North for the holidays

After a week of traveling around by myself in Cambodia, I still had a week left before my friend Anisa was able to get off work. All of the places I still wanted to go, she wanted to go with me. Casting around for something to fill that week, Anisa suggested that I go to Vietnam. The bus from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Min City was only $8, so I decided, why not?

The bus ride from Phnom Penh was interesting, but comfortable. It was a nice tourist bus with air conditioning, but they showed the same few Cambodian karaoke clips repeatedly. So far, I have wandered around the backpacker neighborhood a bit and compared hotels before finding one with a huge room, two beds, minifridge, A/C, and a nice, clean bathroom with shower and bathtub for $8. It seems a bit extravagant, but I looked at the $3 dollar rooms and decided that the extra $5 is worth it. My hotel also organizes tours and after a few days here in the city, I plan to go to see the Mekong Delta. 

Today I started my tourism in earnest. I signed up for a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels just outside of Ho Chi Minh. It was my first time with a tour group. The tunnels are where the people of the village of Cu Chi hid during the war when Americans were in the area or when the area was being bombed. The tunnels include rooms for sleeping, cooking, meetings, medical clinic, etc. Some of the rooms are as deep as 20 meters, and the tunnels themselves are very narrow. You almost have to crawl through them. The tour was accompanied by the typical government propaganda, but in all it was a very positive experience. The guide had fought for the South and when his side lost he had to do eight years in a "re-education" camp. He laughed it off, but I'm sure it was terrible. One positive thing about the tour was that they emphasized the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the villagers, instead of talking the whole time about the politics of the war. I was the only American in the group, but it wasn't uncomfortable. I didn't feel any animosity from the guide or others in the group. I'm glad they've gotten beyond that, otherwise it would have been very difficult.

On the other hand, in the afternoon when I visited the War Remnants Museum I did feel the animosity. Nobody there knew I was American (there are lots of European and Australian tourists, who are easy to blend in with) but the museum was about violence, and it was made very clear that they blamed the US for the violence. The museum was very difficult, though well made. There were several different buildings for different parts. One large building was dedicated to the journalists who died during the war. At the entrance to this building there were photos of every one of the journalists along with their names and nationalities. The majority were Vietnamese, but there were journalists from all over the world and though only two were women. The rest of the museum made me nauseous, especially the part about the effects of Agent Orange. My personal environmentalism seems pointless in the face of such a large scale environmental devastation. 

It was an interesting day, but it’s going to take a while to absorb what I saw today. Like Toul Sleng, it's just too much to take in all at once. It's a good thing I don’t hang on to guilt, or I would feel even worse after seeing all that.

I ventured out of the city for a two day tour of the Mekong, and I have to say it was wonderful. I was almost sorry for it to end, but I was so exhausted I needed the break. Those tours pack in a lot in a very short amount of time. In the morning I got on a bus with a few other tourists and we drove out onto the delta. They put us on long traditional wooden boats and we started down the river. After several turns off the main waterway we were moved onto little, narrower wooden boats. Each boat was paddled by two women, one in the bow and another in the stern, almost like a canoe. We visited four islands, each named for an animal: Turtle, Dragon, Unicorn and Phoenix. We had lunch on Dragon Island, but the closest thing I saw to a dragon was a couple skinks. The other people on the tour were very interesting. There was a woman about my age from Vancouver, BC who was travelling alone. She just traveled for a month in China and came down through Vietnam from the north. There was an ex-Peace Corps volunteer from Rhode Island who did his service in Suriname. For the first time I wasn't the only American. The others in the group were two women from Germany and a young couple from France. I ended up translating for the French couple a little, since English with a strong Vietnamese accent can be hard to understand. It's not so easy for me, so for those whose English isn't great to begin with have a much harder time. The guides here primarily speak English, so tourists have to know at least a little. It seems strange to me that English is so important for tourists here. After lunch we toured through the canals a bit more, saw a coconut candy making workshop and listened to some traditional music and singing over tea. The singing was specific to the Mekong Delta and so was one of the instruments. They called it a "stalk" like of a plant, because it's a long piece of wood, maybe two feet tall with only one string that the musician held upright in his lap and played with a bow. It was beautiful. We spent that night in Cantho.

The next day was also very full. We toured the canals more and I saw a "Monkey Bridge” for the first time. They're the traditional bridges that people use to link islands together, but the government is trying to replace all of them with ugly cement bridges. They're very narrow and I suppose not used much since everybody does everything by boat there. A monkey bridge is basically Xs of crossed bamboo across the canal with narrow logs laid in the bottom of the top half of the X. Along one of the outside uprights, they attach a frail bamboo railing. It looks very sketchy, but when I walked across, it felt pretty stable. One advantage these bridges have is they can lift up one of the bottom logs for taller boats to pass under, which I got to see them do a few times. A cement bridge doesn't have that flexibility. One of the farms and workshops we visited today was a pepper farm. I had never thought about how pepper is grown, but it's on a vine. I tasted some of the little grains, which grow on a little stalk, a lot like grapes. I was surprised to learn that Vietnam is the biggest exporter of pepper in the world.

I spent my last days back in the city. Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon is a huge, busy place, and not really my style. It was interesting, but I was happy to leave when I did. It was very relaxing and even a relief to cross the border back into Cambodia. In retrospect I probably should have gone straight from Saigon up to Dalat, which is a small mountain town with waterfalls and hikes all around it. Instead I did the tourist thing in and around the city with my little trip out into the Mekong Delta. I'll have to save Dalat for next time.

Surprise trip to the south

After a week of traveling around by myself in Cambodia, I still had a week left before my friend Anisa was able to get off work. All of the places I still wanted to go, she wanted to go with me. Casting around for something to fill that week, Anisa suggested that I go to Vietnam. The bus from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Min City was only $8, so I decided, why not?