Big Trip To Vietnam

For two weeks I cooled my heels while the students took their national exams and promptly ditched their classes, a week before their scheduled vacation was supposed to start. When all of that was over, I blew every last dollar I had on one big fabulous trip to Vietnam.

Say the name of that country, and all the things that come to mind are ones you learned in history classes or things your parents told you. I imagine that I grew up hearing about the country the same way the baby boomers grew up listening to stories about the Japanese. But America no longer fights wars in East Asia. The Japanese are known for their television sets and cars, the Vietnamese for the turnaround of their economy. Sitting in my room now in Angkor Chum, I can probably look around me and point to five different things that either came from or were manufactured in Vietnam. Given its place in American history and for the influence it has on the rest of the Indochina region, it was an impossible place not to visit and discover.

The bus left from Phnom Penh on April 5th at 8:00 AM in the middle of the sweat, smog, and dusty air that inundates Cambodia’s capital at all hours of the day. 200 kilometers away was Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

I only felt relaxed when I was on the bus, and it started pulling out of the city. In the guesthouse that morning, I rode the elevator down to the lobby with a man who carried a small pistol beneath his shirt line. His bleary eyed mistress stood stolid in a polka dot dress. Feelings of calm and security were only going to ensue when I was safely out of the city. The Phnom Penh-Saigon express leaving from Sorya Bus Station was a good one I was told, and they lived up to their reputation. The man in charge of the mission had obviously herded large numbers of barangs across the border beyond the ferry crossing at Neak Lueng.

Neak Leung. We, and by we I mean the United States government before I was born (thus having nothing to do with any actions taken by we), bombed Neak Leung during the Vietnam War. We were after communists. We were always after communists. The trouble was that we always did not get the communists, and when we bombed Neak Leung we killed several hundred civilians who did not give a damn about a dead white German or a dead white Russian who came up with some silly idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They simply wanted enough rice to eat. There is that scene in the movie The Killing Fields, the one where Dith Prahn and Syndey go to Neak Leung? There are just dead bodies everywhere. It is horrifying. Today there is nothing but a ferry crossing today in NL. There was even a Peace Corps volunteer stationed here a while ago.

In passport control, I wondered if the man behind the counter who looked at my photo remembered the war. It had been thirty five years since it happened. Just like anyone who remembered the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, you would have to be older than forty to remember it. That’s almost two generations who have grown up never having lived through it. I was sure that I was going to meet people who remembered the war, and that I was going to be embarrassed to explain that I was tourist visiting from America. You know, that country that caused the death of nearly five million Vietnamese people? Sorry about that. It all happened before I was born.

When I stepped past the customs area, I was in Vietnam. Suddenly everyone on the street was wearing cone shaped hats, and I felt like I was in an Oliver Stone movie. The fields were all green with plentiful irrigation works, and everyone riding a motorcycle was wearing a helmet shaped like one used for batting in American baseball. Sometimes the seat covers of the moto matched the design on the helmet. Thus, my first impression of Vietnamese people was made for their fiendish color coordination.

The bus dropped me off at Pham Ngu Lao, the backpacker’s area with enough bars, hostels, pizza parlors, drug peddling moto drivers, and prostitutes to make any traveler feel at home. With my backpack, I walked and tripped over the feet of many Vietnamese café dwellers as I scanned the street for an inexpensive hotel. Stopping inside one named Hotel 79, the lady behind the desk barked a friendly “One room with fan, eight dollars!” I took the room on the top floor, and she took my passport to hold behind the desk. To make a fuss about that would be useless; All hotel owners in Vietnam are required by law to hold your passport and report the information as to who is staying there to the local police.

The Hotel was not the best place I found, but I was out during most of the day anyway and I just needed a place to sleep in. Besides, there a little balcony down the hall from me where I could sit at night and peer into people’s apartments as they played cards with each other or sat on their beds. It was cool on that balcony too, and I looked at the skyline some nights and thought about where the hell I was.

Saigon, Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City. There were people and chaos in every direction. The techniques I used for crossing the street in Cambodia worked here as well, but with so much more traffic it was a little more difficult. I walked near the Saigon river during that first late afternoon I was there, and an old lady with a heavy Chinese bicycle helped me cross the street. Here is what I imagine she said to me.

“You need to cross the street? Okay let’s cross the street together. Wait for it...now go! Don’t rush! Hold out your hand like this, palm in front. That’s how you indicate to cars to slow down.”

I thanked her in French, and she smiled.

