Saigon, Vietnam
Trip Start
Feb 07, 2007
1
40
50
Trip End
May 15, 2007
Saigon,
Vietnam
Monday, April 9, 2007
After running around like a crazy woman today (trying to update my blog with my final Malaysia entry...charging my cell phone that still doesn't work...getting my landing card...getting to my Cu Chi tunnel tour before it left) I was hot and sweaty before even getting on the bus, and it would only get worse. The weather is the only aspect of this country I can't bring myself to love. The city, the countryside, the people, every bit of it brings me to tears of joy. We got on our bus and our tour guide, Lah, introduced himself to us and got us underway. After a quick drive out of the pier we arrived on a main street, where we were first introduced to the chaotic traffic of Saigon. (Saigon...we're in Saigon!) The way to cross the street, we were instructed, is to simply walk out in front and the motorcycles, 18-wheelers, tour busses, and occasional car will move around you. Imagine the traffic in Times Square or on Michigan Avenue. Now imagine walking right into it, and expecting it to maneuver around you. Surprisingly enough, here in Vietnam, it does. After a full day of driving and walking these streets, neither my person nor my tour bus are scathed. Both walked away (or drove, depending) unharmed. I did fear that we hit a person on a bike at one point, because of the sudden jolt in our big bus, but if we did it wasn't an issue because we continued on our way through streets that reminded me so much of SoHo in New York. People on motorcycles and bicycles flood the streets, which are lined with shops of the same kind. I've never seen more bridal shops or stores that sell mattresses and bedspreads in the same area in my life. Everyone passing by on their modes of transportation, whatever they might be (save for cars, which only sit covered and seemingly unused), stares into the tour bus and either smiles and waves or studies your foreign face. If you want to shop here, you can. If you want to sit down on the sidewalk and play a game, you can. If you want to purchase a meal from a street vendor, you can. Or, if you want food prepared on a stove set up on the sidewalk, you can do that too. If neither of those sounds appealing, there are countless restaurants to choose from. Buddhist and Hindu temples are just down the alleyway between those restaurants and shops, so if you want to worship before or after your meal or as you shop, you can. Vietnam has every kind of architecture imaginable. The French influence is everywhere, and interspersed with the traditional temples and the more modern structures, the city is a developing melting pot. And yet, of it all, the thing I love the most is the traffic. At any given moment, it can be as dense as the streets during a marathon, or three busses can be squeezed into a space no wider than two lanes and longer than two bus lengths. Yet, people still manage to brave the bicycle, sometimes with two or more on one bike, as motorized vehicles whiz past them. I was thinking what it would be like to be driving a motorcycle with your daughter in your lap and realizing that one day, some day you are going to entrust her with a boy who right now is five, six, seven years old to drive her around through that traffic and get her home safe. Of course, he'll learn before then, but I don't know how I could ever feel comfortable driving in Saigon, let alone feel prepared enough to teach someone else how to handle the roads. Occasionally, the streets would open up and bring into view a river and canoe-like fishing boats. The waters, brown with filth, teemed with floating plants and palm trees. I'm not much of a small-town or country girl, but the rural landscape of Vietnam is enough to change my views on the quieter areas of a land. Once we made it through the bustling city, we encountered quieter streets, wider and with less traffic and more open fields. We drove about forty minutes through the green fields of palm trees and tall green grasses, and a rubber tree plantation- with the trees perfectly aligned in front of each other, next to each other, and diagonally from one another- before we reached our restaurant on a river. We had to cross a bridge with canoe boats tied to trees on its banks and more plants floating in its waters to get to the dining room. We feasted on rice, vegetables, and pork before driving the lat fifteen minutes to the tunnels. We were pretty close to the river we sailed up to get to the port, but you wouldn't have known it. We walked through dirt pathways through acres of trees, passing holes in the ground created by the blasts of B52s. We got to climb down into the narrow sliver in the ground and cover the hole and ourselves with a piece of wood no larger than a standard piece of printer paper, that the Vietnamese used to take cover in. We got to see models of tanks used in the war, and traps that they used to use on American soldiers. I felt so strange, walking along the same