Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

Until we arrived in Saigon, we had pretty comfortable weather, but it all changed when we landed at the airport.  The temperature then, late in the evening, was approaching 30C, but in the morning it quickly rose to 35C, with high humidity.  Fortunately, my stomach had pretty much settled down by then and I had no real problems with the heat.

Saigon has a population of 8.3m and 3.7m motorbikes!  As with Hanoi, the roads are just packed with motor bikes and the driving just as chaotic.  The city is much more modern though, with wider roads and better quality building.

Did I mention that, by law, two adults are allowed to ride on a motor bike, together with up to five children?  That is, provided the children are not more than 1.2 metres tall.  It used to be that their ages had to be under eight and the driver had to carry the children’s birth certificates.  Now, if he stops them, the policeman has to measure their heights!  They’re also allowed to carry luggage up to one cubic metre, but it’s not clear if this has to be so that no dimension is greater than one metre.  If so, some are totally illegal.  One was carrying a metal beam that must have been about six metres long.  God knows how he managed to corner.

The first visit was to the Reunification Palace, renamed after the fall of Saigon.  Previously it had been the president’s palace.  After the original French building was partially destroyed in 1962 by two rebelling pilots of the Vietnam air force, work on a replacement palace was commenced and inaugurated in 1966.  To me, there is nothing especially appealing about the palace, although some of the rooms are pleasant enough.
 

The most interesting aspect was that it was here in 1975 that the government finally fell.  The Viet Minh drove their tanks through the gates of the palace (the actual tank that broke through is in the picture), only to find the president, Minh, sitting in the cabinet room, waiting for them.  Minh had only been president for three days!  He told them that his government surrendered totally and, suddenly, the war was all over.  The communists made him speak to the people on the radio to tell them of the surrender and then put him in gaol.  He was subsequently sent on a re-education program.

The War Remnants museum was, in many ways, the most interesting visit.  It consists almost entirely of war photographs, together with a few quotations and one or two artefacts (medals, uniforms, etc.).   As is often said, history is written by the victors, but the sole objective of this museum seems to have been to show how brutal were the Americans.  So there were lots of horrific pictures of dead and injured Vietnamese (always implied to be innocent, rather than Viet Cong). 

The pictures included the famous shot that many will remember of the nine-year old girl (Phan Thị Kim Phúc) covered in flames, having been hit by Napalm (a devastating chemical fire-bomb) in 1972.  Apparently, she survived and was sent to Cuba for treatment.  The final irony, so far as the communists are concerned, is that she eventually moved to Canada (Toronto, I believe).

As well as the on-the-spot war pictures, there was also a section showing photos of grotesquely malformed people, supposedly (and very likely) the result of so-called ‘agent orange’.  This was a defoliant used by the Americans in South Vietnam, both to clear jungle areas to make it easier to find the Viet Cong and also (approximately 40%) to kill crops, in an attempt to starve the combatants.  There are many gross images in the museum, just one of which is included here.  I'm afraid it is shocking, but so was the war.

Incidentally, the Viet Minh were the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong were the South Vietnamese citizens who supported the north.  Most of the fighting was done in the South and, surprisingly to me, there was a greater tonnage of US bombs dropped in the South than in the North.  The VC were the most difficult for the Americans to deal with, since they wore no uniforms and could just fade away into the background.  Most likely, in many of the villages in the South. the whole population would have supported the communists, but perhaps not by actively fighting for them.  Could this justify wiping out vast swathes of people, for example, as occurred in the My Lai massacre in 1968.  According to Wikipedia:

“On March 16, 1968 of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women, children (including babies) and elderly people.   Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten and tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.  While 26 U.S. soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted. He served only three years of an original life sentence, while on house arrest.”

With these rather disturbing images in our mind, we moved on to view three French buildings, the Notre Dame cathedral (brick-built and rather uninteresting), the Opera House (reasonably attractive) and the Post Office.  This was by far the most interesting building and I only wish our queues were as short.  The pictures show the interior of the building, together with detail of the floor tiles.






The eighty-year old man in the picture has been coming to the Post Office every day it is open for the last 27 years.  He is paid by no one, but took it on himself to help people who can't read or write or who needs to translate letters into French or English.  Such dedication.







We finally moved on to lunch, which happened to be the first I’d eaten in several days.  We went to a place called Pho 2000, so called because Clinton and daughter Chelsea ate lunch there in 2000.  I’d expected a rather fancy place, but it was just a simple noodle bar, albeit with good, cheap food.  I actually sat in the same seat as Clinton (see picture, with his picture behind me), but when we were there, the restaurant was crowded.  When he came, they closed the entire street from the restaurant to his hotel, 300 metres away.  Of course, he had the restaurant to himself and his entourage.

Here are a few more odd or interesting facts:

• Our guide is a Chelsea fan.  He even called his daughter Chelsea, which must be a pretty uanusual name in Vietnam.  She’s not the only one, Charles.
• There are four sacred animals in Vietnam: Dragon, Unicorn, Pheonix and Turtle (the only real one).
• The Vietnamese Unicorn is half dragon and half lion.  It doesn’t have a horn, except when in a temple.
• The Vietnamese culture is very much Chinese.  However, there are differences.  For example, their lucky number is 9, not 8.
• Vietnam has quite a lot of oil, mostly in the south of the country.  It exports the crude and imports refined oil.
• Some years ago, China occupied a few islands in the south and, although the UN has declared that they belong to the Chinese, the Chinese won’t move.  Guess what?  There’s oil in them there islands.  No wonder they don’t like the Chinese any more.