Going underground in Saigon

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After my stint of R&R in Mui Ne, I was ready to get back into things in Saigon. I didn't really know much about the place, other than that it was renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the victorious North Vietnamese after taking it from the South in 1975. Just a word on that though... HCMC is the name of the wider urban area, but the centre is still known as Saigon, and most locals still use this name. So I will too.

I arrived in Saigon late afternoon, and after finding a hotel, got chatting to a Slovenian tour guide and then a Slovenian couple who happened to be in the same cafe. They were meeting up with 3 more Slovenian friends and Mexican and Polish friends also travelling through Vietnam, so my first evening was spent in their company. I haven't met so many Slovenians in one place before, including Slovenia! My first day in town was spent wandering round the main Dong Khoi area. It's an attractive, busy place with luxury hotels and manicured gardens, but insensitive new development sadly spoils the views of most of the remaining French colonial landmarks (the planner in me was disgusted!). I had a quick look round the Ho Chi Minh Museum, which is housed in the former Independence Palace, which played an important role in the Vietnam/US war. I then strolled over to the Reunification Palace, which used to house the South Vietnam President and Parliamentary offices, until 1975 when two tanks famously barged their way through the front gate to force South Vietnam's surrender. The Palace is a banal 1960's building from the outside, but the interior is full of light, airy rooms decorated with beautiful furniture - very much of it's time. The basement houses the war bunker used by South Vietnam command, and there's a camouflaged US Army helicopter perched on the rooftop, looking like it's making a sneak attack.

The next part of my time in Saigon was one of the stranger experiences of my trip. On my way back to thehotel, I started talking to a Malaysian man whose daughter was going to study at Oxford. Her mother was worried, so would I go to his house to talk to her. He seemed nice, and after trying to get out of it I agreed to go. The daughter wasn't there when I arrived, so the uncle started to teach me how to play blackjack (he said he worked as a croupier on a cruise ship). As he showed me how he knew which cards were coming and what signals he could give me to indicate high or low cards, he told me about a client - a gold dealer from Singapore, who had refused to pay him an agreed share of her winnings - no less than $50,000. Well, 2 minutes later, in walks said gold-dealer and we start to play blackjack! I'm introduced as a good customer from London - a regular at the casino on Piccadilly. I win the first few rounds, using $200 of uncle's cash, but then my opponent decides to raise the stakes and produces $40,000 in crisp notes from her handbag! I'm dealt 21 with all $40,000 on the table, but my opponent asks for proof that I can pay up if she wins. At this point the uncle takes me outside to call a loan shark who agrees to lend him $10,000... so uncle asks me how much cash I can produce! I beat a hasty retreat and tell uncle I'm not getting any cash, even if I have a winning hand that would give me the 50%!s(MISSING)hare I'd been promised. So, I return to my hotel feeling a tad pissed off... an offer of friendly advice turning into a scam (although I still don't know if I would have genuinely got $20,000... I think not, but the gold dealer felt like the real deal and the cash was definitely real). But hey ho... these things happen!

You can't come to a country with a history like Vietnam without learning about the war. So my next day kicked off with a visitto the Cu Chi Tunnels, a network of tiny tunnels built by the Vietnamese locals to defend their land against the American troops. The tunnels are an amazing feat of construction and a tastament to the ingenuity and stamina of the fighters. They featured hidden entrances, ventilation pipes and various lethal traps, most loaded with menacing spikes. Hearing the sound of distant gunfire from the shhoting range echo through the otherwise idyllic forest gives some sense of how this place felt during the fighting, and crawling through a small stretch of specially enlarged tunnel (I still scraped both shoulders!) helped to imbue a sense of how these people suffered defending their homes.

My last stop was the War Remembrance Museum, which is dedicated to the two significant conflicts in Vietnam's recent history. I didn't realise how long the Vietnamese had suffered... part of the French-occupied Cochinchina before WWII, it was handed over to the Japanese during the war, after which the French fought a war to take it back. The museum features a detailed account of the chronology of this imperialist war, which was fought during the 1950s and was largely funded by the US. It struck me as particularly difficult to understand why France was fighting to subjugate a sovereign nation after it had just emerged from a period of occupation itself... but I guess old habits die hard. The main focus of the exhibits is of course the war between North and South, including the terrible effects that Agent Orange and other chemical agents used by the US has had and continues to have on the people and environment of Vietnam. The photography is beautiful, particularly that by US photographer Larry Burrows (should war look so poetic?), and those by an unnamed photographer of Vietnamese children born with defects as a result of Agent Orange. A sobering way to spend the afternoon, but invaluable if you want to appreciate the warmth of the Vietnamese people, and admire the speed at which the country is now developing.

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Photos

Photo 5
Colonial landmark in the 'Paris of Asia'

Photo 7
The gates to Reunification Palace

Photo 10
Ho Chi Minh and the star of Vietnam

Photo 18
One of the nasty traps at Cu Chi

Photo 22
A victim of Agent Orange at the War Remembrance Museum