-life game of
frogger , you painstakingly make it to the other side of the street without a game over... Then you realize you'll have to repeat this again nearly every block!
Ho Chi Minh City is an adrenaline-pumping place to say the least, all you have to do is cross the street. Yet, after you get the hang of it, things start to slow down, and (maybe it's the insanity kicking in), but you start to see the artistry in the way people drive, and how the Vietnamese conduct their life in lock-step to their culture. Being here in
Vietnam for a month for a project for school represents the longest I've been in a foreign country for one time since college. It's amazing being here, and really delving into what people do, and how life can be significantly different in another culture. It's been quite a ride so far.
As mentioned before, crossing the street is always an adventure. Large roads do have traffic lights, but right turns are always allowed, and despite a walking signal, there always seems to be some sort of vehicle zooming through the space you're supposed to cross. The trick is to walk forward slowly, look the drivers in the eyes, and never, ever, walk backwards! They will slow down and dart around you, and after a while, you realize that done correctly, it's actually not unsafe. Practically anything is allowed on the road - cyclos (bicycles with a seat in front that you pay for rides), motorbikes, cars, bikes, hand pushed carts, three wheeled motorcycles with a large carrying compartment in front - it's all there. The
traffic is unbelievable. With the exception of very early morning, or very late night, you'll probably crawl at a snails pace to get
to whereever you need to go... and I thought Bangkok was bad. (Here's a
vid of attempting to cross the street. It's someone else's, but shows the difficulty... I haven't been able to take a good one yet - trying to actually focus on the street crossing.)
Almost everyone on an open-air vehicle wears a surgical mask, and the air is pretty rancid on the street with all of the exhaust. Luckily, helmet wear is mandated, and pretty much everyone follows that rule. The price is also right, as apparently, the price for a helmet is $2. With a population of 86 million, rising wealth, and increasing car purchases, the traffic will likely be getting worst soon, as some high-capacity freeways are still under construction. Maybe a helicopter taxi service would be a good idea here.
Food
The food here is amazing! Pho, the traditional dish is available nearly everywhere, and almost every block has 1 or 2 ladies with a stainless steel food cart and a pile of tiny plastic chairs and tables which you can pull up for a meal. Pho is only the tip of the iceberg for Vietnamese cusine though. There are tons of spring roll combinations, com -
Vietnamese Coffee
Served with condensed milk. They bring that little contraption with the coffee and hot water, and it drips down as you watch. Pretty neat. or broken rice dishes with all types of meats, veggie, seafood, and a seeminginly unending combination of dishes. Some are extremely creative, such as ground prawns rolled on sugar cane sticks and fried, or deep-fried ground pork wrapped crab claws! Delicious. Interestingly, barely any American fast food chains have set up shop - the only ones we've seen are Pizza Hut and KFC. Then again, with the delicious and ubiquitously available Vietnamese food, they probably wouldn't stand much of a chance. Interestingly, there are also many bakeries around the city which aren't too bad, and baguette stands that sell sandwiches with similar contents to a spring roll inside - a remnant of the decades of French colonial occupation no doubt.
Of particular note is the coffee. It's so good, and they make it with this interesting personalized drip contraption which filters the coffee as they serve it, so that it's about as freshly brewed as possible when you dig in. If you want a cafe au lait, they put condensed milk in the bottom. As you stir strongly, the coffee very gradually turn several shades of ever-lightening brown as the condensed milk dissolves. It gives the coffee a caramel-y,
taste and frappucino-esque consistency. Delicious, but also a good way to pack on pounds. Still, I'm only here for one month...
Sights
Ho Chi Minh city has a very European feel in some areas, and a very Asian feel in others. There aren't that many sights, as much was destroyed all around the country during 15 years of war with the French and then Americans. Not surprisingly, the two biggest attractions in HCMC have to do with the war...
The Independence Palace
This is pretty damn cool. It used to be the South Vietnamese presidential residence, and when the Viet Cong conquered it, the war was pretty much over. The tanks that stormed the palace have been left there with memorial plaques dedicated to those who were the first in. The palace is in excellent upkeep inside, and still used for state meetings and for diplomatic efforts. The basement is particularly interesting, as the war rooms from which the South Vietnamese government ran the war still have all of the switch-boards and such, probably in the same locations as before. Everything has been preserved likely as it was, and it's like stepping into a time capsule from several
decades before. They even have the South Vietnamese president's luxury Mercedes and helicopter preserved and on display.
