The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Ho Chi Minh City

Even though we’ve only visited Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) so far in Vietnam, we already love the place. No real surprise I guess, given the fact that this whole region has been a fantastic experience. As per usual in this part of the world, the people are incredibly friendly, the food is fantastic and the traffic is crazy.

There are a lot of people here, about 8 or 9 million in the greater HCMC. Almost all of them have a motor scooter and a good portion of them seem to be on the road at any one time. Couple this with the fact that there aren’t that many traffic lights (or traffic laws for that matter) and you start to get the picture. Crossing the road becomes an experience in itself as you just slowly push out into the tidal wave of traffic. Apparently there are about 15,000 fatal accidents a year in Vietnam and I’m guessing a fair few of those are here in HCMC. That’s also why they don’t let tourists hire bicycles here!

So far Vietnam seems to be the cleanest of the SE Asian countries that we’ve been to. Despite this being one of the largest cities we’ve visited, the streets are always clean, the market food always seem fresh and well presented and the people in general seem to take a bit more care. There is also a surprising amount of greenery here, even amongst the inner city blocks.

As I’ve already alluded to, the food is superb and cheap, which of course rates highly in my books. The Vietnamese are renowned for their soup (pho) which is eaten any time of the day or night. It is a rice noodle soup, often made with meat balls, mung bean sprouts, chili and a host of varying ingredients (depending on where you get it) in a clear broth. My favourite so far is probably the Vietnamese pancake, which is a massive savoury pancake, eaten for dinner, which contains shrimp, pork, mung bean sprouts, herbs and lettuce. It comes with a chili sauce that I managed to spill everywhere the first time I had it, table, shorts, floor, chair, everywhere. Delicious though. The coffee here is also excellent. It is served as a glass with a simple little single-serve percolator that sits on top. You just keep topping this up with hot water, which drips through the coffee grounds, until you’ve got a full glass. It is normally served with a little bit of sweetened (condensed) milk in the bottom of the glass, which you then mix in.

As for sights to see and things to do, there are plenty of those too. Read below for the details on a couple of the main excursions. We’ve also visited the markets here, done quite a bit of walking around and got through our fair share of BGI (one of the local beers, 640mL bottle for US$0.75). The main religion here is Buddhism but another popular local religion is Cao Dai. We visited the largest Cao Dai temple in Vietnam during one of their ceremonies that takes place four times a day. The temple was very ornate and quite different from a lot that we’ve seen. It was quite interesting to see their religious ceremony but it was also pretty strange being one of a few bus loads of tourists encroaching during their prayers. Oh well, got some cool photos.

Cu Chi Tunnels and The War Museum

Went out to the Cu Chi Tunnels the other day which is the labyrinth of tunnels the Viet Cong used to evade the Americans and South Vietnamese in the Vietnam war. The war is pretty big bikkies over here and I felt like a bit of a dick cos I really had no idea what the two sides were fighting about. To give you readers a brief idea of what and why (I just looked this up on the web and it's pretty complicated but what I think happened was...)

Vietnam gained independence from the French in 1954. The local regime were pretty disorganised and the country ended up splitting in two, the communist North who were the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the South, the Republic of Vietnam. In the 60's the North and a group called the "National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam" thought it might be a good idea if the country became one communist nation so invaded the South. The North were quietly supported by the Russians and the Chinese so it was more than an excuse for the US to jump in and support the South. End of the day the yanks got carried away, realised it was all a bad idea and got out of it after roughly 10 years . The final result it seems that the North won and "liberated" Saigon in the South.

If I have some of that wrong please feel free to correct/abuse me on the comments page.

So... got to the tunnels which are about 70km out of town. First thing we did was watch this video on the war. It was brilliant as it was from the Vietnamese point of view, a real 180 from many of those Hollywood movies about the war. The general gist was this: "Vietnam was very peaceful happy place, everyone was happy. Then Americans come and want to destroy Vietnam but the people were too strong for them. This person is hero American killer as he killed 116 Americans. This person is also hero American killer because she destroyed 5 tanks and killed 86 Americans. The Americans could not fight with the mighty Viet Cong guerrillas so they loose the war". I wished we had some Americans in the room as I would have loved to have seen their faces!

