(Yes, I know it's now officially Ho Chi Minh City, but how many people do you think actually say all of that?)
As my Malaysian Airlines flight started its descent into Tan Son Nhat airport, I looked in some disbelief at the patchwork paddy fields below me -- was it really possible for anywhere to be so flat? Lazy brown rivers snaked through the fields and round the clusters of houses in a textbook illustration of the word meander. I could see no bomb craters, although I was well aware that I was about to visit the scene of a war that had ravaged both Vietnam and America.
The lines to clear customs moved at the same slow pace as the rivers, but eventually I collected another entry stamp and then became a millionaire again, this time in dong. (The rate was 15,300 dong to one US dollar: good thing I was carrying a calculator.) I shared a prepaid taxi into the city with my Viennese seat mates from the plane -- Anneliese and Salim. The taxi driver dropped me at the hotel I had chosen over the Internet and took the others on to one that he recommended.
Salim was born in what is now Pakistan, and when he and Anneliese met me for dinner they looked enviably comfortable in South Asian clothes. I enjoyed their company, and we ate dinner together every night we were in Saigon. My hotel, the Riverside (not to be confused with the glitzy Marriott Riverside, next door), turned out to be a dump and after the first night I moved to the one recommended by the taxi driver. The driver certainly earned any commission he received from the hotel: I loved the Saigon Pink II -- squeaky clean with very friendly staff and well-located half a block from the central Ben Thanh market, a short walk across a park from the backpacker ghetto along Pham Ngu Lao and a rather longer walk from the upmarket hotels near the river.
My first impression of Saigon was of traffic. Not of cars, although there were cars, but of motorbikes. Rivers of motorbikes filled the streets. Red lights would pen them in for a while -- five or six abreast -- and then the floodgates would open again. Cars seemed to be confined to certain lanes, but the bikes were free to travel anywhere.
There were still bicycles and cyclos around, but they were seriously outnumbered by the motorbikes, many of them cheap Chinese knockoffs of Japanese designs, many of them offering taxi service. Vietnamese rickshaws, known as cyclos, have the passenger in front, facing the traffic, with the rider perched behind, but I felt safer in them than on the back of a moto. Crossing the road required a certain bravado -- I walked diagonally toward the oncoming traffic, eyeballing the drivers, who would swerve around me.
Helmets were not part of the culture. During the four weeks I was in Vietnam I saw four, and one was tied unused to the back of the bike. But the bikes did have lights. When it rained the drivers wore big plastic capes that draped over the passengers, if any, in back, and the handlebars in front, and at night the lights would shine through in a pastel rainbow of pink, blue and green. That was passengers, plural -- it was not uncommon to see a whole family on a motorbike -- and think scooter rather than Harley-Davidson.
Women riders wore soft hats or conical straw hats with scarves over the nose and mouth and velcroed to the hat, only their eyes showing, with shoulder length gloves to protect them from the sun as well as the dust. Although they were as covered as Muslim women in burkhas, the effect was very different. I eventually became used to the sight of elegant Vietnamese women riding bikes in flowing ao dai -- loose trousers and a tight, high-necked tunic reaching nearly to the ground and slit to the waist at the sides. The light silk or polyester panels floated as they moved.
Street vendors wore more practical clothes -- loose pants and shirts -- balancing their goods in woven baskets on shoulder poles as they trotted through the streets. They carried little four-legged plastic stools, and low plastic tables and chairs seemed the furniture of choice for many street cafes. While a few vendors remained near the Ben Thanh market at night, the market itself closed down, and restaurants suddenly appeared in the streets outside. The food was freshly prepared and reasonably priced, and popular with the locals. Each restaurant had a greeter who tried to entice passersby to become customers, and who organized parking for their motorbikes.
Nighttime Saigon, in November, was quite pleasant, but during the day the humidity was fierce and the places I visited lacked AC. Even the huge Reunification Palace was cooled only by breezes from the many windows. President Ngo Dinh Diem commissioned the 65,000-square-foot building to replace Norodom Palace, bombed in 1962: it was finished after his assassination. The photographs of North Vietnamese tanks storming the gates on April 30, 1975 were emblematic of the fall of the South Vietnamese government, awaiting arrest inside. The building, and its contents, were untouched, and are a stunning reminder of 1960's style. Minimalist architecture and maximalist decoration -- concrete and glass, rectangular rooms, openwork staircases, futuristic chandeliers competing with deep carpets, heavy curtains, elegant carvings and intricate lacquer work. The private rooms included a rec room with a wet bar and a movie room with the original projection equipment still in place. And no well-dressed palace should be without its own landing pad and helicopter on the roof.
More helicopters, along with planes and tanks, filled the courtyard at the War Remnants Museum, a rather different reminder of the '60s and '70s. One exhibition room honored the photographers who died covering the war, the walls covered with the all-too-explicit photos they had taken, and pictures of the men themselves, nearly all my contemporaries. Another room displayed the effects of Agent Orange -- deformed babies, phosphorous burns, deforestation. The documentation of civilian casualties, of torture, was a compelling testament to the cost of war.
