Tag Archives: Travelling in Vietnam

Travels In Vietnam 2011: Saigon

What’s In A Name?
Ho Chi Minh City is such a mouthful of a name, and so bland compared with the exotic and evocative Saigon. Evidently, the locals agree. They routinely default to the old name, and that’s license enough for me to do the same. Besides, Uncle Ho expressly stated that he didn’t want anything named after him. Unlike the Hanoi government, I’m happy to respect his wishes.

Significantly, incidentally, the further north you go the more the modern name is used.

This is not a travel guide, so my treatment of Saigon is going to be limited to a few brief personal observations. How could it be otherwise, when I was there for only 6 days (longer than intended, actually).

The city is divided into districts. District 1 is the tourist area, where most travellers spend most of their time in Saigon. The guts of this area is packed with hotels, restaurants and bars, street vendors, the odd girlie joint, CD stores, beauty parlours, money changers, tour companies – you name it, and you can probably find it. It’s pretty crowded during the day, but come nightfall and it really starts to pump. There are people everywhere, thronging through the streets, eating, drinking. Tourists outnumber Vietnamese.

Our First Night
On the night we arrived, after establishing ourselves in our hotel we ventured outside, smack bang into the action. The cheapest al fresco beer locales were packed with Caucasians pissing on and looking oh so cool as they sat back appraising us newbies with mild scorn (or so we fancied), as we drifted along the street. We stared about like startled rabbits caught in a crossfire of headlights. It was all a bit intimidating.


(not quite what I’m referring to, but it’s the only pic I took)

We soon realised that no one is more than a day away from looking cool in the District 1 party zone. The turnover of tourists is huge. Next night, we were the veteran travellers sipping on Saigon Green at 50c a pop during ‘happy hour’ (which lasts 4 hours, or longer), watching bug-eyed newcomers lumping their backpacks along.

The dizzy array of restaurants in this area covers a wide variety of cuisines – Italian, Indian, Middle-Eastern, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, French, German… There are burgers, pizzas, kebabs, and the ubiquitous American fast food chains. You can get just about anything you want – except authentic Vietnamese food! That’s surprisingly hard to come by, although there are plenty of street vendors selling fried snacks, and many of the restaurants have a ‘Vietnamese’ section in their menus.

Once we’d had our fill of sweaty exploring of the main streets and dodging the constant stream of motor bikes, vendor carts and other sundry traffic coursing up and down the roads, we searched in vain for a restaurant or hawker stall offering appealing-looking Vietnamese food. In the end, we settled for a bowl of pho from a street stall near our hotel – what else? If there is a national dish of Vietnam, pho is it. Stuffed full of herbs and greens in an aromatic light stock with slices of beef or chicken and noodles, it was nice and fresh and filling, but similar to the pho we buy in Northbridge, in Perth. I expected it to be different, better.

I bought a nightcap can of local beer – 333, or ‘bah bah bah’ as the locals call it – for the princely sum of 15,000 dong (75c). In sensory overload we retreated to our hotel.

The Motorcycle Miracle of Saigon
With the exception of the expansive, bustling Ben Thanh Markets, the ‘sights’ were nothing much – mostly uninspiring remnants of the city’s French colonial period. The boulevards and coffee and cocktail haunts of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American were nowhere to be seen.

For me, by far the most remarkable aspect of Saigon is its motorbike traffic. At peak periods, it’s a swarming mass of humanity sandwiched between metal helmets and Hondas that somehow, miraculously, keeps flowing, despite an absence of traffic controls. Riders cut across each other, weave in and out, honk to let the guy in front know they’re at their elbow. Everyone gets where they’re going (which is in multiple directions), no one loses their temper, and there is never a jam. It’s truly a community on wheels, and it has to be. If the good folk of Saigon had the selfish and sometimes downright spiteful attitude of Perth drivers, the traffic would be constantly locked up.


The pictures above don’t come close to depicting the Saigon traffic phenomenon – some experiences are not recordable, whatever the media.

Parting the Red Sea
Crossing the road as a pedestrian is hair-raising (well, for people with hair…I was fine) – until you get to understand the system. It’s pretty simple, really. Just venture out into the fray and keep walking slowly to the other side. Don’t stop, and don’t change your pace. Motorbike riders are used to avoiding pedestrians, but you have to stay predictable in your movement. Oh, and give way to cars and other larger vehicles!