paths that soldiers from my country used to walk to fight against citizens of the country I am in. I tried to imagine rain pouring down, soaking through my uniform as I hauled guns and ammunition through the forests. It seemed weird that a place that once claimed so many lives is now visited by tourists like me who pose to take silly photos with the soldier dummies. I didn't take silly pictures. I couldn't even walk through the museum displaying five or six replicas of traps. People died here. Our family members fought here, and some died here. How can someone bring themselves to make light of it like that, by huddling around the dummies holding peace signs and sticking their tongues out in silly smiles? Perhaps I was to sensitive and I'm overreacting but it just felt wrong. And listening to the Vietnamese tour guides and the sound effects they made with their mouths as they demonstrated how the traps worked, it made me sick. "Ahhhh, ahhhh" as if their legs were caught in a spinning trap or "Eeee-eeeeeeh" like they'd fallen through a spinning trap door and had landed on spikes. In that moment, even though my day today in Vietnam is the closest I've ever been to a war, I was the enemy. To hear them talk about my country that way, regardless of how right or wrong we were to be there, was horrifying and eye-opening. The history books are always written from the American's perspective. The Cu Chi tunnels? They're the other side of the story. Our tour guide showed us a map of all the miles of tunnels, taking 20 years in all to dig out by hand, and we had a chance to crawl through them. I wanted to imagine what it was like back then, what it took to just be inside them, let alone hiding in them so you could fight for your life and country. I started hyperventilating, even in the 20 meters of tunnel we got to go through. I could squat and crawl on my knees in the packed-dirt tunnels, but when there was no light overhead or up ahead, I'd start to panic. I couldn't handle it for barely more than a minute, the tight space and little oxygen and scalding heat. This might sound small-minded but the discomfort of those things is enough to keep me running from war. You had the chance to go through three networks of tunnels, but I got out at the first one. Lauren went through and as much as I struggled in the first one, I thought about it. I don't know when the next time is that I'll be able to crawl through tunnels used during a war, but she was too far ahead and I needed a flashlight if I was even going to consider going back in. However, there was a fourth network, a much longer one, that was the smallest network of tunnels open to the public. That was my shot, my last chance to go in, so I did. For 100 meters, I crawled on my hands and knees through an underground tube that barely cleared my head as I crawled along, swatting mosquitoes that were attracted to the flashlights, dodging holes in the floor, and taking deep, calming breaths. I made it out again, with satisfaction and skinned knees and buckets of sweat on my brow. After that, I'd had enough. We stopped by a shooting range where you could buy rounds and shoot at a target, but just listening to the blasts from tens of meters away was enough to make me jump, so there was no way I was going to fire a gun. I was jumpy and agitated enough just being at the site of the tunnels. I didn't need it reenacted for me any more. We made our way back to the bus and watched a short video of a female Vietnamese soldier (more anti-American propaganda) and got on the bus for the ride back to the ship. I slept on the way back, physically and emotionally exhausted, before getting back to the ship for a shower. Katie and Victor hadn't waited for us to go to dinner, so the four of us (Becca, Matt, Lauren and I) made our way into town. Anytime we asked anyone for directions, we were heckled by cab drivers. Even when we'd ask a security guard, he'd call over a cab driver, so we quit asking and just waited to see what we happened upon. We needed an ATM and wanted to find a restaurant that served a meal we'd heard we'd needed to try, a noodle soup with vegetables and beef called Pho, so we set out in search of one. Even after dark, the traffic did not stop. And we had our first experience crossing the streets, which was a good time because it's the least busiest time, but people still manage to come at you from every which way. Becca and Matt held hands, and I gripped Lauren's, and off we went. In the US, if you see a motorcycle coming, let alone a car or a bus, you run. Here, if you run, you might run into a vehicle coming from the opposite way. So you walk. You walk slowly but at a steady pace, and the busses, motorcycles and bikes go around you. It's so strange, literally being in the middle of traffic. But if you panic, you're hit because you can't run. You can't change your mind, you can't stop. Just keep going, and you'll make it. At least we've made it so far. We walked along the sidewalk, past