Thin, tall, concrete houses lined the streets, and noodle stands were abundant in every direction. Everywhere I looked I seemed to see more and more people. I took a walk near the Hotel Continental and The Caravel Hotel, both famous for different reasons. The terrace bar at the Continental, so famously mentioned in The Quiet American, is no longer there, and Tu Do (Freedom) street has been renamed to Dong Khoi (General Uprising). The entire neighborhood was also littered with Cartier, Longines, Gucci, and other high end boutique stores that made me feel very poor simply being in their presence. This was too much to handle. I wandered over back towards one of the main avenues near the bus station. In the noodle shop, I wolfed down my first bowl of Pho. The thick noodles came to me in a steaming bowl with thin slices of chicken. It was incredibly good, and I was incredibly hungry. Somehow in the heated light of a city in twilight I found my way back to the hotel. The shower and slumber did me good, but the bed was hard and I woke up the next day more eager to get going and see the city rather than get more rest.

Through the streets, shops, and women in conical hats selling goldfish, I suddenly found myself standing in front of the Reunification Palace. While the large building was certainly palatial, the truth is that it did not always have the “reunification” part of its name. In the old days of war and countries that acted like dominoes, this was the home of the South Vietnamese president. Like any corrupt regime backed by the largess of American power, it was equipped with lavish dining rooms, meeting halls, movie theaters, map rooms, and other places of importance. It also smelled like my old elementary school.

In the war remnants museum, the full scale of human suffering during wartime was on display. There were artifacts from the My Lai massacre, photographs of people suffering from Agent Orange birth defects, rifles, guns, tanks. In a special corner, the well where Senator Robert Kerry killed an entire family was on display. On the second floor of the building, a collection of photographs detailed the war from its beginning to end. A plaque in a glass case read, “To the people of Vietnam, I was wrong, I am sorry,” and with it were a bronze star, the gold star, and several purple hearts. Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope was on sale in the gift shop.

Lunch was a steamed clay pot of rice, green peppers corn, mushrooms, and pork at a restaurant named Coffee Cup. I was surprised by the inexpensiveness of the place given its decor. The second floor was dark and insulated from the outside glare, and there were oil paintings on the walls. A fountain was seen in a park beyond the window, and I felt a little underdressed. Cole Porter was on the stereo singing “Night and Day,” and I ate while looking at the men and women climbing up the staircase in business attire. Yes, I was the only foreigner in the place, and I was indeed attracting stares. But this is how my life usually is, so what did that matter?

In the afternoon, I strolled over to the green spaces hidden inside the Jade Emperor pagoda and the Botanical Gardens and Zoo. The sun was bearing down a little more now than earlier, and I spent an hour or two sitting underneath a giant tree in the gardens. The animals were on display, but there is something very sad about seeing a caged tiger pacing up and down inside of its cell.

Around four o’clock I was in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. How funny was it to see a Notre Dame, in Saigon in all places! I went inside, but I was disappointed to find that the place lacked any sort of character other than depictions of Jesus as an Asiatic. It was very Norman, and, as a matter of course, very boring.

In the old French post office, a giant portrait of Ho Chi Minh hung above the wooden counters of incoming and outgoing mail. A local man buying postcards told me that the girl working behind the desk wanted to know how old I was, but was too shy to ask. The three of us started laughing, and I almost responded to her in Khmer but caught myself just in time to say it in English. She turned out to be very pleasant, and gave me precise instructions as to how to mail my postcards to America. Another walk on the Dong Khoi happened but only because it was on my way home. In the fading twilight, couples danced in the boulevard pavilions and the sat close to each other on their disengaged motorcycles.

At a table near a busy intersection, I watched the motorcycles roll by as the waitresses in blue Tiger Beer uniforms served the patrons and ate the Vietnamese version of Lok Lak (The Cambodians say the dish is Chinese in origin, but the Cambodian version has more sauce and is therefore better)

I did not plan on going to see the Cu Chi tunnels on the trip, but because the tour included a trip to the Cao Dai temple I decided to go. Most of the day was spent on the bus with our guide Minh. “Easy name to remember, yes? Like Ho Chi Minh!” Minh smiled, but never laughed at any of his own jokes. He had been an interpreter for the 101st airborne division during the war. Now he took people on tours to the former guerrilla bases. “History first, business second,” was the mantra he kept repeating.

The bus ride to Tanyin allowed me to reread some passages that Graham Greene had written about Caodaism. “Caodaism, the invention of a Cochin civil servant, was a synthesis of the three religions. The Holy See was at Tanyin. A pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor.”

