Ho Chi Minh City, day two

As mentioned priorly, Jeff, Jenn, and I had booked tours at a small streetside stall across the road from 23 September Park on Wednesday, July 16. It was one of those charming little tour-booking stands that pop up in the touristy areas of Asian cities. This one did double-duty—it moonlighted as a laundromat. A pair of whirring washing machines stood behind the two clerks as they took our names and our cash and put Jeff and me down for a half-day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, and Jenn down for a full day. 

After a refreshing night's sleep, the three of us met up at that same streetside stall at half-past dawn on Thursday, July 17, clutching a few limpid banh mi in our hands and looking bleary-eyed and exhausted. We clambered aboard our air-conditioned buses (and Jenn aboard hers) and off we went. I was too fuddled to make much sense of the countryside in between HCMC and the Cu Chi tunnels, but I remember a lot of rice paddies, banana trees, and water buffalo. We made a pit stop along the way—a rather political one, a warehouse-type compound where Vietnam's disabled and handicapped crafted pottery and decorative tiles for tourists to shell out way too much money for. I used the word "shell" intentionally: it was made clear to us that this organization had got started as a way to prevent Vietnamese civilians who'd been injured by U.S. bombs in the war from starving to death in the aftermath. 

Our stop was mercifully brief. We did bump into Jenn, and said hello at her. Then it was off to the tunnels. Our tour guide Mr. Ly wasn't young by any means, but he was short and lean and wiry and there wasn't a grey hair on his head. He had big, calculating eyes, a wide mouth full of white teeth, a baseball cap perched cockily on his head, a grey polo shirt and frayed jeans. His voice was loud and resonant and his accent almost impenetrable. (He pronounced "Cu Chi" like "Goji.") He was a crafty old devil, too. Right from the get-go he set himself to tugging our heartstrings and fostering indignity on behalf of the righteous socialist republic of Vietnam. He claimed to have been born in 1977, a few years after the war's end, in a one-room shack in the countryside with no running water or electricity, and to a maimed mother. Pulled himself up by his bootstraps, he did, moving to Saigon and becoming a tour guide. Well, he'd certainly been at this job a while, and it was evident in the foreigner-aimed jokes he made and the expert showmanship he displayed. Under his supervision, we disembarked from the buses and made our way along neat sidewalks through the jungle to a series of recessed barracks and makeshift bunkers, where we were treated to a propaganda film detailing the V.C.'s use of the tunnels to fight American incursion. 

Then it was time for a little preview. Ly led us to a unremarkable clearing and asked us to hunt for one of the "Goji tunnels." We were unable to locate it. Ly kicked aside some leaves and unveiled a trapdoor the size of your average breakfast tray there in the muddy, silty soil. He knocked the lid off with the toe of his Nike trainers and dared one of us to step forward and insert ourselves into it. The tunnel had been expanded to accommodate our Western...generousness-ness, he assured us. Moreover the tunnel beneath was only twenty yards long and the exit was close at hand, a couple of right turns away from the exit. (He did issue us a dire warning not to head left, or "you be in Cambodia before sunset." 

And then this happened:

And, about 45-60 seconds later, this:

I didn't hear much about how the experience went, as the sap in question was too busy explaining it to his friends in low tones as Ly herded us to the next teaser (a V.C. spike trap). But I did hear him mention bats. Icky. 

And so we made our way through the tamed, trimmed, and somewhat-less-than-virgin Vietnamese jungle, moving from exhibit to exhibit. We saw a lineup of diabolical V.C. spike traps (you can research those if you want; they're a bit too horrific for this blog). We saw a wrecked, gutted American tank, destroyed by the patriotic yahoos from the cover of their tunnels. 

There were also several conspicuously-labeled B-52 bomb craters lying about: 

Then it was time for the kicker, the climax, the reason we'd all come along: a hundred-meter stretch of tunnel (widened for our convenience, but not our comfort) which Ly dared us to brave. Half the tour group took him up on it, including Jeff and me. There we all were, hot, sweaty, greasy, and gritty from the dirt of the floors and walls scraping against us, in a long line, strung out through a hundred meters of four-foot tall, three-foot wide passageway. It took about 10-15 minutes to traverse those hundred meters, especially due to some unexpected dips and ledges that foiled the less adventurous among us. There were escape hatches for the pansies if we got too claustrophobic or came near to asphyxiating, but nobody used them as far as I could tell. The hot jungle air and bright afternoon sun were welcome changes from those stifling tunnels when Jeff and I finally emerged, dirt-smeared and soaked to the bone. 

