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Published: June 13th 2009
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Like a sore thumb...
But the food is really the best when you eat where the locals do Ho Chi Minh city once the capital of Vietnam, once called Saigon. HCMC was my first taste taste of Vietnam after a grueling bus ride from Cambodia and lengthy border crossing. To say that HCMC is busy is a massive understatement. Its in a state of complete and continuous chaos. Motorbikes that number in the millions zip and zag through out the streets. Horns, which are used non stop wail through the air as drivers signal their positions. Because things are so busy and nobody ever follows the rules the Vietnamese people just use their horn to say "I'm over here, don't hit me". And they use it at every intersection, turn, passing, or sometimes when there are all alone. I don't get it. Some of the lazyier ones just lay on there horn, never letting up. They fly past you sounding more like a firetruck than two fifteen year old kids on a beat up moped.
I would not recommend this place as a first stop for anyone's SE Asia trip. Sure other countries out here have mass begging, aggressive touts, scam artists etc. But no one beats Vietnam. As soon as you get off the bus they swarm
you, reaching, grabbing, and shouting. All trying to get you onto the back of thier moped. You are tired and don't know where you are, but you have to resist the urge to take the "help" of one of these moto drivers. The prices they quote you are sometimes 10 times the going rate! And even if you pay this extortion they might not take you to the hotel you asked for, but instead to another where they can collect a commission. So you say, okay Ill have to be careful and firm, they wont get me. Maybe, maybe not. They might take you exactly to the hotel you ask for, and only when you check in do you realize that the hotel is some shabby competitor that simply changed their name to clone the better hotel you are looking for. Its a pretty common practice down here, if you open a successful business, others will come in with substandard service and trade off your name. Copy the name. Logo. Everything. And there's nothing you can do about it. You could of course forgo the whole moto thing and grab a more expensive taxi, I mean you get what you
Dont mind me...
Its sucks even more when you gotta dodge guys like this. pay for right? Well they will try to not use the meter and quote you a outrageous price. Demand that they use the meter and they will use a fake one whose numbers run 4 times faster then usual. Call them out on it and they will take you on a "tour" of the city. Taking the longest ways, backtracking, etc. Until they get the meter to where they want it. The Vietnamese are much more aggressive than any of their neighbors. The hard sell is really the only sell. Traveling touts with pirated books, cds, movies etc will walk into any restaurant and harass you at your table. Pestering you until you ice them out or give in and buy something. They will grab your arm and pull you into their shops, they will block your path, they will yell at you from across the street. If your white you will get a ton of unwanted attention. Whew. Okay venting over. Most of the Vietnamese people are kind warm people, and want to talk to you and treat you like a human being and not a dollar sign. Unfortunately any place that has any tourist traffic also have the
How ya doin today, Comrade.
You can never forget that you are somewhere very, very, different. touts. This gives many travelers the impression that all Vietnamese are out to cheat you or get as much of your money as possible. In the almost 3 months I have been out here that has been one of the most steady complaints of my fellow travelers. The environment can lead you to develop a basic mistrust of every new situation or person you meet. It takes sometime to develop a balance between caution and aversion. Falling into this trap ruined Vietnam for not a small amount of people on the backpacker trail. Now you can never judge a group of people by stereotypes. I have met many, many wonderful Vietnamese people. You just have to work a little harder to find them here.
It is next to impossible to travel through Vietnam with out hearing, seeing, or talking about the Vietnam War. It is just so ingrained into their history, and ours. Vietnam to me is one of the most interesting wars in modern history, so I went to a handful of museums to learn more about it. What I got I was not expecting. First off they don't call it the Vietnam war, they call it the
Chu Chi Tunnels
Another backpacker showing us how small the tunnels actually were. Thats right, people fought down there. American war. Fair enough. What I thought was not fair was the incredible amount of bias their museums have when tell about the war. Whole sections of history are left out. Hell whole years are gone. The worst case of this was the War Remnants Museum. It vilified everything the American military did in Vietnam. Now your not going to hear me become an apologist for some of the things that happened during that war, but when you leave the museum and have no idea that the Vietnamese were fighting each other in a civil war...Wow. That's a massive omission. The propaganda was really heavy handed. Pictures of GI's holding human heads. The death toll of women and children. Every Vietnamese was referred to as "Patriot" or "Hero" while every single American was a "devil" or "child killer". That sort of thing. I understand bias but a Museum is supposed to show the history of an event, not government spin.
It was more of the same when I went to the Cu Chi tunnels. The Cu Chi tunnels were a enormous spiderweb grid of underground holes located outside HCMC. These are the infamous tunnels where American troops were ambushed
Goin Down
Heading down into the tunnels ourselves. by the Viet Cong. And where American "tunnel rats" would crawl down into to fight the VC. They start off by showing us a "documentary" about the tunnels. This film is actually a black and white propaganda film from the war its self. Its presented as the facts, the history of what happened there. Pretty amateur stuff really. But only one of two Americans in a group of thirty, and listening to the film exude the glory of soldiers who ambushed Americans was a little tough. One in particular was about a woman who was given a medal for being, and I quote, "the best American killer". War is War. But to see them playing stuff like that in this day and age is a little frustrating. The tunnels themselves though were well worth the trip. Small, claustrophobic. The original ones were only big enough to crawl through. The ones we went into were large enough to duck walk. Still when you are duck walk through a tunnel with 30 ft of earth above you in the dark. Not my favorite thing. You can't have anything but respect for the soldiers, on both sides, who fought in these horrible conditions.
Tunnel Exit
This was definatly not for the claustraphobic. HCMC itself was a blast. Some of the best food I have had on my entire trip. The Vietnamese really know how to cook, and it was a return to street food, something that had been lacking in Laos and Cambodia. But I think the thing that takes the cake was the homegrown Vietnamese "Bia Hoi". What is bia hoi you might be asking yourself? Well it is either your best friend or your worst enemy. It is literally translated as "Fresh Beer". Small shops around the city brew giant cauldrons of beer and every night throw together some small plastic chairs and let the party begin. It tastes horrible. Makes the cheapest shwag you drank in college taste like ambrosia. It has a shelf life of about a day. It is served out of a giant tub, from a garden hose, and into a plastic jug. Why, why in the world would anybody drink this crap? 14 cents. 14 cents for a glass of beer hoi. That's dirt cheap for even out here. Its possible to have a night out of drinking for less then 2 bucks. And people flock to these shops, locals and backpackers. The conversation
Feastin!
After a long day at the tunnels a friend and I sat down for a "small" chinese meal. Whats great is that this only cost us around $5 a peice. Nice! is loud and rowdy. Laughing, arguing, talking. Beer after beer, all the while trying to convince yourself that its getting better the more you drink. Its not. The next morning you wake up feeling like you just drank yourself silly with something that was brewed in some guys bathtub. It probably was. But every night, the corner "bia hoi" is popping and it just draws you back in.
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