They've got all our toys!
The bus for Saigon left at 11 o'clock in the evening; I was waiting at the stop for about 20 minutes before a moto-driver decided to make a last ditch effort for my business and said "Sorry, no bus tonight" - later that second, it pulled around the corner.
We arrived in city centre at around 4AM; with around six million people, HCMC is the closest thing you get to a 24-hour city in southeast Asia, but still, at that hour it was a bit dead. I wandered around a public park full of chicken and dragon-shaped hedgery; hordes of crazy people were already out doing their morning Tai Chi, jogging and badminton. When the guesthouse owners finally got around to getting up (conveniently, these are probably the latest risers in town), I checked into a place that not only had rooms for rent, but also served as a restaurant and hair salon - it was a bit like one of those big cruise ships - there was really no reason to ever leave the building.
While I went about the primary task of sampling every variety of street food in town, I stopped by a few museums. The War Remnants Museum, formerly known as the American War Crimes Museum, was not terribly discrete about its message; upon arriving, you received a graphic "Why We Hate America" flyer and each portion of the complex went into grotesque detail on the various atrocities committed. The exhibits included a "tiger cage" prison simulation, several jars containing pickled agent orange fetuses, and an exhibition of paintings by gradeschoolers depicting the US bombing their villages; they also have on display quite a large collection of our toys that they confiscated at one time or another.
Over at the Museum of Ho Chi Minh City had many artifacts that may have been of interest had I actually cared about the history of Ho Chi Minh City. The Fine Arts Museum covered the gamet of America-bashing art forms. Shortly before the end of business hours, I crashed through the gates of Reunification Palace (actually, it was more of a stroll) and explored the deserted halls of the former presidential mansion.
Across the city in Chinatown, I explored the same alleys of cheap junk that you can find in virtually any such district around the world; in one shop I found a Chinese dragon puppet that danced to pop music - it would've been absolutely perfect for the gag gift exchange had I been able to fold it into a cubic inch so that it would fit in my bag. On the way back to the tourist hub, I ran across a region packed with stores offering cow's milk and derivative products - despite all the cows wandering the streets, they import all their milk from Holland, making it a real delicacy - for 2000 dong I picked up a cup of soft-serve about the size of a Baskin Robbins sample spoon. Having slept for all of 3 hours the previous night, I decided to forego a wild night on the town and zonked out old geezer style at 8 o'clock.
In the morning, I headed to the zoo; the exhibits in themselves were rather pitiful, but I did get to see three zoo attendants collectively wrestle a giant goanna that had snuck into the deer habitat. As usual, the park was geared towards younger audiences, so I was a bit surprised to see that they put on a daily self-mutilation show. When I first arrived and saw a fat man rubbing a burning torch all over his body, I assumed it was a cheap carnival trick, but this was followed by a guy who stuck nails through his shoulders and nipples, another who hung steel ball from hooks in his tongue, and about 10 variations of the standard sword-swallowing trick (the grand finale being a giant pair of serated scissors that were opened inside his chest); the most intriguing act was a boy who threaded a snake from each nostril to his mouth and then proceeded to yank them back and forth. This was immediately followed by a performance by two men dressed as cats who played with hoola-hoops and held a sack race.
The next few hours were spent hunting down a few random pagodas and other attractions in the outskirts of town. Along the way I ran across a supermarket and decided to stop in to see how much the markets had been ripping me off; as it turns out, all the prices here were several times more than even the vendors' absurd initial quotes; there is apparently a large class of Vietnamese in HCMC that does its shopping at these air-conditioned superstores and remains completely oblivious to the reality that they are not, in fact, living in the western world; at the checkout counter, the woman in front of me paid for her purchase with two 500,000 dong notes - I had previously not thought such a bill could exist here.
A tropical downpour had ensued while I was in the mall; rain has a fascinating effect in Vietnamese cities - every vendor, regardless of what they were originally selling, instantly goes into the business of poncho dispersal; it's as if they have a button that deploys a ring of rain jackets around their stand the instant the first drop falls. Naturally the rain stopped the instant I shelled out the 2000 dong for a coat, and I was able to see a few more pagodas as well as the soup shop used by VietCong spies.
