Saigon Simon hits Saigon at last
Trip Start
Nov 26, 2007
1
17
44
Trip End
Apr 17, 2008
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Had a nice last night meal (in the place with the moth infestation but without the moth infestation if you know what I mean) with Cecile before my customary early bed; just as well this time as I had to be up for 6am. I think we were a both a little bit sad to see each other go but its what goes on in this traveling game.
As usual the minibus to take me to the bus station didn't turn up till an hour after it was supposed to, we then changed to another slightly bigger bus to take us another 3 miles to the big bus station. By the time we got there all the buses seemed to be full and chaos was reigning. Most people that arrived with me started to kick off, especially this Chinese girl who was shouting etc. I just kept my mouth shut (as to be honest I didn't really care whether I got the bus that day or not since destiny was controlling my destination really) and stood around with my ticket in my hand until eventually the little Cambodian girl asked me if I was alone. I said yes and she took me straight onto the bus, with two seats (as one of them was broken so couldn't be used). Eventually I think they managed to pay some Cambodian families some dollars to sit on top of e3ach other so that the other narky people could get seats on one of the buses. I just sat back and read my book all ipod-ed up till we got to Phnom Penh where we had to change bus (even though I had been assured (as always) that we wouldn't have to when booking. This turned into a bit of a panic since we were an hour late getting there as a result of the above nonsense. In the rush to board the transfer minibus (I wonder when Asia will realise how good it can be to put all buses under one roof rather than setting off from offices all over the cities...) I picked up someone else's Decathlon backpack. Luckily he ran after the minibus and caught us - he looked about the same size as me anyway so guess I'd just have used whatever he left me...sure he was gay though so that plan could have caused some serious issues!!
The bus drove us to the border (some of it unpaved) with lots of very loud horn blowing. I couldn't see what was going on and thought best to leave it that way. At the border we had to get off the bus twice, doing that old trick we used to have to do at Dover back in the day where we take all our bags out the bus and walk through customs. On arrival in Saigon we drove straight into the back of a taxi at a crazy roundabout (more on Saigon traffic later). It didn't affect me but some of the happy campers who had bunged the driver at the border to sit in the aisle shot down a the aisle which was well funny. For me it enabled me to see the 1st Man City goal in the Manchester derby in a handy TV shop. It was 9pm when the bus got in but fortunately it dropped us by the backpacker ghetto so it was pretty easy to find a reasonable hotel for $10/night. Got straight out to watch 2nd half of game and get some food (I had had one baguette all day with all the running around). Vietnamese food (thus far) has a bit of a heavy bias on noodle soup for me, prefer my rice and curries really. Had this soup from a street vendor the other day and it was full of some kind of chicken entrails or something, was nice enough though. What they do really well is this iced coffee in the morning...its really strong Vietnamese coffee with sweet milk...my new thing (after spending 34 years not drinking coffee and certainly not with sugar). Its interesting watching the Vietnamese people eat such things; they can be sat in the poshest of little street cafes scoffing some noodle soup with bits of chicken in it and when they have gnawed the meat off the bone they just toss the bone on the floor under the table, same with cigarette ash. But they do seem to have an abundance of people working everywhere to deal with such things.
Observations of Vietnam:
- First impressions are that the Vietnamese people are not as friendly as the Cambodians. There is much less smiling goes on and I am constantly getting stern looks when trying to have a laugh with them. I think most of the adults just think I am some kind of demented mad man wandering round the streets smiling and saying hello in pigeon Vietnamese to them. Even the children just stare at you no matter how much waving and tongue sticking out you do at them they just continue to pensively stare straight into your eyes.
- All in all I don't think Vietnamese people hassle as much as Cambodian (this is the opposite of what I had been led to believe but could just be because I have been in the wrong places thus far). I did have on entertaining girl came up to me in a restaurant with a tower of books (in Saigon they tend to walk around with 6 foot tall towers of copied books held together in a bundle by a string) and asked me if I wanted a book. I said no thanks (knon gammon is how it sounds to say in Vietnamese) she then asked 'You want marijuana' to which I said khon gammon, 'you want massage', khon gammon, 'you want young lady with massage' knon gammon, and finally ending with 'very special massage with young lady' before my strict shake of the head told her to stop wasting her time.
- The Vietnamese speak much less English than in Cambodia or Thailand (from what I can understand it wasn't really taught here during the hard core commie years) which makes communication difficult. In their favor though they use latin characters rather than the hieroglyphics used elsewhere in Asia so the language is a bit easier to understand.
-Vietnam is really clean compared to Cambodia (and even Thailand). They have litter bins, seem to collect litter on a daily basis and even go through the litter taking out cardboard, bottles etc for recycling - something they could teach us in the UK!!
-Whenever a Vietnamese person calls of answers their telephone they say hello in English.
Every family in Vietnam seems to have a motorbike. The roads are total chaos. Crossing the road is entertaining and takes a certain degree of skill. The technique is just to get on with it really and the sea of bikes sort of parts around you as you advance looking and listening carefully in all directions. It really is amazing how you start to pick up what different methods of horn tooting mean!!