The War Remnants Museum
Much more gruesome is the War Remnants museum. There are several American jets, tanks, helicopters, howitzers, APVs, and other heavy guns parked outside, in excellent condition. One of the exhibits shows off a guillotine from France that was in use in Saigon for over a century, and next to it, the various torture methods that were inflicted on Viet Cong in the south. Pretty sickening stuff, and there are a lot of pictures to show the results of such treatment for the survivors. One particularly terrifying tool was the "Tiger cage" a 2-foot tall enclosure covered in barb wire, where they would shove several prisoners naked for days. Barely able to even kneel, any brush against the wall of the tiger cage would yield extremely painful results.
Inside the museum, there are likely enough guns, bullets, bombs, mines, and missiles left there by the US to start another war. Absolutely amazing how much must have been produced for the war effort, and then left behind. There are many exhibits about the war, but the most heart-rending is
the one about the many birth deformities that children of Vietnamese exposed to Agent Orange poured on to forests to defoliate have suffered... Just horrible. The point of view of the exhibits is also interesting, having always seen the history of the war from the opposing viewpoint. One way or another, it doesn't seem like anyone really "wins",
Partying
Ho Chi Minh's party scene is quite something. You can go out pretty much every night to thumping clubs. Unlike some other southeast Asian cities I've been to (cough cough, Bangkok, Phuket), there are real Vietnamese people out and about, even at the very heavily-touristy places (as in not as many working girls). I made it out quite a bit the first few days before the jet lag kicked in, but then had to curtail getting back at any point between 3-5AM as we started our internship. Still, good times all around when out, and the music varies from techno to hip-hop. There's also tons of options from clubs with the music blasting, to chill, outdoor lounges. It actually feels more like euro club scene than anything else.
One of the most interesting places we made it to was
a small club called Acoustic with a band that knew practically every song ever made. They would switch out singers, change song's styles, and just basically improvise all over the place without batting an eyelid and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of the mouths. Mad fun, and the almost all Vietnamese crowd would go crazy for each song.
Here's a vid from
Tuesday night at Lush.... Out of control
The People
The Vietnamese people are pretty friendly. Aside from the touristy area of Pham Ngu Lao (HCMC's Khao San Road) where every guy there is trying to get you on the back of his motor bike for a ride out somewhere, the people are pretty chill. It's amazing watching a street scene though. There are so many people out, each doing their own thing... one guy mending shoes, a woman selling fruit, a whole gaggle of people eating pho on tiny stools and arguing, some guy taking a nap on a cot next to his store, people in every store (which are more like glorified stalls), mororbikes wizzing on the sidewalks - and all that in one eyeful! It's chaotic, but after a while, it starts to look
A tiger cage
A form of torture - this is a wire frame wrapped in barbed wire, so small, that you would kneel to lie down to avoid touching a wall. I don't even think I'd fit in doing that. Grotesque. like a scripted dance. In any case, it seems to work, as no one seems to get trampled on or run over by a motor-bike. In any case, it's always entertaining.
One big disappointment has been communication. Not that many people speak English out of Pham Ngu Lao. Despite the fact that I tried to pick up several phrases from a free podcast before I went, the woman seems to be using a Northern accent, and, I guess my ear isn't good enough to imitate all of the six different tones, and unless you nail each syllable just right with the correct tone, you just get blank stares. Every time I'm taught a phrase from a local here, it sounds totally different from the way it sounded in the podcast. I could get it, but it would probably require some instruction. The language is just not very forgiving.
So far, the "scams" have been few and far between. Probably, the biggest area to watch out for is that the cab driver turn on the meter. I got shaken down for a bigger tip from my cabbie from the airport, but aside from that, people have been pretty honorable.
A very emblematic look here is the Vietnamese squat. People on the street will balance on their feet with their bums almost, but not quite touching the ground and stay like that for hours, in what looks like the most uncomfortable position ever. They seem to find it very comfortable though, and a guide mentioned that during the war, the Viet Cong could even sleep in that position, with their guns still at the ready should they need to fire immediately after waking up.
