Goooood Morning Vietnam

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Despite being untold hours behind with our sleep, we both arose at 0600. The faint sounds of scooter horns suggested we weren’t the first people in Ho Chi Minh City to be awake. Already the scooters were five deep on our one lane street.

We had breakfast at a sports bar next to The Empress Hotel, a freebie with our room booking on Expedia (NZ$23 per night). I was hoping for some Pho – the traditional Vietnamese noodle soup but the sight of scrambled eggs and bacon wasn’t at all unwelcome. Alongside was some fresh peach juice, watermelon and some lovely pork and prawn won-ton type things that took a hammering in the half hour we were there.

The plan for the day was to roughly follow the Lonely Planet walking tour of Ho Chi Minh City, taking detours as and when we felt something was worth further investigation. A local food market was the first detour before we’d even hit the start of the planned walking tour.

It began on Bùi Viện, an area that I suspected was the backpacking area of town due to the number of guest houses and cyclo drivers competing vigorously for our custom. A simple "No" was enough to shake most of them off but some were more persistent.

“You want tour?”
“No thank you”
“Is cheap”
“No thank you”
“Where you from”
“New Zealand”
“Keee Ora – You want tour”
“No thank you”.

A few kilometres down the road we arrived back at Bến Thành Market again. This time around the inside portion was open but I was a little disappointed to find that, with few exceptions, the goods available were exactly the same as those available in most markets anywhere in the world. Among the few exceptions were snakes fermenting in rice wine and roasted coffee beans, along with countless hawkers that seemed to think we were probably travelling with our own espresso machine and grinder. Outside the market the crabs, cockles and fish for sale looked delicious – if not a little sun-baked.

I’m really not sure why we decided to follow the Lonely Planets suggestion to visit the HCMC Museum of Fine Arts, but at D20,000 (about NZ$1.50) admission for both of us it seemed worth a crack to try and become a little more cultured. There was art. Some of it, I'm sure could be considered as fine by those in the know. We feigned interest for all of a minute before powering through in very little time. The building itself was an old colonial French building in similar sort of condition as many of the larger museums in Cuba so there was at least a little rustic charm.

Having declined the advances of another mob of cyclo drivers outside a coffee shop, we headed towards the Ho Chi Minh City Museum (admission D15,000 – NZ$1 each) the main attraction of which was a US Huey UH-1 helicopter and an F5E plane that once bombed the Presidential Palace. The majority of the displays inside were focused on commerce and enterprise in the city, with machinery, tools and the like but several sections were dedicated to the fight for independence. I was embarrassed by my lack of knowledge on the history of Vietnam. When we visited Cuba a few years back I’d studied the Revolution for months preceding but I must admit to being a bit lost with Vietnamese history.

Lunch was at Cafe Da, not far from the Presidential Palace where Jo had seafood noodles and I had beef rice. We were already shocked to have to pay NZ$4 each for a main… it doesn’t take long to get used to living on the cheap.

In 1975 two Viet Cong tanks rolled through the gates of the Presidential Palace and seized power from General Minh – effectively ending the battle for power with a communist victory. Palace entry was D15,000 (NZ1) and a tour through the palace with an English speaking guide was included.

I was expecting the tour to be a communist propaganda lecture but the guide's information was refreshingly unbiased. Whilst the formal office and dining areas were spectacular in their own right, I enjoyed the basement area the most. It was the President's bunker and most of the situation rooms have been kept as they were found, complete with radio communications and all sorts of vintage machinery – it looked like a set from a 1970s James Bond movie.

We must have turned down 20 cyclo drivers and hawkers selling coconuts in the short walk to our next stop.

The most poignant visit of the day was to the War Remnants Museum (D15,000- NZ$1 each). The courtyard featured American military planes, helicopters and tanks but this was no souvenir collection. The walls of the three story building are covered in photos of the war and it’s long term effects on the Vietnamese people. Two of the galleries in particular were chilling. One outlined the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese and the other dealt with the long term effects of Agent Orange. I snapped a few photos of some of the lesser depressing shots for this blog but many were just too gruesome to post. I had seen just prior to our trip some of the photos from the end of Gadaffi’s reign in Libya where the Americans had been helping the Revolutionists and similar photos came out of Hussein’s time in Iraq.

In certain situations the yanks have been the first to help out in dealing with such atrocities. In Vietnam they were the perpetrators.

We caught a taxi back to the hotel, arriving around 1800. The driver turned the meter on but took us well out of the way before finally getting us there. The fare was still less than NZ$6.

We found dinner after a half hour walk through the backpacker district in a little alleyway eatery with tiny plastic chairs and tables. Scooters shot by just centimetres away from us. At one point it poured down – the staff raced out to cover us up with an awning with just seconds to spare. Jo had some spicy ribs and I ordered wild boar with some kind of unknown green vegetable. Both were pretty good but the highlight was the seafood spring rolls. Add a couple of beers, sprites and waters and the bill came to D208,000… around NZ$14.

We were back at the hotel asleep by 1930.

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