I got the knack quickly, but I did baulk at crossing during the crazy peak periods. One evening when the motorbike madness was in spectacular full bloom, a Brazilian guy asked us for directions (the fool!). We chatted a while, then he bade us farewell and set off into the maelstrom. Initially raising a hand like a traffic cop against the oncoming charge of bikes, he put his head down and just kept walking. I have no idea how the riders avoided him. They were shoulder to shoulder, but parted either side of him as he waded forward with the conviction of Moses. We stood looking after him slack-jawed until he made it to the other side and disappeared.

Cholon
District 5 is the old Chinese area of Cholon. We took a taxi over there one morning in search of The Authentic. We never made it out of the enormous, hectic and hassley market area. Several times, sweating singleted workers carting or heaving produce through the narrow aisles between stalls shoved us bodily – and wordlessly – out of the way. No quarter given for silly gawping tourists here!

The diversity of foodstuffs was mind-boggling. Here’s a tiny sample. If only someone had been able to speak English and tell us what the hell half the stuff was.





The Other Districts
District 3 is the business and admin area, and the site of some of the tourist sights and locales, most notably the War Remnants Museum. I think it’s safe to say that few tourists make it to the other Districts, except on tour buses on the way through to destinations outside Saigon. I would have been interested in having a look at District 4, where the ex-pats live, but didn’t make it this time. Next trip, maybe.

One quick observation. We twice bussed through the outer suburbs of Saigon – once on the way to and from the Cu Chi tunnels and again when on tour to the Mekong Delta. Most notable for me was the organisation of the shops. There are long stretches of pavement lined with shop after shop selling garden sculptures. Then there is a garden plants area (bonsai is extremely popular). Another for baby clothes. White goods. Bikes. Entertainment units. Household furniture. Mechanical repairs. Religious icons. And so it goes, on and on. Curious, this apparent partition fetish. It’s as if the whole city was planned from a flow chart, beginning with the division of the city into Districts.



More posts in this series on Vietnam:
Travels in Vietnam 2011: Intro
Travels In Vietnam 2011: The Cu Chi Tunnels
Travels In Vietnam 2011: War Remnants Museum, Saigon
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

Travels in Vietnam 2011: Intro

When I touch down in a country I’m visiting for the first time, I enter an ultra-focused state in which my senses are heightened, my eyes magnifying glasses alert to the merest detail. This hyper-perceptive, emotionally over-charged condition is so ridiculously intense that it inevitably lasts only an hour, a few hours, a day at most. Any longer and spontaneous combustion would surely follow. (Maybe it’s the same for everyone, but I can’t know that. I can only speak my truth. Take that as a caution that applies to the series of posts on Vietnam that follows.)

The taxi ride from the airport to our hotel in Saigon was truly unforgettable. It was about 8pm on a Tuesday. The driver spoke zero English. Free of the distraction of obligatory small-talk, I sat in the front passenger seat in my super-sponge mode and absorbed my new surroundings. The windows were wound down, presumably because the aircon wasn’t working. The air was thick and warm, tropical, as expected – and as it turned out, this was about the only expectation that was not to be confounded in the 3 weeks that followed.

Shortly into our taxi journey I became aware of a hum. A few motorbikes came into view. The hum was building, as if we were entering a beehive. More bikes, more and more. Then we were in the middle of it: a maelstrom of buzzing Hondas, not bees! Hundreds of ‘em. Thousands! Helmets everywhere, riding the chorus of engines this way, that way, every bloody way. The taxi was tailgating (no choice there!), motorcycle riders wove in and out and around us, one guy crossed in front of us with his arm out fending off our car, as if bodysurfing across the face of a wave. The driver plugged on impassively, tooting his way through the singles, couples, families and kids atop bikes.

It was overwhelmingly impressive. Pulsing with life. The traffic flowing impossibly through the apparent chaos. So this was Saigon.

THIS WAS SAIGON.

I was all over the place emotionally. In fact, I felt as if I was going to blubber. What the hell?

I had no idea I would react as I did, but I knew that Vietnam was not just another SE Asian country for me. This is undoubtedly the same for anyone in Australia who was approaching conscription age at the time of the Vietnam War – ‘the American War’, as it’s known in Vietnam. Although most of us knew little about Vietnam or its people back then, Australian involvement in that war left no one untouched. We were a country divided, stirred as never before or since.

