We stayed at the New Pacific Hotel in Saigon from 3rd-10th March.
Following our arrival we were bristling to fill our senses with the country we are going to call home for the next two (or more) years. After gaining a feel for the place and the impossibility of turning our first impressions into thoughts and words, we began to settle into a travel routine, balancing energetic efforts to DO as much as we could, whilst keeping cool in the midday sun and calm through the frantic streets. We found a little gin and tonic, ice-cream and/or a cold beer helped this no end.
Fragments of my memories of the lively town include visiting the Reunification Palace - beneath which lies a complex series of basement rooms and tunnels, used during the war as the President's HQ. David Lynch couldn't have arranged an eerier mise-en-scene. I left Matt absorbed in the old radio transmittor systems and wandered the narrow, pale concrete chambers and tried to decipher the maps and codes posted on the walls. The president's "War Room", next to his bedroom (complete with antique carved hardwood bed), was covered ceiling to floor in gigantic maps with trails and numbers and Vietnamese text all around. The room was empty except for his desk, chair and telephone. There were markings in the desk by the chair where we must have scratched away as he sat on the phone. A blocked tunnel nearby would have served as his escape route, surfacing some several miles away out of town.
Also, a beautiful old Citroen, and a fully-furnished kitchen (with giant ice-cream maker) to cater for the officers.
As I mentioned before, we visited the War Remnants Museum (previously called the Museum of American War Crimes). Much, much worse than I had anticipated. Truly devastating photographs, and harrowing original instruments of torture. Wonderful section on the photojournalists, many of whom never returned.
We visited the Ho Chi Minh Revolution Museum - but there was no information in English. We tried to make sense of the photographs and personal items of Ho Chi Minh, known affectionately to his supporters as "Uncle Ho". We came face to face with him downtown - a forbidding bronze statue gazing out from his lotus pond over the rising commercial skyline of Saigon. All along the wide avenue leading to him stood billboards with detailed scenes of communism in action across the nation - volunteers bringing fruit to the poor; free music and theatre performances in schools and community centres; medical care outreach to the rural areas. I was impressed.
At some point in your first few days in a country, you are going to get ripped off. You may benefit from accepting this, and enjoying the luxury of being taken for a ride - ours was in a rickshaw, a scenic tour of a tiny fragment of town near the Grand Continental Hotel and market area that took a great deal longer than it may have done if every sidestreet and turning hadn't been taken, several more than once. We giggled as we brushed past death at every near-hit with a motor vehicle and lay back to enjoy the sights fly by. The error was of course ours in not agreeing a price beforehand - I was prepared to pay over the odds and gladly give the boys a tip for wheeling our big western bums around in the heat! But when they asked for $50 we had to get a little apologetic with them. I think we handed over $20 or $25 in the end, comparatively a taxi for the same time would have been about $1! Well, I like to think their families are eating well this month.
At night the city lights up like a 50s diner, with neon on every conceivable surface. I think the moment we put our arms around each other and said; "Welcome to our new home! Wonderful Vietnam!" was on the stumble home after discovering the kareoke bars. Now, those who know me, know that I dread singing in public (or rather, sing gladly...but badly, and never if put on the spot!) ...but kareoke, Japanese-style, is....wait for it.... waaaiiiiit fooooorrr iiiiiit...... bloody good fun! First of all, the mic is set to echo so much that it totally distorts your voice, and I think there might be some sort of autotune mechanism (or maybe that's just the beer). The best part though is that you don't sing in front of a crowd, you have your own private booth for you and your most tolerant of friends. Most bars are in tall, narrow highrises. You enter and an escort takes you up several floors in a lift, shows you to your room and takes any drinks orders. Beers ordered in bulk for groups of friends arrive in a large crate. You are given the song books (all but one bar that we've been to have an English section) and enter the song code into the machine. Then the twinkly synth starts up and you're ready to go. Stupidly entertaining until you can't croak out another "hey hey hey" and off you go to settle the (refreshingly light) bill downstairs.
Our sightseeing was interrupted towards the end of our stay when I had to visit the British Council's office and run a little errand of having a health check at the International SOS hospital. Meanwhile, Matt wandered off to do some of his own exploring. During one jaunt he was harrassed by a guy who wouldn't accept that he couldn't possibly sell Matt anything. After trying 'motorbike', 'city tour', 'hotel', 'shop', 'restaurant' he finally resorted to 'happy massage?' While we were amused by the euphemism we were also both rather horrified by the in-your-face reality of sex tourism. Matt noticed that nearby our hotel there was a women and children's centre run by volunteers, privately funded by a Dutch woman (I couldn't find anything more out about it, but they seemed well-organised). We paid a visit and with our trusty phrasebook clumsily offered a small cash donation.
On Friday 10th March we grabbed our bags at dawn and headed out of the dirt and grime for a beach holiday in Mui Ne...
Love, E.
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