The whole place is really well done. We went outside and were shown the tunnels. The entrance too most of them is a tiny rectangular hole about 50x30cm, from there it is crawling space only with no light. These tunnels typically went down 3 levels to a depth of 8 metres as to shelter from bombs. They were full of booby traps and had multiple entrances (some underwater) to escape from . It must have been bloody scary to be the guy that had to go in first to search for the VC knowing that they were probably lurking around a dark corner with a gun or that you could fall into a trap any second. We went from there to see examples of all the traps the VC placed around the jungle. They all consisted of a camouflaged pit that when stepped on would trigger some revolving mechanism that would ram multiple 12" spikes into your legs or arms or places you dont want 12" spikes. There were about 10 variations, each one gave you that feeling you get in your stomach when you see someone wear a soccer ball in the nuts. There was an artillery range in the complex that gave it quite an authentic feeling with the sound of M16s and AK47s being shot. I would have liked to have a few shots myself, but seeing as one bullet cost the same as two beers in town I decided I didn't feel the need to re-affirm my masculinity and saved my cash for more important things.

After this we got to crawl through an actual tunnel which had been widened to fit Westerners but was still pretty tight. It took about 5 minutes and we came out sweating and filthy. It must have been so hard to live like that for years on end. We then saw a display on the VC's guerrilla weapons. What they did was take all the unexploded bombs and munitions that the Americans dropped, cut them open and made these crazy home-made mines and grenades. It was clever stuff, combined with the traps and the tunnels you have to admire their creativity and level of jungle warfare they had.

Next day we walked to the War Remnants Museum. I wasn't expecting much as I hadn't heard much about it, but there were some exhibits there that were seriously scary. S21 in Cambodia was chilling as you were standing in the spot were it all happened, but the images at this place were way worse. Outside there were some US tanks, planes and guns that had been restored which was quite cool. Inside however there were a whole lot of photos and captions, once again from the Vietnamese perspective. The first lot showed the people, many of them kids that had been injured by bombs containing nails or napalm or phosphorus. They had some of the actual bombs sitting there, cut open showing the contents (i.e. nails). I dont know what kind of sick fuck designs these kind of things but they are terrible, and the damage they do is horrific. The worst of the lot is Agent Orange. It doesnt just mutate the people and environment it touches but it screws your whole family. Many people who came into contact with the stuff went back after the war and had children, many are born with massive deformities like missing or mutated limbs or severe brain damage. America has support programs for kids like this in the US who's parents came into contact with Agent Orange while they were spraying it, but they dont appear to be doing anything for the people here they sprayed it on (one area was doused with 81 million litres and it takes a few millilitres to kill a human).

I was starting to feel a bit sick after reading all this, partially from being well and truly hungover and partially because I couldnt get over how disgusting it all was. The next section had shots of GI's torturing and killing Vietnamese. There was a story about a group of SEALs that went into a village and killed everyone there, 16 in all from 4 families with only one survivor, because they thought they were informants. There were other things too gross to mention on here, but the war must have got to the heads of a lot of the soldiers for them to do that kind of thing to prisoners. I dont know much about the Geneva Convention but Im pretty sure it was breached here.

The next gallery was more impressive than shocking, it was dedicated to international and local war correspondants, many of whom died, and showed some of their photographs. There were some great photos taken at just the right point, one of an aeroplane that had just been hit with a missile in mid-air. The tail was flying one way, the rest of the plane the other. Another was taken just as a shell had landed in a trench. It was colour and all you can see is a massive ball of fire and three soldiers running towards the camera, they would have died a few split seconds after the picture was taken.

The last bit was the prison and torture chambers (replicas not the actual ones), which were fairly similar to S21 in the methods used to extract information and living conditions. These were run by South Vietnamese to extract information from the VC prisoners. I was beginning to see why much of the world despises the US. The museum was from mainly one point of view and Im sure some of the US and allied troops were exposed to some terrible things also. New Zealand had a small section as we sent 600 troops (our entire army?), yet we were last in and first out and there was a note that the ANZAC forces were "well disciplined".

I left the place with a couple of thoughts in my head. One was that a lot of us have it pretty easy these days, our problems consist of car breakdowns, increasing mortgage rates and being in the dog-box with the missus. People who live through wars have problems like the fact a bomb might come through the roof, or their children are going to be mutants because of Agent Orange. The other was that fact that I was in a pretty anti-US mood, I thought "Screw you America. Why dont you just stick to yourselves, grow some corn and have incestuous relations with your sister". Then I thought that blaming 250 million people for the decisions made by a handful of guys in the White House made me somewhat of a small-minded cretin, so I stopped thinking altogether and went out for a beer.