Ho Chi Minh City
VIETNAM
Back in 'Nam
By LYNDI
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Even though Aaron and I only have about 6 weeks in Southeast Asia – a huge territory to cover in a very limited amount of time – I made sure that we would have a full week to dedicate to Vietnam. From my first trip to Southeast Asia seven years ago, Vietnam was the biggest surprise for me. I had no idea how friendly and helpful the people would be, how delicious and addictive the food was, and how varied the topography and activities were, so I was anxious to introduce Aaron to everything that I had fallen in love with.
By the time our flight had landed and we had made our way to a comfortable, family-run hotel room ($8 a night! Another thing to love about Vietnam!), it was lunch time. Seeing as how we were set up in the Pham Ngu Lao district (a.k.a. touristy part of town), restaurants were abundant.
I started right off with the famous pho soup – pronounced like “fuh” – and Aaron dove into some spring rolls with satay sauce. Delicious. Most of our meals from here on out would consist of at least one of these items.
Another daily custom in this area starts around 5pm. There is an over-abundance of restaurants and bars in this area, so just walking down the street around happy hour, you will see waiters literally jump in your path in hopes of blocking you and directing you to their drink specials. Since Aaron and I like the laid-back atmosphere better than the Euro-club-music-throbbing atmosphere, we mostly stuck to the 10,000 dong Saigon beers (about 50 cents) that they offered on the side streets where visitors and locals alike sit side by side on cheap, uncomfortable plastic seats and enjoy the evening together.
For our first full day in town we headed to the “War Remnants Museum” – also known as the “American War Crimes Museum”, so you can guess where this is headed. I think most Americans – or possibly most people – in their 20s and 30s know about the Vietnam War primarily from media. Forrest Gump won a medal of honor in his self-titled movie, Francis Ford Coppola made a disturbing film about it, and I think even Robin Williams had a radio show on “Good Morning Vietnam”. If you put all our media images together, we can get an idea of what happened over here. Or so we thought.
In 2004, this museum was a one-room display of horrible prison conditions for the captured Vietnamese and the terrible effects that Agent Orange has on the Vietnamese and their offspring. Today it has grown into a modern, three-story museum that covers the above – in more detail – and also describes the atrocious things done by the American soldiers during that time.
To be fair, history is written by the winners – and the Viet Cong certainly won this one and have a story to tell. The facts displayed may be a bit slanted – but they are facts. And they are atrocious. Photos show American soldiers spraying women and children villagers with bullets. American soldiers posing for photos with body parts of Vietnamese they just killed. The irreversible agricultural devastation caused by chemical spraying – thus ensuring local farmers would be unable to survive. And there were three stories of similarly horrifying photographs and information. There was a section on the resistance to the war in the US and abroad that was interesting to read about, but there honestly were photos and first-person accounts that I couldn’t even look at. Aaron and I weren’t alive during that war and I actually don’t even know anyone that served in the Vietnam War, but we left that museum with our heads hung. It just goes to show that war brings out the worst in everyone – and our worst was on full display.
So! After that sobering museum, we decided to embarrass ourselves more and head out to the Cu Chi tunnels the following day. We signed up for a half-day tour at one of the thousand travel agencies in Pham Ngu Lao and proceeded to be herded around like cattle for the entirety of the tour. There were no less than 1 million other tourists on the exact same tours at the exact same time. Every single travel agency offers identical tours – every stop on the way, every site at the Cu Chi tunnels – is carefully scheduled so that you feel like you are in a zoo. Well done.
The first stop was kind of weird. There are many people in Vietnam disfigured or mentally affected by Agent Orange, so there is now a co-op where they are taught how to make beautiful handicrafts and jewelry and therefore earn a sustainable income. That’s the good part. The bad part is that it’s called “Handicapped Handicrafts”. I didn’t think it was serious, but due to the fact that our tour bus – along with 20 other tour buses – stopped there so we could all buy something from the “Handicapped”, it was very real. Even though the products they made were really nice and high-quality – the prices were astronomical, so Aaron and I lingered outside in fear of accidentally breaking something.
We finally arrived at the Cu Chi tunnels and were given a tour of the grounds where the Viet Cong lived and fought in an intricate underground tunnel system. They first show you a black and white propaganda film used by the Viet Cong to congratulate their war heroes where the American soldiers are referred to as “Evil White Ghosts” and the villagers that killed the most Americans were considered heroes. Then we were walked through the Disney-fied jungle where animatronic Viet Cong build bombs and booby traps from scraps of metal. Hmmm. And finally we got to the “tourist” tunnels that have been widened so that our bigger bodies can stoop and crawl through a portion of their network. Spending 10 minutes down there does give you a good appreciation for what they had to endure for years – heat, humidity, darkness, and throbbing thigh muscles. The tour was interesting and educational, but the hordes of people were a bit off-putting and we were ready to get back to our 50 cent Saigon beers and happy Vietnamese family we were renting a room from.
After a couple days of depressing tours and museums, we decided to do another date night. So I traveled through Saigon, picked out a nice happy hour, restaurant, and talked to bicycle taxi drivers to get a good price for a tour of the city at night. But then the rain came. And stayed. All night in what was going to be a great outdoor date night. So it was cancelled, though we did end up going to the nice restaurant and enjoying really nice Vietnamese food the following night – so all was not lost.
I’ve had quite a few people ask me how the Vietnamese react when they find out we are Americans traveling in their country. And to be totally honest – they could care less. Eating street food one night, I spoke with a woman from Hanoi who was vacationing in Saigon. I told her how we had been to the War Remnants Museum that day and how horrifying it was for us to see all of that. She looked me straight in the eye and told me, “I hope you know we do not hold Americans accountable for that”. Wow. I don’t know who would be accountable if it wasn’t us, but she was very sincere when she said continued by saying it was a time of war and it was government officials forcing soldiers and average Americans to continue to fight in the only way they knew how.
The Vietnamese are a very strong people who have been invaded since time immemorial by the Chinese, the Japanese, French and Americans – yet they still maintain a very strong cultural identity and have somehow come out on top even when up against the world’s most powerful foes. Going back to Vietnam was everything I remembered it would be – if maybe too many tourists trying to do the touristy things we wanted to do – and Aaron got to see what I’ve been blabbering about all these years. But more importantly, it reveals an important chapter on American history that we don’t learn in textbooks and can only begin to understand from films and books. And only by visiting the country and meeting the locals do we see that even the Vietnamese have put that sad history behind them and have moved on.