There had been a promise of a short English and/or French homily at Notre Dame cathedral, but the Saturday Mass was as opaque as ever; afterwards, everyone just stool around and stared at the Mary statue in front of the church while nearby vendors sold baloons and dried squid. The main commercial district was hopping - among local teenagers, the big weekend activity seems to be dressing in the latest fashions and cruising around in circles on motorbikes (this sounds dumb but I'm certain that, if our parents had let us get motorbikes, we'd of done the exact same thing); since there's somewhere around half a million kids indulging in this in around the same place at around the same time, the result is one huge mass of slow-moving bikes forming an impenetrable river of man and machine along the main drag.
In my ongoing search for a free bathroom (in two days, I had not yet found the first), I ventured into a shopping mall and found in the main lobby a hip-hop dance-off where random audience members of all ages would leap onto the floor and try to out-breakdance their competitors. The move that most impressed me (though the locals were non-plussed) was a kid who ran, jumped, and hit the ground in a lotus stance. What made the show even better was the fact that many of these people happened to be wearing rollerskates - I'm sorry, but until you've seen Asian teens breakdancing in rollerskates, you just don't know what "cool" is.
Exploring more of the upper crust of Saigon I happened upon the "California Burrito Kitchen;" here you can get a super burrito for around $3 - this is even cheaper than in San Fran, and if I'd had any assurance of quality, I would've jumped at the opportunity, but being served an inferior burrito could instill such pangs of home-sickness that I would've needed to skip India and make a B-line for the nearest Freebirds.
There are no McDonalds or Starbucks in Vietnam; this probably has something to do with these being the quintescential symbols of American culture. There are however, KFCs (translated to "Ga Chien Kentucky") as well as a good share of imitation burger joints; a light meal at one of these establishments costs roughly twice what you'd pay at a fancy restaurant.
I'm a bit terrified of Saigon traffic so I decided to put off renting a motorbike and jumped onboard a tour to go to the legendary Cuchi tunnels. Our guide was a former lieutenant of the South Vietnamese army but had been sufficiently brainwashed in a re-education camp such that he could deliver the right messages to the tourists; he was the first guide I've come across that didn't lament on his pitiful salary and deplorable living conditions - he actually bragged that, unlike us poor western types, he ate at a restaurant every night, and that, though in his youth he had only had one pair of trousers, he now was the proud owner of 65 - if wealth were judged on trousers alone, he would be a rich man indeed.
At the site, we watched a government video which showed the smiling faces of the Cuchi villagers as they devised clever new ways to kill off Americans and made an overview of all the honors awarded based on the number of Americans killed. We then went to one of the original, unmodified tunnels in the area; I was one of the few who could actually fit through the trap door, so I crawled 30m through a dark, .5m x .5m passageway while trying to shield my face from the swarm of bats that lived there.
Nearby, at the shooting range, you could buy bullets (18,000 dong each, minimum 5) for a number of period weapons including a shotgun and machine gun. As was to be expected, the guards laughed at our requests for ear protection and we all lost a good bit of our hearing.
We ended the visit by crawling through a 100m tunnel; this was fairly unnerving even with one straight path and no booby traps or enemy soldiers; by the end of it, I was quite pleased never to have been a tunnel rat. The guide pointed out another tunnel that ran to the Saigon river; he claimed we couldn't do this one as it was full of snakes and scorpions and you spent a full 3 hours underground before hitting the water's surface; someday, I will have to return with my own transport and a big critter-smashing stick.
In the evening there was a huge festival near the tourist district which featured free food samples and games such as paddle-horse jousting and an amateur version of that folk dance where they smash the bamboo rails together between steps of the dancers' feet. There was also some sort of beauty contest that involved dressing foreign men up like women in traditional Vietnamese dresses and makeup but I sadly arrived too late to participate.
I haven't run across many beggars in southeast Asia, but on Sunday night (when everyone's out going wild, throwing around thousands of dong like it was nothing), Saigon is swarming with every manner of disfigured war victim, crazy old lady and dark-skinned urchin. One of the more interesting approaches I saw was a woman who decided to lay on her back in the middle of one of the city's busiest road with a hat on her chest which passing motorcyclists were theoretically supposed to toss bills. Far more irritating than this was the swarms of children who would hang out around all the snack stands and beg you to buy them a snack - their pimps had of course worked out a deal with the vendor to buy back whatever the tourist bought for half price; I remedied this detail by taking a huge, salivating bite out of whatever I happened to buy them - the vendors (anticipating a quick return) usually gave me much better deals this way.