The next day I visited the tunnels at Cu Chi, where the civilian population had lived underground to escape attack and plan their own traps and ambushes. Driving through the paddy fields beyond the outer suburbs, the horizon seemed miles away, no hiding place to be found under the wide blue sky. Walking through the jungle around Cu Chi, where trees closed in around me and leaves crackled underfoot, was another matter. I could imagine the taut nerves of the American GIs on patrol above, and the equal tension of the Vietnamese in their claustrophobic tunnels below.
At noon that day I was in the gallery of the main temple of the Cao Dai religion at Tay Ninh, listening to a half-hour of chanting I couldn't understand. The religion grew out of spiritualist practices during the 1920s, the founders contacting Cao Dai, the Supreme Being, via mediums and spirit writing. An attempt to emphasize that all religions are founded on the same basic truth, that all creation is one, the goal of Cao Dai practice is to "help humankind achieve ultimate reunification with the Supreme Being," which is symbolized by an eye, "the image of universal and individual consciousness."
The temple itself was definitely an attempt to marry different influences -- twin towers at the front entrance (Christian), layered roofs (Buddhist), bright pastel colors (modern Hindu), with Chinese dragons coiled tightly round the pink pillars inside. The worshippers, kneeling on the floor, wore white, except for the blue, red or gold worn by a few senior men, two of whom had eyes on the back of their robes. The focal point was a huge blue globe in a nest of columns, with an eye -- left and right combined -- staring out over the congregation.
As my Pacific Airlines flight descended towards Noi Bai International Airport I saw hills in the distance, corn and vegetable fields among the rice paddies, and what might well be bomb craters. The weather had changed too. It was winter in north Vietnam, cold when I arrived, colder and wet when I left. I wore the top of my thermal underwear as a sweater and used my umbrella to ward of rain instead of sun.
Motorbikes were as common in Hanoi as in Saigon, and capitalism seemed alive and well. In fact I had more trouble with pushy vendors in Hanoi's Old Quarter than I had near the Ben Thanh market, perhaps because the quarter was full of tourists -- the backpackers slept there, and the well-off visited, often in a long line of cyclos. I could imagine the itineraries in the tour brochures - "included cyclo ride through atmospheric Old Quarter."
I slept in the Old Quarter too. At my second attempt I found a hotel that nearly matched the Saigon Pink, small, friendly and clean. I got plenty of exercise climbing to the fifth floor, to the only single with a window, but I was rewarded with a tiny balcony from which I could watch the action below.
Across the street was a cafe with a pho production line -- steaming covered pot of noodles, steaming open pot of broth, assorted bowls of other ingredients. The next scrap of pavement was occupied by a woman roasting nuts. One morning I saw her suddenly move her little table inside. A man in a green uniform walked past. She moved the table back out. No authority seemed interested in all the motorbikes parked on the sidewalks, usually with a guardian watching over them.
As in medieval European towns, different trades had their own streets, and my hotel was on cafe street. Silk street was one block north, shoe street was over by the Water Puppet Theater, a few blocks south of gravestone street. The whole area was a photographers dream.
Hanoi was also a good place for foreign food. The expats seemed to hang out at the Mediterraneo, which had a tapas bar on the ground floor. I dined twice at the Cafe des Artes on steak and French fries and good blue cheese, and camped out among the cushions in the Tamarind Cafe where I could watch the cyclo parade and indulge in whole-wheat garlic baguettes and papaya, pineapple and ginger shakes, along with a book from the nearby exchange shop.
I visited several of these secondhand book shops in Vietnam, and was always amused to see that the few classics were in excellent condition, while the multiple copies of Clancy, Grisham, Steel et al showed wear. But there were welcome surprises -- I found Sayers' "Murder Must Advertise" in Hoi An, and in Hanoi I read Laurie King's "The Bee-Keeper's Apprentice", a charming flight of fancy involving Sherlock Holmes and an Anglo-American girl.
I enjoyed Hanoi with its lakes and trees and elegant embassy quarter. I strolled round the smaller Hoan Kiem Lake, where graceful tree branches swept to the water between concrete benches. I walked across the bridge that separated the huge West Lake from Truc Bach Lake to visit the tall tower and tombs at Tran Quoc pagoda, one of the oldest in Vietnam.
I admired the water lilies in the pools at the Temple of Literature, and wondered about the mandarins whose achievements were recorded on the 82 stele in the third courtyard. I found a remarkable collection of monks in lacquered wood at the Museum of Fine Arts, and noticed Indian influence in the Champa statues at the History Museum. I also visited the Women's Museum, which documented the role of women in the "war of resistance to American aggression", along with displays of textiles and baskets and traditional costumes. Apparently the traditional bride's red dress has been "renovated" to white, although I saw a bride in red being photographed in front of Notre Dame cathedral in Saigon -- in Hanoi the Opera House was the venue of choice.
But I was cold. Clearly this was a city to revisit in warmer weather. I abandoned plans to visit Halong Bay and spend a night on a boat and arranged, with some difficulty, a ticket for the train to Hue. It was time to head south.
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