Ly stood at the exit, hands behind his back, a smug smile on his face, bobbing back and forth on the balls of his feet. As we emerged, coughing and blinking and stretching, he ominously hinted that the tunnels had originally been three feet high, and that V.C. fighters progressed through them at a running squat, which he demonstrated a few moments later at the exit to the park. He openly ridiculed us for our inability to mimic him; everyone who tried to imitate his peculiar Asian squat fell on their backside, save for one female English hipster with dreadlocks.  

Then we took a relaxing bus ride back to HCMC, sucking greedily at our two-liter bottles of water. We got back to our hotels, cleaned up, and met Adam at around 4:30 for a pregame snack of Saigon beef pho and beer along Nguyen Cu Trinh. Then we walked around the corner to a big open-air eatery on Ho Hao Hon and had more beer, plus some curried eel and blackened frog legs. We got slightly drunk and hotly debated whether the United States truly lost the Vietnam War or not. (You can guess which side of that debate I was on.) 

Curried eel and blackened frog legs, Saigon-style. 

I felt so free and easy that I bought a cigar off a street vendor and smoked it as we walked through District 1's narrow, darkened thoroughfares—staggered, really—to meet Jenn at Baba's Kitchen, an Indian restaurant on Bui Vien Street. I'm not big on Indian grub, but that place was astoundingly good. We feasted on three different types of curry (Northern and Southern Indian), kebab, naan bread, long-grain rice, and a host of delicious side dishes. 

We went to a rooftop bar across the road that was supposed to be having a pub quiz, but due to there being some kind of school holiday, half the foreigners in Saigon had bugged out for parts unknown, and the bar was all but deserted. Undaunted, we made up our own pub quiz, sitting and swilling beers and watching the world go by in the streets and alleys below, grilling each other on nebulous topics like "famous figures of the Cold War" and "dinosaurs." 

Jeff and Adam doing their trivia thing. 

The makings of a mighty good pub crawl were in the air, but I was done. Before we slid out of that place and on to another den of venial sin, I begged off. It was past midnight in Saigon but well after two in Seoul, and my body clock was screaming at me to shut down. I lurched straight back to Green Suites and collapsed into bed.

Tomorrow: the last day in Saigon. After that it's on to Cambodia. You coming? 

Ho Chi Minh City, day one

Travel Truth #2: It pays to have friends. 

The light in which you first see a city is important. No unfamiliar metropolis looks attractive under grey, cloudy skies. Maybe some of the towns in Western Europe could pull it off, but definitely not Asia. 

I first saw Ho Chi Minh City (which from hereon I shall interchangeably refer to as either "HCMC" or "Saigon") under the pale pink light of dawn, and it was already bustling. Scooters—even more numerous than they'd been in Hanoi—warred for room on the roads with trucks and cars and taxicabs. Shopkeepers, fruit sellers, noodle-mongers, and other vendors were just opening their doors. The city was stretching and yawning wakefully under the warm, steamy, slanting light of the morning sun, which leaped above the horizon with equatorial swiftness. I observed all this as I rode in a cab from the Saigon Railway Station in District 3 to Cong Quynh Street in District 1 (which, I believe, was named after a popular scholar who lived during the Le-Trinh dynasty). 

It was barely six-thirty. Check-in time wasn't for another nine hours. But my road had been paved ahead of me. A Geordie friend whom I knew from my Geoje days, Adam, knew the morning receptionist at Green Suites. He'd greased a few wheels for me, and she admitted me to the hotel for no extra charge. Pays to have friends, see?

I had to wait a couple of hours for a room to be cleaned and prepared for me, but hey—no extra charge! 

Green Suites was infinitely better than the Asia Star in Hanoi—bigger, brighter, cleaner rooms, an enormous bathroom, a double bed whose mattress eschewed the usual Asian adamance, and more tasteful interior décor. Gratefully I flung my baggage down and took a long shower. I considered a nap, but I was too excited. I hadn't seen Adam, Jeff, or Jenn in something like six months, and now here we were in an entirely new city in an entirely new country and about to go exploring. Hell yeah. Just you try to sit still, mister. 

Adam showed up to get me at half-past noon, and we walked through a crooked series of shade- and sun-drenched alleys to Jeff and Jenn's hotel. They'd had a hell of a time getting to Vietnam from Indonesia; their Tiger Air flight had delivered them safely but their baggage was still stuck in Singapore. To mend their stressed souls we wended our way through the twisting alleys to a nearby café and had us some Vietnamese coffee. 