Sure enough, the scene in the main hall of the Cao Dai temple was a spectacle. The foreigners wandered around the balconies while the devotees of the temple performed a ceremony and sang for our entertainment. Motionless dragons circled around pink columns, and a gong rang every few minutes to let the congregation to lean forward on their knees and touch their heads to the floor in Muslim fashion. A choir of teenage girls dressed in the immaculate sang to the accompaniment of a small group of instruments. A painting of Jesus with Victor Hugo and Buddha was somewhat comforting, for the former is usually seen bereft of company. I wondered if the followers of Cao Dai, with their robes and cloth hats, thought us as strange as we thought them. “In the Caodaist faith all truths are reconciled, and truth is love,” said the Bishop to Thomas Fowler. Perhaps someone’s dinner is reconciled by the income of the tourist visit.

In Cu Chi, I crawled through the old guerilla tunnels and toured the Vietnamese equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. While it was all very informative, I thought that the animatronic robots which were making homemade weapons was a bit too much. Graham Greene wrote that the Vietnamese could turn a tail pipe into a mortar, and I did not quite realize that that was entirely possibly until I saw the robots doing it. While the other tourists took pictures of the tiger traps and homemade bombs, I left those alone. The Vietnamese taught the Khmer Rouge how to make those awful things, and they used them in Angkor Chum during the 1970’s. Kroo Sambok told me once how they used to trick people into walking into them.

At the end of the tour, we watched a video about the “heroes of Cu Chi.” Among them was someone named “Thia,” who “despite being cute and shy managed to blow up many tanks, earning her the American killer award.” When the movie stopped, the logo of the DVD player popped up on the screen. It could have been Samsung, or Toshiba, or some brand like that, but it had to be California USA electronics. I laughed. It was incredibly inappropriate, but I laughed anyway. American consumerism conquers all!

I needed to get out of Saigon, so I caught the early bus that went to Dalat up in the central highlands. Out the window, there were multiple skinny houses with statues of the Virgin Mary displayed prominently on the top floor. The girl sitting next to me was from Vienna, Austria, but from the tan on her long lovely legs I would never have guessed that.

In Dalat, I was confronted on every corner by a motorcycle gang named “The Easy Riders.” They aggressively promised tours of the countryside and transportation to various towns around Dalat, and displayed themselves in leather and gleaming metal perched on Chinese motorcycles. How difficult it was to tell them that they frightened me, and that I did not need their services.

The air in the hills of Dalat was lovely and cool. I would have stayed there if there was something more to do. The lake, a central attraction, was dried up during that time of year, and the town itself offered little more than an old French train station and a luxurious art deco Sofitel. The latter was an art deco former residence of last emperor of Vietnam.

In the concrete market near the lake, I took a stroll among the strawberry and flower vendors to the delight of my olfactory senses. The girl who sold me a kilo of the former had an old uncle who had no arms and no legs. He sat on a mat dressed in coat, scarf, hat, and glasses. There was a feeling in my stomach that somehow we were responsible for that.

The morning after I arrived, there was much lounging to do in a coffee shop while talking with the owner and watching the students roll by on their bicycles. The students wore blue trousers, blue sweaters, white shirts, and shoes; this was much more stylish than their Cambodian cousins. The woman, Tu Anh, who owned the shop chatted with me in English and told me that she hated leaving Dalat for any place else.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Anyplace else is too hot,” she told me. That was a good enough reason as any.

In Nha Trang I stared at the tourists, slept, and sunned myself like a cat after the meal. Boutiques, backpackers, and bloated resort hotels lined the beach. I hate backpackers. Yes, I am tourist when I travel to other places and I do carry a backpack. But a backpacker is a totally different breed. The only requirements to be one are as follows: one must own a ridiculously overstuffed backpack, dress incredibly badly and inappropriately, have an obnoxious attitude, and must have a propensity for drink; thus making them more obnoxious.

And so I found myself mixed in among these people in a beach resort town where The Sheraton Hotel looked like it had a flying saucer on top of its roof, and the Sofitel owned its own island.

Sitting on the beach, one could look at the island across the bay or the hills in the surrounding area. It almost reminded me of Cannes, only without the casinos and an abundance of the elderly. A visit to an old Cham temple and the National Aquatic museum kept me occupied when I was not sitting in ocean side cafés or swimming. When I was ready to leave, I discovered that the only transportation services going north were leaving at night. Upon booking myself for the night train to Hué, I found a deserted spot underneath a palm tree and lounged there for most of the day. A bookseller sold me a photocopied edition of Catch-22, and when dusk came I moved myself down the beach closer to the taxi stands. What a bizarre sight I must have been; a white foreigner sitting alone on a beach with a big blue backpack. A student came up to me and asked if she could speak English with me. I invited her to sit, and she peppered me with various questions that most students of English ask. It was also a chance to compare and contrast Vietnamese students with the Cambodian type, and I managed to get off a few questions of my own. In a moment of epicurean curiosity, I also asked her if she often ate Vietnamese equivalent of pro hok (fish paste). The student made a face that suggested “Ew!” as well as maybe “how on earth do you know what that is?” I said to her that I was making my way up the coast from Saigon, and she said she had never been to Ho Chi Minh City.

