Slow Start in Vietnam

Note: we got a virus on one of our camera cards, so this post is light on pictures for now.  Will try to add some later.
 
Our time in Vietnam did not have auspicious beginnings.  I woke up in Phnom Penh, Cambodia with a pounding headache, not looking forward to the six hour trip that was ahead.  After almost vomiting during our steamy shuttle bus ride to the jetty, I tried to sleep away most of the three hour boat ride down the Mekong River.  Apparently, it was a nice ride.  Maybe I'll see it next time.  By the time we crossed into Vietnam, the headache was the worst of my life and I no longer chalked it up to general fatigue.  That night my eyes felt like they would pop out of my skull.  Combined with the unrelenting urge to throw up, it meant I didn't sleep that night in Chau Doc.  As I wrote in another post, we determined that I had contracted dengue fever.  We were supposed to continue on to Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by most residents, and referred to as Saigon in this post going forward because I like the sound of it better) the following day, but I wasn't going anywhere.  As I attempted to rest on our hard bed, the skies opened up and the rainstorm proceeded to pour water into our depressingly dark, and clearly not water-sealed, hotel room.  Hello, Vietnam, nice to be here.
I still didn't feel well the next day, but was determined to get out of that hotel and made the six hour bus ride to Saigon.  The bus was actually a van that was too hot and too small, and is firmly entrenched as the worst bus ride I've taken on this trip.  It would have been a miserable experience even if I hadn't been sick.  I'm also pretty sure we paid too much for it.  If you're wondering if things eventually got better for us in Vietnam, don't worry, they did.  That night, after barely eating for days, I ate a whole roll of Oreos, which I'm pretty sure cured the dengue.

Although we had not originally planned to spend too much time in Saigon, our recent illnesses and desire to slow our travel down meant that we took it easy in this city for five days.  Even though it lacks much of an aesthetic appeal, we both liked Saigon.  There's a frenetic energy here that we haven't experienced anywhere else; the city is packed with bustling activity.  The most obvious manifestation of this is the traffic.  We've been to cities where we thought the traffic was crazy (Quito, Piura, Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh), but we didn't fully understand traffic.

What separates the Saigon from everywhere else is the sheer number of motorcycles and scooters, none of which care for things like lanes, right of way, traffic lights (which aren't commonplace, anyway) or the distinction between the road and the sidewalk.  Watching the roads here during rush hour is truly mesmerizing.  Of course, you can't just watch the roads, as you eventually have to cross them, and I can't imagine there are many cities that are more dangerous for this activity.  Here, you simply have to step out into traffic, picking your gaps between the motorbikes and advance slowly.  Some praying is also involved.  There is almost a sense of accomplishment when you cross the street successfully, and I've had the urge to high five Magge after a few of the tougher crossings.

The commercial activity here is also striking.  While Vietnam is still technically a communist country, with the communist party being the only legal political party, its economy is very much a market one.  Like China, I'm not exactly sure how they reconcile the two ideologies.  In a jarring juxtaposition, you can see flags bearing the communist hammer and sickle lining streets that have big Louis Vuitton and FCUK stores.

The two most interesting sites in the city we've seen have to do with the Vietnam War, which is called the Resistance War Against America here, or more simply, the American War.  We first visited the Reunification Palace, which was formerly known as the Independence Palace when it was the seat of the South Vietnam government.  North Vietnamese tanks burst through the gates on April 30, 1975, ending a war that lasted nearly twenty years.  The palace, which is a reminder not only of the war but of how bad architecture was in the 1960s, is still sometimes used for official functions, but is now essentially a museum.  Most of the rooms are frozen in time and adorned with old tactical maps, rotary phones and ugly carpets.

Just as interesting was the War Remnants Museum, originally called The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government before being renamed the Museum of American War Crimes.  It wasn't nearly as one-sided and jingoistic as I had expected, and was very well done.  The best exhibit covered photographs taken by photojournalists that died during the war.  Some sections of the museum, particularly those that covered the My Lai Massacre and the effects of Agent Orange that are still being felt today (I could only take so many pictures of deformed children before I decided to move on to the next exhibit). 

We took one day trip out of the city to see the Grand Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi tunnels.  Cao Daiism is a relatively young religion, being less than ninety years old.  While approximately seventy percent of its facets are Buddhist, it also takes aspects from Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism and probably others that I'm forgetting.  There are about 3 million followers today, most of them in South Vietnam.  Our tour group was able to watch one of temple's four daily prayer sessions.  The temple was interesting as a side trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, but it's not worth the trip alone. 

I read about the Cu Chi tunnels before leaving the U.S., and it's been at the top of my list of things I've wanted to see since then.  There were over 200km of tunnels used by the guerrilla Viet Cong as communication and supply routes, living quarters and combat.  Riddled with booby traps and difficult to find, the Americans turned to bombing the area, which became one of the most scorched in the history of warfare.  Today, tourists whisked through on a conveyor belt-like tour to venture through the tunnels, experience some of the food eaten by the VC (tapioca root dipped in crushed peanuts and sesame seeds, not too bad) and see examples of booby traps.  Oh yeah, and shoot guns.  Visitors can choose between Russian made AK-47 (used by the VC) or American made M1, M16 or M60.  Of course, the only two people in our group of thirty to shoot the guns were the only two American males.  I'm sure the rest of the group rolled their eyes when they saw us raise our hands in interest.  I shot the M60, which is the same machine gun Rambo used in First Blood.  I won't lie, it was cool.  I was supposed to shoot at a target, but I was too busy getting an adrenaline rush.

Making sandals from old tires, but like the VC did

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Into the tunnels

These tunnels have actually been expanded to twice their war-time size to allow fat Western tourists in

After a week in south Vietnam, we're about to take an epic thirty-one hour train ride north to Hanoi.  With dengue firmly behind us now, we're both really looking forward to it.