Ho Chi Minh City

(apologies for the lack of photos…time constraints, stay tuned)

You enter Saigon along a highway that is flanked for miles with small stores, rice farms, and repair shops. As you approach, they increase in frequency, until the black soot clinging to the concrete tells you are in a city again. Motorcycles dominate the roads, chaotically darting and buzzing amongst the cars. The only traffic rule they follow is a Darwinian one: wherever a motorcycle can go, it will. That includes sidewalks, crosswalks, and the wrong way on a one way street.

Interestingly enough, the drivers of these death machines will often cross several lanes of traffic, pop up a curb, burst through a fruit stand, and then casually ask you if you might need a ride somewhere. One imagines that if one of them took you to your execution, you'd be somewhat relieved to arrive in one piece.

In any case, your bus beeps and honks its way over a bridge or two, and plunges into a modern, but still old city. Saigon is built flat and spread out, rather than up. Depending on where you stay in it, you can have a dozen different experiences. On the outskirts, you'll swim in a steamy sea of South East Asian grime and mania. Trucks and buses belch smoke and dust onto impromptu cafes where patrons poke through bowls of pho. Women walk balancing loads of coconuts or fruit on long staves. Motorcycles run down everyone in sight.

In the center, though, you find the wide, patient boulevards of colonial France. The traffic is still incredible, but you can easily escape it in small boutiques or cool cafes, which serve some of the best iced tea you'll ever find.

We liked it so much, we immediately ditched our idea of a trip to see some wartime tunnels outside the city (there's a perfectly informative book we'll read), and concentrated on the city itself. The first day took us to the War Remnants Museum. It is, as you might imagine, a long, gruesome, and pretty much accurate portrayal of the US war on Vietnam. Hardly the sort of thing you follow up with a steak dinner.

From there, we went book shopping, and I was left, as usual, to ponder who chooses the absurdly high-falutin titles in a foreign bookstore. It had no less than five books by Thomas Hardy, in addition to Vanity Fair, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Middlemarch, Ethan Frome, Silas Marner, volumes of eye-closing Wordsworth, the sonnets of the Reverend John Donne, and the complete works of the lesser Bronte sisters. I was once a graduate student in literature, and I've read most of that stuff. My advice: buy a gun instead. It's quicker and you'll suffer less.

We ended up eating dinner at a café and considered the day a success. Tomorrow, we'll head back out to take in the Ho Chi Mihn City Museum and the city market. Then, we're off to home.