After a 3 hour ferry ride from Phu Quoc to Rach Gia, we had another moto drive to the bus station. Prior to this though, I managed to cause myself an injury by falling down some steps and landing on a concrete bench. Ouch. The bruise on my bum was really quite spectacular, and not really the ideal preparation for a 5 hour minibus journey. Ho hum.
The journey to Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as the locals, and us, prefer to call it) was pretty uninspiring - and pretty uncomfortable. I had in my head that the Mekong Delta would be a beautiful unspoilt rural area, but from the little we saw, it was really built up. A little disappointing.
I had it in my head that I’d hate Saigon - most people I’d spoken to who’d been to Vietnam had hated their first Vietnamese city and loved their second. But I actually really liked it - yes, the traffic is crazy, and you do have to just take a deep breath and plunge across the road (there’s a simple rule: Motos will steer round you, cars won’t). There’s definitely a sense of defiance about Saigon ‘Yes, we may have lost the war, but we’re still way cooler than the North’. There’s certainly still a rivalry between North & South Vietnam that remains to this day.
Our first day in Saigon we decided to explore the city, heading to the market, then Notre Dame cathedral (Catholicism was introduced originally by the Portugese in the 17th Century, then embedded during the French colonial period, and to this day, 8% of the population remain Catholic).
Having checked out the gates to the Reunification Palace that were crashed through via a tank on the 30th Aprril 1975, signalling the end of the American War, we went on to the War remnants museum which took us through the history of the Vietnamese struggle for independence from the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu to the American War (as it’s known over here). Propaganda is pretty well entrenched here, quite naturally I suppose, but it still had a jarring sense compared to the fairly even handed reporting of the Khmer Rouge struggle in Cambodia.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the museum was the exhibition of war photography by correspondents who had been killed during the war - it was fascinating to see the photographs taken of perhaps the first truly Media-present war - apparently American Army colonels used to ask the journalists & photographers for the latest information about the war as typically they were very close to the action. The photos were stunning, and even-handed, made all the more poignant by the captions beside them ’this photograph was recovered from the camera after his death - the last photo he ever took’.
Very moving.
I perhaps therefore should have felt more moved by the exhibits on the atrocities committed during the war. The most significant measure of success during the war was the body count, and the ’Search & Destroy’ motto that was originally designed to refer to military installations was soon expanded to cover the villages where the entire population was killed in case they were harbouring any Viet Cong. There were also a number of exhibits on the after effects of Agent Orange and the other defoliants the Americans dropped across swathes of the jungle - miscarriage & terrible deformities have caused terrible suffering to the Vietnamese people.
But somehow, it still didn’t touch me in quite the way the plight of the Cambodian people did.
The following day, we went off on a little jaunt to the Cu Chi tunnels. These were a series of fighting tunnels that the Vietcong hung out in during the day to avoid American bombers. The Vietnam/American war was always going to be long drawn out & largely unwinnable: The Americans fought during the day, the Vietnamese at night, the Americans by air, the Vietnamese on land.
The tour began with a fantastic propoganda video. Apparently this “crazy batch of American devils slaughtered women & children & even shot pots and pans”. Imagine that, as Ben would say.
The tunnels were fab - we could crawl through 120 metres of tunnel used by the Vietcong, including a chapel for wedding ceremonies and the hospital. Even though the tunnels have been slightly widened for Westerners, they still require either stooping or crawling on hands and knees. With only a few minor injuries (a kick to the head here, a bruised elbow there) we made it through the full 120 metres.
After this, we paused for a brief snack of tapioca (ick) and green tea before possibly the highlight of the day: the shooting range. We clubbed together and bought 10 bullets for a Russian built AK47 used by the Vietcong - Rox & I had 2 bullets each, the boys 3. On entering the shooting gallery, I immediately lost an octave of hearing when a gun went off - it may sound obvious, but those things are LOUD and health & safety is for wimps in ‘Nam (Ear defenders? You can have a pair of 1980s Sony Walkman foam covered headphones & that’s your lot)
The recoil on the AK47 is massive - the guns were mounted to avoid any accidental fatalities but the force was amazing - it’s hard to imagine the tiny Vietnamese women using these things night after night. Ollie then decided to fulfill a childhood fantasy & bought 10 bullets for the M60 machine gun (I think it’s a machine gun - I’m a girl, I don’t know this stuff). The 10 were fired off in 2 seconds, but apparently it was 2 seconds of absolute awesomeness and one of the major highlights of the trip.
The trip to Cu Chi was a definite highlight of Saigon, but as a whole, I actually really liked Saigon - apart from the slight downside of getting violently ill for really the first time in Asia. I felt wiped out for about a day (apparently it was very amusing watching me try to zip my bag up - I kept having to have a little lie down after each attempt), but was recovered just about enough to get onto our first overnight sleeper bus to Nha Trang.
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