Tag Archives: Travelling in Vietnam

We don’t usually take guided tours when we travel, preferring to DIY wherever possible. We had intended to catch a bus to Can Tho and from there meander our way through the Delta for a few days, but after spending longer than planned in Saigon decided to make up for lost time and take a 48 hour tour.

The downside to tours is you’re stuck with someone else’s itinerary; the upside is you don’t waste time seeking out accommodation, working out where to go, and organising how to get there (and back). Also, good tour guides can impart a lot of local knowledge that is not readily accessible to the independent traveller – especially in a place like Vietnam, where so few people outside the hospitality industry speak English.

My posts have been wordy so far, but pics beat textual description of the unique environment of the Mekong Delta, so here ya go:

The Delta is an incredibly fertile area that yields the most glorious produce. I had some fresh-cut pineapple that no superlatives can do justice to. I’ve tasted good pineapple in SE Asia before, but nothing close to this. It was so far superior to the acidic, tongue-ulcer-inducing Aussie variety that it might as well have been a different fruit.

Going by what we saw of the fresh produce sold daily at the street markets of Can Tho and Vinh Long, the quality of the local fruit and veges is outstanding across the range. As it is throughout Vietnam generally…

Concluding comments
I had imagined the Delta to be verdant and lush, bursting with jungley fecundity – something like a Rousseau rain forest painting. Another expectation that was way off the mark! The dominant hues of the landscape are browns, greys and dull greens. I enjoyed my time there, though. It was truly exotic, almost otherworldly (and the local tradition of erecting graves of the dead in the middle of the family paddy field, or in the case of deceased business owners, on their work premises, added to the weirdness).

If we’d had more time – much more – I would have liked to have seen more of the region, but looking back, taking the 48 hour tour was the right move. Excellent value @ $35 including transport, overnight accommodation, boat tours and visit to a floating market, English-speaking guide, and return trip to Saigon. Recommended, unless you have a particular interest in exploring the Delta more extensively. We went through Singh Tours.

One gripe: the locals treat their wonderfully bounteous waterways as a drain. The water is naturally murky with mud and silt, which I suspect covers a multitude of littering sins. Rubbish can be seen floating on the surface as you chug along in your tourist boat, and there is lots of discarded crap washing around against the shore. During a trip to a floating market near Can Tho, we saw a guy who was painting the mast of his fishing boat tip half a can of green paint overboard.

This apparent disregard for the environment is not confined to the Mekong Delta, unfortunately. Nha Trang, reputedly one of Vietnam’s most beautiful beaches, is severely compromised by the refuse in the water (I wouldn’t swim there), and I believe the situation is similar in other coastal resort areas. This is something the Vietnamese need to address post haste. Their land serves them up abundant choice produce, and defiling it as they currently do is short-sighted to say the least. They owe their land, their burgeoning tourist industry – and themselves – more respect.

Travel, Vietnam

Travels In Vietnam 2011: War Remnants Museum, Saigon

March 21, 2011 rolanstein Leave a comment

I knew that a visit to the War Remnants Museum was going to be confronting. Maybe that’s why we delayed our visit until our last day in Saigon. I’d heard from other travellers that there were several floors of grisly exhibits, descriptions and photos, including some foetuses preserved in jars with horrible deformities allegedly related to Agent Orange. However, as with my shooting range encounter during the Cu Chi tunnels tour, the most profoundly affecting aspects of the museum visit came from unexpected sources.

On entering the grounds of the museum, you’re presented with a range of open-air exhibits of military equipment and weaponry circa the ‘American War’, including tanks, planes and bombs. I wasn’t much interested in these, or in this sort of trophyism, but decided to have a brief wander prior to tackling the museum proper.

Out of nowhere a beggar appeared on a crutch. He was missing an eye and a leg, and before I had time to register the full extent of his incapacity, he was clutching my hand between the soft ends of the two stumps of his arms, which had been amputated above the elbow. My immediate instinct was to withdraw my hand in revulsion. Not an admission I’m proud of but that’s how it was, and worse was to come.

I forced myself to maintain physical and eye contact, as he pleaded for money and told me his story. He said he had been maimed by a landmine and had no way of making money other than to beg. On learning of my nationality, he added that his father was an Australian soldier who had deserted his mother when his period of service was over. I began to walk off. He fixed my arm between the pincers of his stumps and again begged for money. I mumbled that I was sorry, shook myself loose and fled. I did not look back.

I will not attempt to explain myself. There is no justification for what I did, whatever the reasons.

The Museum
The War Remnants Museum is blatantly propagandist. Before normalisation of relations with the US, it was known as the Museum of American War Crimes, then as the War Crimes Museum. That gives some indication of the skew of the exhibits. There are hair-raising descriptions of the torture meted out to the VC by the south Vietnamese and sanctioned by the US, and no mention of atrocities committed by the north (during or after the war).

The museum delivered in full on all the horrific photos and exhibits we’d been told about, but to be brutally honest, I became quickly desensitised to the imagery of carnage, which went on for wall after wall, floor after floor. The only photograph that cut through and remains with me still is of a helmeted American soldier shooting a baby lying on the roadside during the My Lai massacre.

I found myself rubbernecking to get a better look at a ghastly wound here, a mutilated corpse there, and I noticed many other visitors doing the same. By the time I arrived at the Agent Orange foetuses, I was sick of my inner ghoul and moved past with barely a glance.

A quote from an American mother lamenting the change the Army had wrought in her son packed a greater emotional punch than any of the ghastly images:
I gave them a good boy, and they gave me back a killer.