Mekong Delta
Before everything shut down for the night, I made a circuit of every tourist cafe in town and checked out their 3-day Mekong trip; the Delta is full of water and to get anywhere you need to hire boats (usually designed for 20 people) - given my typical independent approach, this would've been prohibitively expensive - so I resolved to find the least "tour-like" of the tours. I scrutinized every detail from about two dozen places, and found that for the most part, they differed only in typos; while I did this, what stuck in the back of my head was just how each of these places managed to fill a bus every single day.
Naturally, it turned out they were all under the same umbrella company and my bus circled the town and picked up groups from every agency. And this was not the end of it; the one, two, and three-day trips as well as the "end-in-Cambodia" variations of each were all intertwined in a complicated network of buses and boats.
After our two-hour "scenic drive" down the mostly featureless highway, we arrived in the town of Mytho. We took a motor boat on a trip through the palm forests to see a number of villages that had been engineered by the tour companies to each sell us a different specialty (allegedly, a family tradition for a hundred years); the first was mass-produced coconut candy and rice wine followed that and then the ever-popular coconut bobble-heads. The prices were always hyper-inflated and we were always left on the island for ong enough that we became sufficiently hungry or bored to buy something. At least one of the brochures had mentioned "a chance to bike-ride around each of the islands;" as it turned out, however, this "chance" was significantly diminished if you were unwilling to rip-off the locals' bikes.
For lunch we had fried rice and spring rolls (who could've guessed?) - we opted not to pay the extra to get the local specialty where they served an "elephant-eared fish" deep-fried and standing on its tail - and then we boated a bit further to a massive fruit sampling accompanied by traditional music. Our group included, among others, a guy from Tallahassee, a D.C.er (sure, email me the real name for those folks), and two Montanians; the last group was on a "semester-at-sea" program with 650 other Americans where they circled the world in a cruise-ship (complete with swimming pool and basketball courts), stopped at random ports (South Africa, Chennai, six other places I don't remember) and got to do whatever they wanted for 5 days.
One brochure had claimed that we would sail into sunset towards Cantho; it's debatable whether there was actually a navagable passage between the two cities, but at any rate, we ended up spending a few more hours in the bus. At Cantho, the two Montana girls and I were loaded on to a cyclo (motorcycle with tiny cart attached) and carried to the edge of town; here, three motorcycles took us out to the country to our homestay. Two German guys had arrived before us; they were both deaf, but were experts at reading and writing English, and were far more adept at communicating with the Vietnamese through signs and pictures than we could ever hope to be. The family prepared us a feast and tried their best to show us how to correctly eat it as we all sat in a circle on the empty wooden floor of the living room. The meal was accompanied by a 2-liter bottle of rice schnapps (100 proof), and someone among the family would spontaneously decide that we should all take shots about once every 5 minutes.
One of the older children happened to be the president of the Vietnamese John McCain fanclub, and after dinner, he regailed us with the countless merits of Mr. McCain and showed his great surprise that we were not ourselves experts on every American politician and our ambassadors to Vietnam; he was very pleased to see, however, that there was a consensus on who we would choose in the event that good old John ran against Hillary in 2008. This man of many hobbies also happened to be a palm reader, and so he laid out of each of our pasts and futures in turn - apparently someone was deeply in love with me at the age of 21 (a fact of which I was clearly never informed - if you happen to be this mystery girl, please send an email or something) and I would live til the age of 90 (though his voice was shaking quite a bit as he said this and I suspect he saw that I had a month to live).
The family set up paper-thin mats on the same floor where we had eaten hours earlier, and draped big mosquito nets over each; there seemed to be about 7 people in this family who were scattered in various nooks and crannies around the property; two were sleeping in hammocks suspended from the porch by American parachute straps.
We woke up to a breakfast of bread and eggs - they had to make a special run to the market for this, probably questioning the whole way why our type couldn't just eat normal foods for once. They took us by motorcycle to a gas station parking lot where we waited 15 minutes for the rest of the group to roll out of bed and bring the bus down there. We walked to the loading dock where we jumped on boats and explored the Cai Rang floating market (biggest in the Delta); this was mainly wholesale and large boats would use long poles, covered in fruits and vegetables, to explain what it was they were buying and selling. From there, we stopped at an island where they made rice noodles (oddly enough, they didn't try to sell us any instant pho packs here), and then we cruised on to another place where they milled rice for domestic consumption (apparently for the stuff they export, they need inspectors to pick out all the rat parts).
