Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

We went to the famous Cu Chi tunnels today, which was quite an experience. You get to crawl through the same tunnels that the Viet Cong used during the American War, which results in one having a lot of respect for what these people endured.

While we could only navigate the tunnels painfully on our hands and knees, the Viet Cong guerillas ran upright with head bowed, while carrying a rifle. They cooked, ate, slept and lived in these tunnels, venturing out to the Mekong River to have a bath.

250 km of tunnels they built, a couple of which ran directly under the American base at Cu Chi. They would attack by night, then disappear without trace. When the tunnels were eventually discovered by the enemy, they were too small for the American frame, so the Americans sent in the smallest people they could find, but these people often fell victim to booby-traps and land-mines.

As a solution, the Americans started to use dogs to sniff out the entrances to the tunnels, but the guerillas also managed to thwart that approach by taking the uniforms from American corpses and rubbing them over the entrances to mark them with smells that the dogs would associate with friendliness. They also dropped chilli powder over the entire area to make the dogs’ nose swell.

Again, I have to say that the ability of these people to fashion solutions from anything that happens to be available — no matter how seemingly useless — leaves me thinking that we are very pampered in the West, often complaining and unable to cope when we are forced to forego our little luxuries, while the people here can devise much more intricate solutions to their problems than we can, even though they possess much less in a material sense. It seems that the raw materials to fix your problems are always there, just so long as you look hard enough.

Our tunnel guide was excellent, by the way. He was a former army officer and possessed a great deal of knowledge and experience about the war. He had seen all of the famous American films about the Vietnam War and pointed out inaccuracies in all of them. They are not to be trusted, in his opinion.

After the tunnels, we went to the American War Crimes Museum (or the War Remnants Museum as it seems to have been renamed). That made for about as grim an afternoon of exhibit viewing and placard reading as I can possibly imagine. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the subject in the past, but nothing could really prepare one for the photographs and other exhibits on display here, with everything from snaps of GIs holding up the heads of beheaded North Vietnamese soldiers to preservation jars containing the pickled, mangled bodies of babies born with fatal birth defects, the victim offspring of parents who had ingested dioxin when Agent Orange defoliant had rained down on them from the spray-planes above.

Outside, a war victim with no arms below the elbows, a mangled leg and only one eye greeted me and shook my hand with his stump, before trying to ply me with counterfeit copies of novels whose plots take place in Vietnam.

After that, it was back to the hotel (a new hotel, since the last one was charging more than it was worth) for a short period of relaxation, before hitting the street again for dinner and then taking a cyclo elsewhere for ice-cream.

Tomorrow, we depart for three days to the Mekong Delta, which is — by all accounts — a great experience. When we return, we’ll spend one last night in Saigon and then depart for Hong Kong the next day.

I expect we’ll write more during our last evening here.

Well, we’ve had a good time in Saigon, despite the word on the street that it was dull and not worth spending more than a day here. We hired motorbikes with drivers yesterday, which was interesting. I was dead set against it at first, but after reading the guy’s book of testimonials and hearing him remind us repeatedly of how hot it was, I decided to give it a try. It was actually just fine, no more dangerous-feeling than a cyclo (basically chair pushed by a bicycle). We saw lots of sights yesterday, although none are really worth mentioning in detail. Basically museums, markets and pagodas.

Today we went with a small tour group to the Cu Chi tunnels of the Viet Cong. Our tour guide was fascinating. He was a former South Vietnamese soldier, or at least we think he was. We know he was an officer for five years, but he was so pro-Viet Cong that it was confusing to figure out which side he was on. I assumed Viet Cong, but Ian says he heard him tell someone that he was South Vietnamese and he also made reference to a trip to New York in 1970.

Anyway, this guy was really interesting and told us stuff almost all the way to the tunnels, which took about 90 minutes. I doubled my knowledge of the Vietnam war, I think. There are two tunnel sites: a rebuilt one for tourist that has been enlarged and an original one, also with tourists but with less of them, that hasn’t been enlarged. We went to the latter. The tunnels are tiny and horrible. I could stand up in most places while bent fully at the waist. Ian is very inflexible (in more ways than one!) so he had to crawl. They are dark (dimly lit for tourists), very stuffy, very hot and just plain awful. I simply cannot imagine being forced to spend my time in there, forget about having to run around in there with a machine gun and no food and people trying to kill me if I went out for a breath of air. We went 30 meters. The girls in front of me stopped to take a photo and I wanted to kick them to make them keep moving. You just felt like if you didn’t get out and get a breath of air, you’d suffocate. We couldn’t have been in there for more than three minutes, but when we got out, everyone was covered in sweat.