children and adults playing soccer on street corners or in the actual street. Women sold cigarettes and lighters on fold-out tables. Men squatted all over the sidewalk and talked. The sense of community here, it's wonderful. Even though this city is always moving, a lot of times the movement is just people being together, playing games with each other. It's how I imagine growing up during summers in the past. The adults sit out on their porches and watch the kids play, and that's what they do here, in an urban setting where even the adults play. So even feeling like an outsider, being stared at by every person we passed, it felt safe. I felt comfortable smiling at everyone I passed, to ease their minds about me. We found an outdoor night market and browsed through for a bit, looking at mainly shirts, shoes, and purses in stands set up in the street between stores selling more shirts, shoes, and purses. Shopping here, if you tell them it's ugly they'll lower the price for you to try to sell it to you. I couldn't do that. Unless it's truly hideous I don't even say anything to my friends about something being ugly, so I just bargained down. The traffic also finds its way into the night markets, with motorcycles squeezing into the space between the shops' steps and the stands. And one side isn't reserved for one direction here. At any given time two motorcycles could be going opposite ways towards each other and have to maneuver around the oncoming bike, the people, and the clothes. It was nuts. I also saw a woman washing dishes on the ground outside of a shop. I'm not sure if washed was the right word, because the water she was using was brown, so perhaps swirling dishes in water is a more accurate description. But that's all some people have, I suppose. And if you've got to wash your dishes, you do what you have to do. We finished shopping and continued in our search of pho, and when we found the place a few blocks over that our tunnels tour guide had told us would have it, a beer garden restaurant, we found no pho. We also found no one who spoke English, as it was an entirely local place. But I loved it. Our waiter passed us off to someone else when he couldn't understand us, and the second man to a third, and a few more after that until we were trying to talk to the manager. He did speak broken English and explained that they had no pho, so we ordered spring rolls and garlic bread. Everything else looked a little too local and with no one to really explain it to us, we weren't feeling that brave. It felt awkward, being passed off so many times because we didn't speak the language, but it felt more authentic. Anyone can go to a touristy place for a meal, but I wanted to eat with locals. And we did. Absolutely everyone smokes here, and only the men drink beer. So we finished our food and paid, leaving a significant tip to show our appreciation in trying to help us. I didn't want to be the pushy, fussy American who gets frustrated when the people don't speak English. I understood that we were clearly in their areas, areas where it's not expected that they know the language. We were a troublesome table because of that. After we took a quick restroom visit to wash our hands, which we had to walk past the kitchen and the makeshift storage room to get to. Food was piled high outside of the restroom doors, and a cage with rabbits in it sat on a small table. I'm just glad we didn't order any meat. We then walked back the way we came to an area that looked like it had some clubs, and we were invited inside of one. We climbed a flight and a half of stairs, all the way up preparing ourselves for being stared at by the few people who would be there on a Monday. But we didn't prepare ourselves enough. Seventy-five percent of the people in there were working, and the rest were standing at tables. We, on the other hand, when we tried to stand at a table also were whisked to a booth in the back corner. We sat down and stayed for about ten minutes, just long enough to order and pay. Two servers were standing on guard, watching us the entire time. I mean, four young white people in a club on a Tuesday, I'd be curious too. But I also wouldn't make blatant hand gestures at my buddy who is also on guard about the kids sitting two feet away and then give them raise my eyebrows at them. Restaurants, we learned, are okay, but clubs aren't the best idea. We'd passed a karaoke bar but when we stopped to inquire we learned it was a hotel, so we gave up and went back to the ship, passing a group of men who hadn't left their board game they were playing on the sidewalk since the time we'd passed them returning from our tunnel tour five hours earlier. I didn't mind turning in early because I was satisfied with my meal in a local joint and a bit of walking, and I had to get to bed to wake up for a visit to a disabled children's home. I haven't yet discovered why I feel so connected to this place, and maybe I'll never really understand it, but I love it here.
