“Ho Chi Minh City…..
I’m still only in Ho Chi Minh City”.
Doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Saigon”………
Either way, Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard may not have been too happy to find himself here, but I for one certainly am. The odds were against us from the beginning but we made it and here we are, safely ensconced in the Continental Hotel. 2 days in now and we’re still alive.
Like Willard, this room is our decompression chamber. Our place to take stock, to adjust and to wait. However, there are no broken mirrors this time, no psychotic meltdowns, no internal demons wrestling for control of our souls…….That all happened on the other end, during the planning.
12 hours in the air wasn’t easy but it wasn’t the outright hell it so easily could have been. Harvey had one pretty big meltdown which ended with a nice 4 hour sleep strewn across my person as I sat and uncomfortably tried to watch a movie. Other than that we had the odd winge but all in all he managed pretty well. So, apart from an unexpected hour and a half wait for the Visa On Arrival, in Ho Chi Minh airport, things kind if went as well as they could.
Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City; whatever you choose to call it, is today a very vibrant, confident, forward thinking city. It has a certain swagger and appears to be the glitzy, modern face that Vietnam presents to the world. Designer shops proliferate, expensive cars everywhere, young Viet Hipsters drinking coffee and riding cool scooters – is this the new Vietnam perhaps?
Alongside the new, however there is still plenty of the old. This is South East Asia after all and not much is going to change that in a hurry. Pleasingly, there are still a large amount of old French Colonial buildings around the city, giving the place a certain kind of grace – in my opinion anyway. One such example is the Opera House, a classic example of 19th century French architecture and right outside our balcony at the Continental Hotel.
Perhaps it’s just me, and maybe I’m a romantic at heart, but it’s only too easy to imagine white suit clad men in panama hats, smoking and drinking coffee below on the terrace; as cyclo’s drift past on the chaos of the street outside. The hotel itself is a relic from another age, opening in 1880 it is one of Saigon’s oldest hotels and today it has a pleasant sense of fading Colonial grandeur, somewhat reminiscent of Raffles in Singapore, minus the hefty price tag.
Never ones to keep too still, in our two days here we have managed to visit a few of the near by sights – Notre Dame Cathedral, the old GPO building, Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum. Unfortunately we fell a bit foul of the lunch time closing thing in Vietnam when we visited the War Remnants Museum. We got there at 11:30 to be told at 11:50 that it was closing at 12:00! Thanks for the heads up guys……. However, in our very short time there, being dragged around by Harvey, it was fascinating to see the Vietnam War from the other side. Where America is the foreign aggressor and the North Vietnamese the freedom fighters, fighting to liberate themselves from the yoke of foreign Colonialism. It takes a while to get your head around the use of the term “Liberation of Saigon” when you come from a world where Uncle Sam does the liberating, and all others are evil.
Don’t get me wrong, I am and have been for a long time aware of the controversies of the American war in Vietnam but it really does open your eyes seeing it all from the other side. There is even a slight tone of sympathetic respect towards the Americans, which, had the war ended differently you can bet would not be reciprocated.
Tomorrow we fly to Hanoi to begin our slow meander down the length of the country. So far Harvey seems to be doing ok, having been dragged to this hot, sweaty, noisy, confusing world by his crazy parents.
I hope he continues to.
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