The ground floor photographs and quotes relating to Vietnam war protests around the world in the 60s and 70s were powerful, also. However, for me the most moving exhibit of all was a small frame on the wall on the ground floor, which contained the medals awarded to an American serviceman during his Vietnam service – including a Purple Heart.

That night, sitting at a table overlooking the street back in the District 1 party-zone, my partner and I had a delayed emotional reaction to the museum visit as we exchanged our thoughts and tried to come to terms with all we had seen. I had kept the beggar encounter to myself until then. As we stared into our beers, I was all too aware that it was of no help to him that I was sorry I had turned away. No help at all. Neither was the bitter taste of self-loathing at the back of my throat.

Soon we would regain our composure, change the subject and order something to eat. I caught the waiter’s eye, indicated two more beers.

I was glad we were leaving Saigon for the Mekong Delta in the morning.

More posts in this series on Vietnam:
Travels in Vietnam 2011: Intro
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Saigon
Travels In Vietnam 2011: The Cu Chi Tunnels
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Mekong Delta
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Dalat
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Nha Trang
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Hoi An
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Sleeper Bus Nightmare!
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Hue
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Eating and Drinking!
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Hype vs Reality
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Reflections & Wrap-up

Travel, Vietnam

Travels In Vietnam 2011: The Cu Chi Tunnels

March 19, 2011 rolanstein Leave a comment

The Cu Chi tunnels are an hour’s bus ride out of Saigon, in an area in which there was heavy fighting during the ‘American War’. The Viet Cong burrowed an extensive network of tunnels (120 km!) beneath the heavy clay surface under cover of night, disposing of the diggings in the nearby river so that there was no trace of their nocturnal activity. There are 3 levels of tunnels, each progressively deeper, tighter and stuffier, we were told. Some of the Viet Cong guerillas spent months underground. When they finally emerged, many had permanently impaired eyesight and respiratory function, and other enduring health problems.

I went into the entrance of one of the tunnels but backed out, partly because of claustrophobia, and partly because I have back problems and feared the nightmare scenario of my back going into spasm half-way along and being stuck underground unable to move. I had only the merest taste of the tunnels, then, but I can say that it is incomprehensible to me that anyone could spend more than an hour at most down there.

Consider this: the tunnels on display to the public have been widened to allow easier access by tourists who want to crawl through 20 metre sections to sample the conditions under which the Viet Cong lived during the war. According to our guide, the third and deepest level of tunnels, which he claimed were 30 metres underground, can only be negotiated by belly-crawling. How could the Americans ever hope to beat an enemy prepared to go to those lengths to defend their cause? Of course, the question is rhetorical…

Also on display are the trapdoor booby traps fashioned by the Viet Cong. There were multiple varieties, all designed to ensnare and torture their prey. It was impossible to get good pictures due to the number of tourists crowded around the traps, but here are a couple I managed to snap, along with two rather primitive paintings depicting entrapped American soldiers.

The traps were not intended to kill, but to maim and entrap, and thus demoralise and instill fear into the enemy. In all but the simplest traps, the spikes are angled to act like huge barbs, making rescue extremely difficult; pulling an entrapped soldier out against the lie of the spikes would shred the flesh and cause terrible injury, not to mention unbearable pain. Horrendous yes, but oh so ingenious to turn crude equipment into devastatingly effective weaponry against a technically far superior occupational military force. Clearly, the physical injuries of trapped soldiers were horribly severe, but the psychological effects on the rest of the unit must have been devastating. Every step held the threat of a concealed trapdoor…

Along with the traps and tunnels, there are trophies of war on display. This American tank, for example.

It was sobering to reflect that young soldiers must have perished in this metal tomb. Apparently this did not occur to the young tourists who clambered around the body and turret, draped themselves over the cannon, and struck playful poses for cameras.

As you troop after your guide, you hear loud bursts of gunfire coming from somewhere not far away. It’s only a small leap of imagination to envision how it might have been for soldiers engaged in combat in this region. The gunfire seemed to summon ghosts, to prise ajar the lid on the hell it must have been for those soldiers, whichever side they fought for. Quite unnerving.

The source of the gunfire is a range where tourists pay 200-300,000 dong ($10-15) to fire off 10 rounds from rifles and machine-guns used during the war (eg: carbines, AK47s, M16s and M60s).

This is undeniably tacky and in poor taste, but the bucks pour in as the tourists line up to bang off some lead. And I confess, I have long wanted to fire an AK47. I would never have another chance. I decided that today was the day.

I went down to the range, where the guns were fixed to pivots. That was disappointing, that pivot stuff. I wanted to hold an AK47 and spray bullets around from the hip, as soldiers do in the field. Really, though, it was the most fleeting of disappointments. The truth is, I was taken aback – stunned, actually – at the ear-bursting loudness of the exploding shells. Unbelievably loud. Painful, in fact. You couldn’t bear not to cover your ears. The sheer brutality of these fucking things, the monstrous shattering percussion, was horrifying! When guns are fired in the movies, you don’t get any real sense of their deafening force.

Shocked, appalled, suddenly the stupid romance of firing an AK47 was gone for me – and, I am certain, gone forever. I got as far from the obscenity of the range and its bullshit macho fantasies as I could, but the blasts were unremitting, inescapable.

I heard those guns long after we left the Cu Chi tunnels for Saigon. I hear them still. And the impact they had on me was far more powerful than anything else I saw or experienced at Cu Chi. May I, may you, never hear shots fired in anger. Or at all, as far as I’m concerned.

The Boomtown Rap

Tag Archives: Travelling in Vietnam

Travels In Vietnam 2011: Mekong Delta

Travels In Vietnam 2011: War Remnants Museum, Saigon

Travels In Vietnam 2011: The Cu Chi Tunnels

movie reviews + occasional other musings