After the tunnels, the van dropped several of us who were interested off at the War Remnants Museum; more accurately titled the those American scum-suckers museum. It was really awful. Of course, they told a very one-sided tale, but that was interesting since I’ve always heard a different one-sided tale. It was mostly photos and also some guns and stuff, but they aren’t that interesting. The photos are of soldiers (mostly American) doing awful things to Vietnamese people and also of various injured people and kids with horrible birth defects. There was one of a baby, probably a year old, taken in 1997. He has feet coming out of his hips. We’ve seen a handful of Agent Orange birth defect people in town here. Most of them ride around on skateboard-like things all twisted up like pretzels. The worst photograph in there, for me, was one of an American soldier smiling while holding some scraps of clothing with some of the former owner still attached. An arm and part of a leg and the head were hanging out of this mass of fabric.

So, fun day!

Tonight, we ate at a restaurant with “stewed goat penis with Chinese medicine” on the menu. Mmm, yummy. I was served stir-fried vegetables with incredibly real-looking fake squid in it. I couldn’t get a straight answer about what it was, but came to believe the guy who said it was made of rice powder. Another guy said, “yes, it’s squid! It’s vegetarian!” Anyway, the look was too unappetizing for me, so I left them to the side anyway.

Ian got a $1.50 haircut and shave tonight. The guy took so much time and care with it that I got jealous. I wish I had a beard to shave. A haircut here even involves an electric massager. I think I’ll get one when we get back from our Mekong trip just to see what the female version involves.

Speaking of massage, we haven’t had a Vietnamese massage yet because it seems a bit weird. We saw it on a video, but I forgot that it was from one of the countries that we were visiting. They take these small heated glass cups and put them on your skin. As they cool, your skin gets sucked up into the glass. You’re left with a big round hickey wherever they put it. I don’t know how long the hickey lasts, but I’m not keen on having them for very long and I’m especially not keen on the idea of trusting them to tell me accurately how long they’ll last. So we’ll see. Unless I can find some info about it on the internet, I’ll pass.

Tomorrow, we head out on our Mekong Delta trip for three days and two nights, so we’ll probably write more on Thursday. Then it’s off to our final city, Hong Kong, on Friday.

OK, this has got to be quick, because this Internet shop will be closing min just a few minutes.

The trip back from Cat Ba Island was a pleasant, lazy way to spend a day.

Once back in Hanoi, we had dinner at an excellent restaurant and then proceeded to the airport, 30 km north of the city, by taxi.

The airport is pretty swish, and the Vietnam Airlines flight was aboard what seemed like an almost new 767, too, so that was quite a change from Lao Aviation.

We arrived 1 hour and 45 minutes later in Ho Chi Minh City. Gone was the coolness of Hanoi and we found ourselves once again in very humid weather, but this time in the torrential rain.

We didn’t arrive until 23:00, so we were a little concerned that we might not be able to find a hotel without the shutter down. After all, the streets of Hanoi are deserted at that time. Not so in Ho Chi Minh City: the hotels were all open and we had no problem finding a room. Indeed, the only problem was in negotiating a fair rate with a taxi driver at the airport, as every bugger in this part of the world wants to rip you off (and who can blame them, since so many tourists are cash laden and just asking to be relieved of their excess money).

We were up very early today to make the most of our time in the city. Gone was the rain, replaced by blazing sunshine and blue skies.

We allowed ourselves to be persuaded to charter a couple of local guys and their motorbikes for a tour of the city. Sarah was very wary of the precarious traffic at first, but this turned out to be an excellent idea, as these guys ferried us all over town for eight hours in total, for the princely sum of $1 per hour. Not bad at all.

We took in the Ho Chi Minh City museum, along with a couple of pagodas, a couple of markets, Chinatown, a great noodle shop for lunch (the real thing — no English on the menus here), the Reunification Palace (formerly the Presidential Palace) and, finally, an ice-cream shop (where I sampled an absolutely dreadful local fruit called durian — I was shocked to discover that Sarah liked it!).

After relaxing at the hotel for a while, we had dinner at an upmarket Vietnamese restaurant, travelling there and back by cyclo (bicycle taxi).

Back on our home street, we’ve just had a relaxing foot massage and now it’s time for bed.