-They have recently passed a law requiring everyone to sport a motorbike helmet. This means that everyone has a brand new helmet of some kind of funky design - from ones looking like soldiers helmets to pink girly ones that look like some kind of sun hat a posh bird would wear to Ascot. Apparently since the law was introduced deaths on the roads have halved. The funniest part is that you see these families bobbing around on their motorbikes, adults all trendy helmeted up while the baby on the handlebars of the bike has a wooly hat on...I guess until they are old enough to work their value is less...
- The internet is stupidly cheap in Vietnam - like 15p an hour. It is strange, most of the internet cafes are full of young kids playing on line games. I guess its way cheaper paying 15p and hour than buying Playstation 3's etc.
- They are mad for Valentines day in Vietnam.
- I am missing something about the Asian economy. Everything I read says that these people are earning $100 a month yet every person seems to have a mobile phone and in fact most young people have a state of the art mobile phone. How does that work?
- They have an inordinate amount of shops in Saigon selling safes.
- They have no McDonalds, Starbucks but seem ok with KFC.
Anyway, enough of general Vietnam. Saigon is a typical busy city with people bustling everywhere. I arrived just at the tail end of the Tet (Chinese New Year) celebrations which meant many places aware closed and the streets were relatively quiet. On my 1st day I was walking to the War Remnant Museum (used to be called the US War Crimes Museum...more on that topic later) and happened to walk past the Ho Chi Minh central park where there was some kind of Tet celebration going on. It was quite interesting with lots of families wandering around looking at bonsai trees etc (see pics)....all sponsored by Pepsi of course...[I have no idea why some young girl is currently looking at everything I write, picking up my book and poking me in back while I write...but she's smiling, pressing keys to fuck up my writing and can't appear to read English].
The war museum is mainly an exercise in anti-us propaganda. It has lost of interesting exhibits of old US weapons but nearly everything is overlaid by the term 'US aggressor' somewhere - even in reference to things that happened pre-1960 when the US was hardly involved. But the more time I spend here and the more I read on this area of the world the US does deserve a lot of what it gets, it just would be nice if the Vietnamese could give their side of the story too rather than everything being to slag of the US and blow their own trumpets. In the evening I had the fortunate experience of sitting beside 2 Californian blokes who invited me to join them as they had ordered too much food. They too had been to the war museum so obviously the topic of conversation moved onto US politics. Their opinion was that the US had not done much wrong, citing how they had saved South Korea and look at how well they are doing now...a fair point maybe but its quite impossible to gauge how well Indochina would be doing if they hadn't bombed the fuck out of it in the 1st place (it really is impossible to conecptualise how much bombing they did - you keep coming back to this statistic that they dropped 3 times more bombs here than were dropped in the whole second world war). Anyway, I went off them totally when they started lecturing me how 'they' had gone into Bosnia and saved that country too...my recollection of that one was that they had dropped a load of bombs but refused to commit ground troops like the rest of NATO. Anyway, being new, non-argumentative Simon I just swallowed my pizza with either anti pasta and pizza...
I also went to the Cu Chi tunnels where the Viet Cong used to hang out under ground in between popping up to kill US and South Vietnamese troops. Once again this turned out to be a propaganda exercise in convincing people how horrible the American aggressors were (complete with a stop to watch (and buy product of obviously) agent orange victims making souvenirs. It was the 1st time on this trip that I have been on an official tour. The tour was led by an ex-South Vietnamese soldier who had a very strange American English. The tour was fun if not that informative. The highlight of it was the shooting range...their for just over a dollar one can fire a variety of guns. The noise of things like M60 machine guns going off is incredible - when you have heard it seeing Steven Seagal in action is never going to be quite the same again - I now have no idea how he can still talk to Pamela Anderson while firing his gun in Under Siege 2 now...I went for the AK47, I bought 10 bullets but when I got to the range I only had 9. After a little argument about nicking bullets with the soldier guy he led me fire them off...brilliant..the recoil is pretty severe. I got close to the target but couldn't quite adjust my targeting to get bang on. The best bit was when I went to take a picture of Saigon cathedral later on that day a fresh 7.62 calibre AK47 bullet dropped out my camera case...how the hell I am going to get that home I haven't quite worked out as yet...I have some empty cartridges as well but they shouldn't be a problem give that you can buy jewels etc...
Anyway, the best irony about all this anti-American sentiment is that so many prices are quoted in dollars as well as Dong. All that effort and 3 million dead to come round to other sides way of thinking anyway.
An interesting observation that I came across in my book on why communism succeeded in Vietnam but failed in Cambodia (and goes some way to attempting to understand why an educated man like Pol Pot did what he did) was that 'the Vietnamese grow the rice; the Khmers (Cambodians) watch it grow and the Laotians listen to it grow. i.e. the Cambodians were far too lazy to make communism work hence Pol had to be increasingly brutal. Apparently when provided with fertilizers for the 1st time and seeing their rice yield double the next year most Cambodian peasants then only planted half the amount of crop!!
As is usual with cities 3 nights in the rather anonymous Saigon (it was pretty difficult to meet people there, I'm starting to think I may have to alter my bed at 9 routine if I ever want to talk to anyone again!!) was enough for me and I decided to head to the Mekong delta to see what that's all about.
Saigon Photos.