Now perhaps you haven't heard about Vietnamese iced coffee, or cà phê đá in the local lingo. To quote Wikipedia, it's "coarse-ground Vietnamese-grown dark roast coffee individually brewed with a small metal French drip filter into a cup containing about a quarter to a half as much sweetened condensed milk, stirred and poured over ice." 

And that's about all you need to know, really. Aside from the fact that it's freaking delicious.

And you know what else is freaking delicious? Bacon sandwiches. 

This place was called The Hungry Pig, started by a wet-behind-the-ears English university grad who obeyed the call to "Go east, young man, go east" and, like so many of his British peers, became an entrepreneur in the Orient. This little grub shop at 144 Cong Quynh was the flagship store for what is hoped will be a country- (and perhaps continent-) spanning enterprise someday. If they keep making sandwiches that good, they'll do it just fine. You could order any fixed item on the menu or even customize ingredients to create your own Frankenstein of a sandwich. I had maple bacon and chorizo on whole grain bread with lettuce, tomato, green pepper, and red onion, plus cheddar cheese and HP ("brown") Sauce. And a little Saigon beer, of course. Fantastic.

But who can be satisfied with only one breakfast? This was HCMC and we were all on vacation. We walked down Cong Quynh, crossed Nguyen Cu Trinh, and had some cơm tấm Sài Gòn—Saigon-style broken rice, a signature dish. I got shredded pork on top of my rice and some kind of soft tofu ball with meat inside. We had 333 Beer and some excellent conversation with Stacey, Adam's girlfriend. 

By and by Stacey had to leave to do lesson plans and Adam had to go to work, so that left Jeff, Jenn, and me free to do some exploring. We wandered through District 1's notable areas, including Twenty-Three September Park and Bến Thành Market. 

Bến Thành Market, one of Saigon's oldest buildings, is that building with the clock in the left background. 

There were some pretty cool T-shirts that I wanted to buy, including one with a silhouette of a B-52 and that famous quote by General Curtis LeMay—"They've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age"—but as usual, nothing fit me properly. Even the XXL shirts fit me like a tailored vest, with my ample stomach sticking out by a mile. So I had to quit on the business. Jeff and I wandered through the vast shopping arcade with its lofty French colonial ceiling, humid air, overworked oscillating fans, its overflowing shopping stalls stuck way too close together, and the stumpy saleswomen who kept plucking at our elbows and sleeves as we walked by. To escape these personal intrusions Jeff and I went across the road and waited for Stacey at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (yes, they have those in Vietnam) to sample what Westernized commercialism has done to indigenous culture. Then we went back to our hotels for a rest.

At 5:45 we met Stacey at a place called L'Usine on Dong Khoi. It was a French-style wine and cheese sort of place, with faux-stucco walls, iron rails, potted plants, and strange realist paintings of geared devices on the walls. ("L'Usine" apparently means "Factory" in French.) We drank wine (house red and house white) and ate baguettes, cheese, figs, quince jam, marinated olives, frites, and calamari. The prices were exorbitant—for Southeast Asia. For foreigners like us it was dirt cheap. Leave it to the Brits to sniff out French wine-and-cheese joints while they're on holiday. I added L'Usine to my mental list of "places to take Miss H later" and enjoyed myself to the fullest. 

Then it was time for another break. Walking around in the hot streets and still, humid air of Southeast Asian megacities really takes it outta ya. 

We met Adam (finally off work) at 10 p.m. near my hotel. Green Suites occupies an alleyway just off the main thoroughfare of Cong Quynh, and said alleyway happens to be full of streetside eateries. One of these, Oc Trang, seats its customers on little blue plastic lawn chairs and stubby metal tables beside a cracked, crumbling, white-plastered cinderblock wall. Then it gives 'em as much phở and Bia Saigon (83 cents a bottle) as they can eat. The four of us sat around, staring out at the brightly-lit street behind us, tucking in our elbows and knees whenever a scooter roared down the alley, enduring the stares of the old women and young boys skulking in corners, watching geckos crawl across the cinderblock wall to eat gnats attracted by the floodlights, while the patrons of Oc Trang ate gaily-colored snails, prawns, and frog legs. I think that's what I'll remember most about my time in southern Vietnam, besides the cheap beer, dirty streets, and hordes of honking scooters—those geckos. They were everywhere in Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, sitting under the eaves near light sources and gobbling bugs by the bushel. 

Stop by next time if you want to hear about the Cu Chi tunnels.