I'm (on) the Train They Call the City of Ho Chi Minh...

30 August 2009

Tragically required to leave Jungle Beach after our three-night stay, and hopped a 30-seater bus for the hour-and-a-half down to Nha Trang to catch the train for Saigon. Nha Trang is meant to be a beach city, but is more urban than bliss--I'm told the beach is very built-up and last year's group had some issues with access and theft. We only saw enough of the place to get lunch and hop the train, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Doc Let and Jungle Beach is the better option...this last leg of the trip is nearly all hotels and no camping, which means it's one town after another. I'm sure Nha Trang has it's delights, but the peace of Doc Let was wonderful--nice to have the breaks in touristing that we'd become accustomed to the last four months.

Vietnamese trains are...functional. It was fine, we had air con and seats and all, but through some miscommunication and tantrums thrown by other people, I got a seat that had the broken back reclined almost flat for 8 hours, and David wedged in behind me. Vietnamese seats, unsurprisingly, are not designed for 6-foot tall white guys. Toilet was a squat (which you might think I would be used to by now, and truly I don't even blink at them anymore...when they're stationary) and I can tell you from experience, peeing in flipflops on a moving train in a metal squat toilet is not the most graceful way to pass the time. More entertaining was the snack shop on the platform in Nha Trang--every kind of dried salt fish a girl could ask for. Mmm-mm good. Especially nice given the direct sunlight and 80% humidity...now, I love Vietnam. But. Dried fish roll ups? Really? It's August, people.

Anyhow, rolled into Ho Chi Minh City at 8 that night--still called Saigon by pretty much everyone except the American guy who reads the arrival announcement on the train and is adamant that it is HCMC. He also read the word 'quay' phonetically, so we'll just ignore him, shall we? Three minivans waiting to take us to the lovely Madam Cuc's hotels in District 1. There are three, all close to one another, and we're scattered between Hotel 84 and Hotel 127. Free juice in the lobby, wifi, and they keep cold Diet Coke in the fridge for 10,000 dong. Also, there is a winch for carrying bags up the stairs. My sort of place. Popped off to find some place with $2 steaks that David read about--and promptly spent an hour in a taxi with a very lost driver circling the Reunification Palace. So...dinner at KFC it is. They bring you soda in glass cups at KFC in Saigon, though, so ace for the class factor.

Spent yesterday sort-of doing a walking tour with four rather unappreciative audience members. Mostly we ate and shopped and they politely ignored my instructive lectures. Custom-mixed cranberry frozen yogurt in a wifi cafe next to an Aussie version of Starbucks...this is possibly not what Uncle Ho had in mind. Lots of vivid and strident red banners though, and if you're going to keep only the fun bits of communism, then the decorative propaganda is the bit to go for, I say. Shopping: Lack of regulation is very nice--any Lonely Planet you like is available here, all photocopied for your reading pleasure at $4. Are also now proud owners of a hammock that cost all of $1.75. Useful and difficult to pack--it has it all.

We did do the War Remnants Museum--which used to be called something like 'Museum of American and French Evil Imperialist Atrocities Perpetrated on Innocent and Patriotic Vietnamese Victims.' But they decided that wasn't very tourist-friendly. In all seriousness, it's a harrowing place, with the most explicit images of dead bodies, Agent Orange-linked deformities, and the various nasty things people do to one another that I've ever seen. Very Apocalypse Now-esque helicopter outside, along with planes, tanks, swiftboats, etc., (all with disconcertingly brand new and occasionally mis-spelt ID stickers on the 40-year old metal frames), and a reconstruction of the tiger cages that the South Vietnamese kept North Vietnamese in.

It's obviously very much from the POV of the North Vietnamese, and includes some horrific images of American soldiers doing unspeakable things, without mentioning the reverse. Hard to remain detached and impartial as a viewer when confronted with images like that--they obviously know a fair bit about emotional manipulation. But also a good exhibit on the role of western photojournalism in the war, from Robert Capa to the journalists who disappeared into Cambodia in the 70s. Worth seeing in the sense that it's got to be better that people don't forget how crap we can be to each other.

Finally tracked down the$2 steaks--you get what you pay for, but $2 does go a hell of a lot farther in Vietnam than in London. Wandered Ben Thanh Market--the iconic clock tower that is recreated in various strip malls in Northern Virginia lives here, built by the French in 1914. David and I had fresh beer--up to 30 cents a glass here, from the much more reasonable 25 cents in Hoi An (sigh...) at a local-ish place near the hotel. Local in the sense that there were actually Vietnamese people in there who were not looking for western boyfriends. Though it also appeared to be where all the Sub-Saharan African men resident in Saigon go for their Orangina--a tad surreal, that.

David and a bunch of the others have gone off this morning for a half-day tour of the Cu Chi tunnels...will let him explain all that. Suffice it to say that I am not a fan of tiny dark little spaces, and have taken this opportunity to sleep in. Until noon. And googling for a hotel in Fiji. It's a hard life for Miss Saigon.