As on the previous day, the group split into a dozen different buses to go to Saigon, Cambodia or on to Chau Duc. I sat on a bus for another 3 hours, stopping along the way at a crocodile farm where we saw what we unanimously agreed to be the fattest crocodile ever, before we arrived at Sam Mountain. This mountain was apparently home to a large number of caves and pagodas, but our guide didn't bother to tell us how to get to any of them, so in the end, we found only good views of nearby Cambodia and lots of drink stands; I also happened upon a bizarre collection of concrete animals for which I could think of no plausible explanation.
Chau Duc turned out to be a pleasant riverside town with a huge central market and tons of good food; as seems to be the norm in Vietnamese border towns, no one speaks a bit of English, but everyone knows how to handle foreigners - in 90% of cases, when I asked the price for something, the vendor simply silently pulled out the biggest bill he/she had, as even though I'd made the inquiry in Vietnamese, I couldn't possibly understand a numeric response or have any idea of what something should cost.
I usually find vegetarian fare by seeking out meat which looks good enough to eat; actual Vietnamese meat is usually full of fat and odd bones, and quite often covered with skin and/or some sort of hair - imitation meat, however, looks like the cuts you'd get back home. I was, however, fooled by a veggie joint in Chau Duc that had expertly inserted sticks of lemon grass into the soy to serve as inedible bones and somehow created a texture almost indistinguishible from chicken fat - even after I was finished, I wasn't entirely sure I had not in fact eaten meat. After dinner I ran into three French guys (on another variation of my tour) who I'd last seen at Luang Prabang in Laos; this beat the previous record of the Irish girl, last seen in Sam Neua, that was staying across the hall in my Saigon hotel.
The next morning we took a boat to a "Cham minority" village, a .35% segment of the town's population that was Muslim and learned Arabic in school - in a manner identical to those in North Africa, the children went through the progression of begging from pen to chewing gum to money (must be a religious thing). On the boatride back, we stopped to view a floating fish farm; these are very basic houses built over fish cages that hold around 100,000 fish - apparently there's no quicker way to get rich in the Delta than put thousands of fish under your house - there is however, a problem of getting splashed through the floorboards and I'm guessing the situation demands more than a few room deoderizers. The rest of the day was spent transferring from one bus to another, as we combined with several other tours going in various directions, until we arrived at Ho Chi Minh around 5. The evening went without much event except for running into the Americans which I hadn't seen since the opposite end of the country.
Though I hadn't seen much in the way of accidents before, since I arrived in HCMC, the average number of motorcycle accidents had risen to 3 per day - with a few fatalities; this helped me make the decision to just bum around the city for a day rather than attempting to make the drive out of town.
The plan was to explore the city's parks and campuses, and pick up any pagodas that had somehow escaped my earlier searches. This effort was more or less successful, except that the town's universities didn't offer the slightest attraction to a tourist and every inch of green space had been commercially exploited to the extreme.
When I arrived at Dam Sen Park, I was shocked to see that they wanted me to buy a ticket just to walk through, and furthermore, at $1, it was the most expensive entrance fee in the city. As if this weren't exorbitant enough, there were actually separate fees for nearly every one of the park's attractions. One thing that was free, however - and this was just about the highlight of my week - was an extensive collection of intricate beasts built solely from spoons and other kitchenware. Other than this highly imaginative set, the park also offered an ice palace which was a good 50% more expensive than the park itself; here, you donned a coat and walked into a refrigerated room full of sculptures that were supposed to resemble famous architectural works throughout the world - these were designed without any skill, style, or reverence for historical accuracy, but it was a great way to cool off on a hot summer day.
I noticed a disturbing trend in Vietnam's largest city - the parents make their children crap on the street! In 3 days of observing city life, I saw this occur on no fewer than 7 separate occasions. People of Vietnam I implore you: Don't do this - you will never be a fully developed nation until you can walk down the sidewalk without the fear of stepping in a baby turd! And with that thought I conclude my study of Vietnam... now all I have to do is get them to accept my half-dissolved ticket and swing over to Calcutta...
Though all physical records of my flight date and time had long since dissolved, I was fairly sure that I was flying ou tof Saigon on the 11th somewhere between 11am and 5pm. The Saigon Airport Bus, at 2000 dong, might just be the cheapest in the world - I didn't figure this out until I had walked to the brink of exhaustion and hailed the bus as a last resort. At the check-in counter, I found that the Singapore Air folks didn't know when I was leaving either - the codes necessary to access my records were embedded in my paper ticket that had been all but destroyed - I blamed this sorry state of my ticket on the typhoon, as people tend to be more sympathetic to victims of acts of God then idiots who take their tickets swimming. I had hoped to get on the early flight so I could spend the day in Singapore's airport which offers, among other things, free internet and a free on-demand movie theatre, but the staff on duty refused to make use of my flashlight or apply lemon juice to try to ascertain what was once written on my ticket, and they insisted that I return to the city's main office.