Tomorrow, we’re heading out for a half-day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, which were a huge network of tunnels that allowed the North Vietnamese Army to conduct their operations while the ground and airspace above were unusable. Ingenious. Everywhere you look in this country, you can’t fail to be impressed by the ability of these people to use whatever means are at their disposal to do some very clever things to survive and progress.

After a visit to the American War Crimes museum in the afternoon, that’ll be it for tomorrow. The next day, we set off for a 3 day trip up the Mekong Delta, which should prove to be outstanding. We can’t wait.

We’re in Cat Ba town on Cat Ba Island, the largest island in Halong Bay in the north of Vietnam. We’re here with a small tour group. We’re writing this message from an internet cafe that advertised itself inside our bus as “only an internet cafe and game room on Cat Ba Island.” Funny how word placement makes all the difference.

Yesterday, we had a bus ride from Hanoi to Halong City. The bus was way better than what we’re used to, which was great. Then we boarded a nice boat for a 4-hour cruise out into the bay. The scenery is really spectacular. After a swim off the side of the boat, we went to a very large cave with three chambers. Many of the the rock formations in the bay have caves inside. This one was just huge. They have it subtley lit, so you can actually see stuff. It was great. Then we went back to the boat for dinner and chatting.

We had decent cabins to sleep in, although an Irish couple in our group had a rat in their cabin. We are unaware of any rodent visitors to our cabin. This morning we docked at Cat Ba Island and dropped our stuff at our hotel. Then we went on a smaller boat that took us to a place where we got off and hiked to a village. From there, a subset of us went on a very steep, very muddy climb to the top of the largest mountain in the bay. It was the sort of climb that required you to use your hands in the ground to keep from slipping down. The view from the top was really spectacular, though, which was good because I wouldn’t have been too pleased if it had been mediocre after all that effort.

We’re back in town now and have had a great dinner at our hotel. We’re walking around the town now and a crazy local guy has decided to accompany us everywhere we go. We think he wants us to hire him for tomorrow to be our boat guide, but we’re not sure. He is also very eager for us to go into the New City Disco, but he’s sorely out of luck there! Once we finish here, it’s off to bed. I’m falling asleep in my chair.

Tomorrow will be an easier day with more cruising and swimming and then the bus ride back to Hanoi. Once we get there, we’ll immediately get in a cab to the airport for our flight to Saigon.

That’s all for now.

We did our Perfume Pagoda trip today. It involved a two-hour van trip (which was more comfortable than our van trip from Vinh to Hanoi), a one-hour rowboat trip (the boat with four of us in it was paddled by one local woman), and a 90-minute hike uphill. At the end of this, we saw a cave that was actually not much better than the Pak Ou caves in Laos, which was significantly easier to get to. However, the boat trip was rather fabulous. The scenery was spectacular. The boat was uncomfortable, though, so I had to endure Ian’s bellyaching about his butt. It was a very shallow boat, so we were sitting on hard little stools about four inches high and in a narrow space so we pretty much had to have our knees at our chins.

We ran in to some forceful street vendors today. They employed a technique that we had not yet encountered. When we arrived in the village that the boat departed from, they descended upon us. Each one of these woman chose one of us and asked us our nationality, name, age and number of children. After each question, they told us their answer to the same question. Then they tried to sell us a packet of postcards or a little bracelet. After we declined, they gave us one of these bracelets as a “souvenir” and told us their name about 10 times and pointed to their head to indicate that we should commit the name to memory. When we tried to give the bracelets back, they wouldn’t take them. They kept saying “later.” This same thing happened at the end of the boat ride, at the foot of the trail. We had four bracelets by the time we got out of there.

When we returned to the foot of the trail and to the village, each of our women grabbed us and reminded us of her name and tried to get us to buy postcards and bracelets. When we declined, they got pretty mad.

Similarly, our boat rower kept saying throughout the entire return journey, “sir, madam, some people, boat money.” It took us a while to understand this, but we did eventually discern what she was saying and understand that she wanted a tip. At the end of the ride, Ian gave her a small tip (the tickets had been pre-paid) and she got all insulted and said it wasn’t enough. One guy in our group said that the same thing happened to him and that his rower tried to grab a 100,000 dong note (more than $6 – the tickets were something like $2) out of his hand.

All in all, our trip was fun, though. Tomorrow we’ll check out of our hotel and head out for our Halong Bay tour, which we’re eagerly anticipating. We booked with a pricey tour operator, so we’re expecting a small group, good guide, and a nice boat.

We suspect that we won’t write again until Sunday.