In my youthful simplicity I saw it as all very black and white. Either you were on our side, or you were the enemy. ‘Our side’ comprised not just the folk who were against the war and outraged at the Liberal government’s “All the way with LBJ” declaration that committed young Australians to maim and be maimed, to kill and die, to suffer and commit atrocities in Vietnam as part of the American offensive against the Viet Cong/China/Russia/Communism.

No, ‘our side’ was the glorious counter culture, the social and cultural freedom fighters who were delivering a new world of enlightened values. ‘Our side’ was rocknroll, the new music that had set the walls of the city a-quake. Was drugs to open the doors of perception. Was sex to liberate a million pimply virgins from the chains of churchy upbringings and the repressions of our parents. New beginnings. New system. The Promised Land, no less. An illusory one, as it transpired, but who could know that then?

And the enemy? Straights, cops, soldiers, the Liberal Party and their voters, and worst of all ANYONE who believed in the Vietnam War. Parents, brothers and sisters most certainly included.

There is so much more to say on this, but this is a blog about my recent experience as a first-time traveller to Vietnam, and I am well aware that the concentration span of online readers is very short (mine included), so I’ll resist the urge to elaborate. If you were there, there’s no need, and if you weren’t, you’ll probably have little interest in my reflections here.

Jump cut. Gough won the election and pulled us out of Vietnam, and so ended the Moratorium marches and protests. Life became a little less meaningful, as a generation of banner-waving protesters settled down to uni studies, jobs and procreating, in many cases eventually selling out all they had once held precious – and in just about all cases, blissfully ignorant of the suffering and privations the end of the war was to bring to the people of the south as Ho Chi Minh’s regime set about exacting revenge on those who had opposed them.

For me, and I suspect many others, the very word ‘Vietnam’ continued to resonate with the excitement of communal action, of rebellion channelled into a just cause, of the romance of insurrection, of genuine shared outrage against the hopelessly – nay, criminally – misguided and pigheaded authorities of the day. And of sweet, final victory against the bastards.

How shallow all that must sound – is! – to those whom the Vietnam war touched more personally. The familes and loved ones of the soldiers who fought over there and never came back, and those who came back mangled, or worse. Who returned to Australian shores to be jeered and spat on, treated as pariahs, as murderers, rather than servicemen who had done their country’s bidding in a dirty war, sometimes at great individual cost. I had no sympathy for them at the time. I know better now.

Then there were the Vietnamese boat people who had supported the south who fled to our country to escape recrimination at the hands of the new Vietnamese government. They came in their thousands, and were welcomed. We knew we owed them something. The least we could do was give them sanctuary, and a new home. There was none of the parsimony or paranoia of today towards sea-borne refugees. And they repaid us tenfold, these industrious newcomers from Asia, changing the face of white Australia forever. Thank Christ that White Australia shame is behind us.

I, like many, regard the Vietnamese as amongst our best immigrants. And there is a sense – and I don’t think this is mine alone – of a special relationship between Australia and Vietnam.

These thoughts and many more accompanied me in the taxi as we made our way to District 1 (where most budget travellers stay). I surveyed glaze-eyed the helmeted hundreds swarming around me, and felt a wave of admiration, and of something akin to gratitude and relief that they had transcended the past, left the war far behind so that there was no trace of it. They had won. Right had prevailed. Their country was their own at long, long last. And who could deny that they were thriving? Just look at this place.

Vietnam – that emotive word that evoked so much – was now more than a word. All these years later, the site of the cursed War that had split the Western world yet united its youth in a way that is unimaginable now, was becoming real for me. No longer a word. A country.

The irresistible energy and thrilling chaos of the city, the noise, the visual assault overtook me and by the time we arrived at our hotel, I was left with only one emotion – excitement at whatever the night, the next day, the coming 3 weeks held in store. I couldn’t have dreamed that I would soon look back on myself and my romantic, emotion-driven inner rave as I sailed into the motorbike fray in that taxi as naive and facile in the extreme.



More posts in this series on Vietnam:
Travels In Vietnam 2011: Saigon
Travels In Vietnam 2011: The Cu Chi Tunnels
Travels In Vietnam 2011: War Remnants Museum, Saigon
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