On the night train from Nha Trang, I slept on a fold out bed in a compartment of six people. I was the only foreigner, and I was very thankful for that. There was an elderly married couple, as well as several gentlemen. They all tried out their English, and I did my best to tell them where I was from as well as where I was going. They explained how to pull down the folding bunk, and I drifted off to sleep to the sounds of snoring and the rumbling of the tracks beneath us. In the morning, I could see through the window rows of steep mountains covered in lush vegetation sloping down towards wide mouthed bays. Wooden boats with fishing nets floated along the edges of the water. We rolled through tunnels and always along the edges of cliffs. When I had climbed out of my bunk, I sat by old man in a gray cardigan who asked me that most wonderful question, “Parlez-vous français?” We smiled at each other, and immediately apologized to one another for our poor pronunciation and usage of grammar. I explained who I was, where I was traveling from, and he explained it to the others in Vietnamese. The old man in the cardigan introduced himself as Laîn, and said it meant “The Forest.” The man asked me if I was afraid of traveling in Vietnam, and I replied that I had had no problems at all. I asked him what he thought of Cambodia, and he confessed that he knew only that it was very hot. We said our goodbyes at the train station when I alighted there.

In Hué, I strolled along the shady riverside, visited Ho Chi Minh’s high school, and took a tour of some lovely summer homes that the Nguyen emperors happened to make their permanent residences when they died.

From Hué I took the train to Ninh Binh, away from the tourists and the backpackers. The landscape was wet, green, and lovely, like Cambodia at the height of the rainy season. The man I sat next to was British, and he let me know it from the minute I boarded the train. From the way he talked, it seemed as if he had very few chances to talk for the past few days. He worked for the transportation authority, and had some interesting comments on Ho Chi Minh City’s infrastructure. When dinner came, we ordered food from the meal cart that came around and ate at a tiny fold out table near the window.

In Ninh Binh, it was cold and rainy. I slept with a blanket on, and reveled in the warmth taken from a hot shower. I feared neither the heat of the sun, nor the exhaustion of being overheated. The tourists were far away, and I spent the day walking around the villages of Tam Coc. Limestone crags shot up from the wet and green rice fields, and the row boats along the river moved gracefully up and down the landscape. Several ladies stopped their bicycles and motorcycles to ask me in French where I was going and if I needed help getting there.

In the afternoon, I made a pilgrimage to the cathedral at Phat Diem. Graham Greene watched the French battle the Viet Minh from the bell tower during the first Indochinese war, and captured it in the beginning pages of Chapter Four of The Quiet American. The structure is still there; a mixture of eastern and western styles with a Christian emphasis. The statues of Christ are there, but the complex looks just like a Chinese pagoda with crosses on the tops of buildings; “More Bhuddist than Christian.” Waiting for the bus back to Ninh Binh, I laughed with an old woman who kept feeding me fried corn cakes because I told her I liked them so much.

From Ninh Binh I rode the local buses all the way past Hanoi along the coast past Hai Phong to Ha Long Bay. The driver stopped at almost every corner, and worked the horn almost as much as he worked the gears. At a concrete rest stop, he told me how to eat my pineapple slices dipped in rock salt and chili peppers. Cambodians do the same for mangoes, but I could not figure out a way to communicate that with him.

In the morning, I went on a tour of the islands in the bay among the slowly lifting fog. A couple from the UK on the boat kept saying, “But we just left Scotland!” I could not have asked for better weather. When the tour was over, I caught a bus back to Hanoi and went out with my new found friends to try to local beer. The pale ale was called Beer Hoi, and was 4,000 Vietnamese dong per glass (somewhere around $0.20). The three of us sat in a small well lit alley next to old Vietnamese men. They were also drinking Beer Hoi and smoking out of long water pipes made of bamboo.

When it came to the last day in Vietnam, I was extremely tired. Hanoi with all of its art boutiques, art galleries, and government buildings did not interest me as much as the frenzy of Ho Chi Minh City. Men in woolen caps, cardigans, and sandals strolled along lake, and wedding pictures were taken and taken again. Of course, there were the usual people in the youth hostel to eat with and explain why it was that I was living in Asia. I love explaining what the Peace Corps is to foreigners. They think it is absolutely bizarre that anyone in the western world should live the way I do.

The night before my 6:00AM flight to Ho Chi Minh, I slept on a marble slab in the airport until 3:45 AM. A large man with a machine gun told me I could sleep downstairs but not where I was. I make it a point not to argue with large men armed with machine guns.

In between airports, I suddenly began to imagine what it would be like fly home to America. But that will not be for another few months.