From the Mekong to the mountains...
Trip Start
Aug 25, 2003
1
10
38
Trip End
Jul 23, 2004
Dalat,
Vietnam
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
We jounced and jolted our way out of Phnom Penh to Neak Luong for the boat into Viet Nam. I can really feel what driving on the moon would be like after a few road trips in Cambodia. Except, imagine Neil Armstrong is hopped up on coke while trying to set a new landspeed record, and the tires are spares. And that's a decent road. Remind me to pack a chiropracter next time.
The boat ride was beautiful; the Mekong River is wide and smooth, and there are really amazing stilt-housed fishing villages along the length. The exit from Cambodia was easy, although I did take a little teasing about my newly long hyphenated name; I would have returned the good humor, his name had like 47 vowels in it, but I didn't want to chance a change of mood with a man casually armed with an M-16 and a grenade belt
Crazy House
. Call me overly cautious, but I'm not quite ready to die for a laugh...The Viet Nam immigration guards were all business efficiency. We had our first "We're giving you money because..." moment when they collected a "SARS Quarantine Fee", gave us a receipt, then the next official took it away and threw it in the trash. The government may be officially Communist, but their bureaucracy is all capitalist. In fact, although the Vietnamese people are certainly poor by international standards, the standard of living is dramatically different from Cambodia. The infrastructure is remarkable, especially considering that the country had decades of continuous war that ended less than 30 years ago. I know I'm supposed to be "shoestring traveling" and therefore loving all the painful bus rides in order to earn the admiration of all the other grungy, poor backpackers living on 30 cents a day and entrance into the ranks of the truly hardcore, but I have to admit I almost kissed the asphalt perfection of the Vietnamese highway. What can I say? My body is much more aware of discomfort than it used to be, say a week ago, when I was only 28.
Ok, enough reminiscing about my youth... We ended up in Chau Doc, a busy but manageably-sized port city, and one of the transport hubs of the Mekong Delta. The city is completely involved with the river: houses and restaurants extend over the water, supported by stilts; families visit neighbors as easily by boat as motorbike; and every menu is heavy with fish and seafood dishes. Our hotel room was great; it rose out of the water on stilts and was directly over the boat parking slip. I made all these really funny jokes about pushing Phil out of the window but they were just jokes. Still, he stayed by the door after that
Crazy House Again
. Who can you trust if you can't trust your wife? So, no one went swimming. It's probably a good thing, too, because there is a risk of bilharzia, which, as far as I can tell from the Lonely Planet book, is a parasite that gets in your body from swimming in the Mekong and lives in your bladder and small intestine and (I forget the intermediate step; I'm such an informed health care professional) and then you bleed to death. I'll stick to the pool.The bus to the city formerly known as Saigon was uneventful, although we did get dropped off at a bus station out in District 14 (the city is huge!) and wandered around until someone took pity on us and helped us to the right public bus. Our three days in Ho Chi Minh City seemed busy, but looking back, we didn't really do anything. I don't know, check Phil's posting, maybe I blacked out or something. Oh wait, we did take a tour to the Cao Dai temple and the Cu Chi tunnels. (See, my memory is going already; damn old age!) The religion of Cao Dai is a mix of several world religions, including Buddhism and Christianity, all wrapped up in a hot pink temple decor and characterized by worshipping a triangle around a big eye (kind of resembling the back of the US dollar...). I really like the basis of the beliefs: God, justice, love, and humanity. Plus, the different levels of followers are designated by really expressive hats. It did feel awkwardly voyeuristic to me to watch (and photograph) the worshippers during one of the four daily services from the balconies lining the walls of the temple, but not everyone had the same reservations. We saw one man impatiently gesture to a worshipper to move out of the way of his video camera; once again, we breathed a sigh of relief that another culturally inappropriate tourist was not an American.
After hustling us back to the bus, our guide gave us some background information on our next tour stop, the Cu Chi tunnels. The original tunnels were mostly destroyed, so they were rebuilt and "improved" to accomodate "bigger-boned" Western tourists. We were first shown a propaganda "documentary" from 1967 showing life in the tunnels and profiling a few Vietnamese singled out as heros for killing "the evil American aggressors". I know that US government films from the same time were full of bias, too; still, Phil and I both felt a little defensive afterwards. We had several opportunities to experience the tunnels. One had the option to get to the surface after only 60 meters; in true Sarah form, I (inadvertently and certainly not by choice leading a large number of our group) missed the "escape route" and we ended up crawling the entire humid, claustrophobic, oxygen-poor 120 meter tunnel. When our group finally emerged, dirty and sweaty and relieved nothing had collapsed, there was a big guy, maybe 6'4" or so, who had been behind Phil; he looked absolutely traumatized. My poor directional ability may have ruined his desire to ever get on an elevator again. Or ride in a compact car. Maybe I should reconsider that career change to Outward Bound Orienteering Guide...
We also saw the War Remnants Museum, which was formerly known as the American Atrocities of War Museum, or something like that. It's the most popular museum in Viet Nam, and has a really incredible exhibit (sponsored, interestingly enough, by the Commonwealth of Kentucky) on photojournalists killed during the wars with first the French and then the US. It was very well-balanced, covering European and American journalists and photographers as well as Vietnamese. There are also American tanks and bombs displayed, and an especially disturbing section on health problems caused by napalm and sprayed defoliant, including photos of birth defects and preserving jars containing deformed fetuses. Fortunately, unlike the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh or the Cu Chi tunnels, no one has thought to install a firing range on the museum grounds.
Expecting an escape from the traffic and pollution of Ho Chi Minh City for the reputed cool nights and calmer pace of Dalat, we were suprised to find that Dalat is actually a pretty big, busy place. It was funny to see locals wearing insulated jackets while we were just enjoying not sweating constantly in our T-shirts; it made Phil nostalgic for snow, so I had to increase his dose of "medicine" to keep him from bolting to Alaska. We toured the "Crazy House", a guesthouse/art gallery with winding staircases up to "theme rooms" (like the Termite Room and the Eagle Room), a few with lofts and secret compartments and cool-shaped windows. It reminded me (keeping in mind that I am hardly an architecture connisseur) of the Gaudi buildings in Barcelona. We also walked to the Cam Ly Falls, where Vietnamese honeymooners apparently like to come to have photos taken with the Native American "warrior" and other cement "sculptures". Phil called it Sewage Falls; it has a bit of a suspicious film on the surface. That was the extent of our sightseeing, but we enjoyed the nice October-in-Michigan temperatures; it was a nice heat reprieve before our next destination: Nha Trang, which is all beaches and...beach people.