One interesting note, is in the upkeep of public spaces. The parks here are beautiful! A small army of workers in the traditional conical hats manicures and waters the plants and grass. People enjoy the parks too, reading papers in the benches, or taking naps, or, doing what looks like Tai Chi, or other martial arts alone or in groups. Somehow, the din of traffic and the heat of the city seems to decrease dramatically as you take a few steps into the trees and wander around the sculpture gardens.
The Mekong Delta
On a day off from work, we went a few hours out of town to the Mekong delta,
rowing through canals lined with mangroves to
a farming island. It ended up being a pretty relaxed day, full of eating. We sampled many tropical fruits including jackfruit, and dried bananas, Vietnamese peanut brittle, sugared lotus seeds, and many other uniquely tropical treats.
We also went to a beehive, and were able to stick our fingers directly in a honey comb to pull out the raw honey. As the guide said, Vietnamese bees are very "friendly", as they don't have stingers. Poor guys. There wasn't much they could do as we raided the honey they'd worked hard to make. We finished up the day visiting a coconut candy making factory, which made one of the stickiest treats I'd ever experienced. That stuff stayed stuck in there for hours. Good though - almost reminiscent of a heavier, stickier, fruity dulce de leche. We capped the day with a bike ride around the island, and a nice coffee in a very country-looking cafe before heading back to town.
The Cu Chi Tunnels
This is where things got very interesting. Going again two hours out of HCMC, we visited ground zero for a 250 kilometer network of tunnels that the Viet Cong had used to store weapons and
fight the Americans. The tunnels were extremely elaborate, with three separate stories within the tunnels that at deepest, went down over 12 meters, wells inside the tunnels, air vents going to different levels, kitchens with a special system to diffuse smoke from cooking fires as it made it outside, trap doors leading out all over the jungle, and horrific booby traps inside and outside the tunnels.
The tour guide enjoyed presenting the war effort with a tremendous amount of morbid gusto, which if anything, made the visit quite interesting. I'll spare the details of some of his more colorful quips. Still, it looks like a pretty horrible way to fight a war. The tunnels and the entrances were tiny at some points, with stale air, no light, and the constant threat of cave-ins from B-52 bombing raids, or poison gas dropped in the Americans were able to locate a hidden air vent.... and people fought a war in those tunnels for years! There were wax figures of Viet Cong all around the area, and even an
animatronic Viet Cong weapons factory where they showed how they would cart unexploded American bombs over to the tunnels and dangerously take out the explosives to make
their own mines and grenades.
At one point of the tour, you could "fire guns or eat ice cream", with your choice of a gatling gun, AK 47, or M-16. The noise was deafening, and made things seem pretty realistic as the guide described the war-time atmosphere. We were also shown the many kinds of traps the Vietnamese set for the Americans, with tons of metal spikes, bamboo skewers, and traps using the basic laws of physics that all seemed extremely gruesome... No wonder so many vets came back shell-shocked from the war... having to fight an enemy that seemingly appears and disappears out of nowhere (from a trap door to the tunnel) in the jungle, having to avoid traps that have been strategically set exactly where you'll probably need to step through that will leave 8 inch metal spikes embedded all over your body - if you survive the experience, while it's raining and slogging in ankle-deep mud, and your getting bitten up by every bug known to man kind... Yeah, sounds pretty terrible.
Most of the tunnels have caved in and 90% of the network doesn't exist anymore, but we did briefly go through one tunnel
for several feet. Even through it had AC running through and a few lights set in some parts, the darkness for most of it was stultifying, and as you had to crouch lower and lower in the rapidly tightening space, I could feel the claustrophobia starting to set in... and that was a particularly large tunnel apparently that had been set up for tourist purposes... We capped off the tour with some green tea and a snack of raw yuca with a salt, pepper, and peanut powder which was what many meals had been like for the Viet Cong for years during the war.
I feel like there's so much more to write. After many trips only spending 2-4 days in a city trying to see all of the sights, it's amazing how much more you pick up hanging out and just observing life in one place at a relaxed pace. It's been very interesting here, but we head out to Hanoi tomorrow for a week. Looking forward to seeing how the North differs from the South.
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David Weinstein
non-member comment
so cool
Great reporting Alex. Bring me back a Tintin poster if you can!!! Have a great time.