As luck would have it, the woman assigned to me at the ticket counter just happened to be the nicest person ever; she spent half an hour peering at the tickets with varying angles and levels of light and constructed the whole 13 stop itinerary from scratch. When it was done, she announced "Here ya go, we normally charge a $75 reissue fee but you're a special case" - I'm not really sure what she meant by this but I'm going to assume she thought that I was hot.
I returned to the airport, sat for a few hours, and got rid of the remainder of my dong paying the $12 "service fee" that had been enacted on the previous day. The international lounge was essentially like every other one in the world - they had applied an easy formula to calculate the prices of the snacks: Take the standard Vietnamese street price, drop the zeros, and substitute US$ for VND; this resulted in nearly everything being absurdly expensive, but I did manage to find a pack of dried bananas intended for export to Russia where the formula had failed.
It was 1.5 hours west to Changi airport (which is oddly a time zone ahead of Saigon); this fortunately didn't give me sufficient time to watch all of Bewitched. Just prior to landing, the crew sprayed everyone down with a non-toxic bug-bomb to kill off any critters we might be harbouring from our travels in the less pristine parts of the globe. Singapore is an island of peace in a turbulent world - no one tries to pressure you or rip you off, there are plentiful drinking fountains with safe water, and clean toilets abound. It was another 3 and a half hours to Calcutta; India is one of those freak countries which is 4.5 hours of GMT and thus I arrived at right around 10:30.
They've got all our toys!
This one's from the French
Notre Dame Cathedral
Central post office
One crazy looking buffalo
City museum
Silly Vietnamese people, always getting married in the darndest places
Most photographed building in city - I felt obliged to take this, even though I don't remember what this place is for
Don't remember what this was
The famous gates of the former presidential palace
Reunification Palace
Replica of tank used by VC
Random garden in middle of building
Random elephant feet
Roof of palace
There are 1000 hands and 1000 eyes in this picture - can you find them all?
Cool diorama with elephants
History Museum
Some temple
Asian deer of some sort
Nature at its finest
Zoo staff rustling up a goanna
Escaped ape
Scientific name: Iguana Iguana
This guy is nuts
This guy is more so
Swallowing snakes - a new twist on a classic
Nose floss
There's nothing more majestic than the Asian tiger... taking a crap
These guys are each stepping on some sort of animal
Instant poncho seller
If Cinderella had a cathedral...
"I'm telling you, we just need to buy a '2006' banner, then we'll be set for 2 years!"
Gathered at the Mary statue
Saigon at night
Breakdance contest - check out this guy's moves
Making rice paper
Tiger/American trap
Hmmm... can you guess which of this girl's proportions don't match those of the Vietcong?
Jeff the tunnel rat
Random guy coming out of the tunnel
Playing on the tank
Baby toy
Shooting range
Caodai Temple
The all-seeing eye
Quick novices, jump in the Caodaimobile
You have to be crazy to drive in this city - this woman is downright nuts
Better late than never
Coconut press
Making candy
Wow, check out this... snake
Huh, where'd the tail go?
Weird banana thing
Taking fruit sampling to the extreme
Traditional band
Hard at work
Not a record-setter, but a good example of the Vietnamese "family vehicle"
A veritable feast!
Not exactly the Hilton
"So you think this means no hot shower?"
Floating market
Monkey bridge
A man washing his chicken
A lot fo rice
Rice machine of some sort
Interesting...
Fattest crocodile ever!
Man, he's fat!
So I was just thinking, "what's the last thing you'd expect to see on the top of a mountain?"
I pity this cyclo driver
Portable rice mill
Floating fish village
Isn't he cute!
Why a penguin is a symbol of HCMC is beyond me
I just can't stand those football players and their constant vehideraces
These things are made of spoons!
I tried to sneak into Underwater World but it was guarded by vigilant crustaceans
Scariest reindeer ever
The park's concrete dinosaurs were mysteriously dying off at an alarming rate
Neon ice palace
Huh, I don't remember seeing a big Cupid statue in the middle of St. Peterss...
Interesting place for a Rodin statue
The genocide continues
