Snapshots of a place once called Saigon.
A cyclo driver–a cyclo is a local species of the common Asian pedicab, a kind of bicycle-powered rickshaw–pedals up as I leave my hotel.
“Welcome back! You remember me?”
“No.”
I keep walking. He follows, without the cyclo.
“You Aussie, right?”
“No. American.” I keep walking . . .
“I remember you. Last year.”
“No, I don’t think so.” I keep walking . . .
“You want sightsee? Market? One dollar.”
“No, I’m just out for a walk.” I keep walking . . .
“War Museum?”
“No, just enjoying the day.” I keep walking . . .
“Enjoy girl? Sexy massage?” I keep walking . . .
“Later?”
I reach an intersection alone, the cyclo-maniac having finally gotten the drift, and make a move to cross the street. The street–it would hold four lanes if they believed in lanes here–is called Pham Hong Thai.
Now, stepping onto a Ho Chi Minh City street is not like stepping onto a street in, say, Kankakee. Think “bungee jump.” Think “Chief Dan George.”
The bungee thing needs no explanation, but here’s the deal on the chief.
In the 1970 movie “Little Big Man,” George (who got an Oscar nomination for this) played Old Lodge Skins, a Cheyenne chief who has gone blind. Dustin Hoffman, his adopted grandson, in advance of a cavalry attack, tells the chief he is invisible and, therefore, invulnerable to the soldiers’ bullets.
So we have a scene where this grinning old man–surrounded by a fury of mounted cavalry firing and slashing at will, with panic all around–is walking calmly and slowly through it all, and declaring, from time to time and with great satisfaction, “I’m invisible . . . “
That’s exactly how you cross a street in Ho Chi Minh City, except here the cavalry is zillions of buzzing motorbikes. You walk, slowly, at a steady pace, across the street, pretending to be invisible as the bikes zoom around you–which they do.
A car, of course, will zoom right over you. That adds texture.
So there you have it: Insistent cyclo drivers, hints of immorality, Chief Dan George, motorbikes–and the world’s greatest breakfast food other than Cheerios, pho.
And the war.
Actually, Ho Chi Minh City isn’t a bad place to visit for a couple of days, especially 1) if you’re going to see more of Vietnam (a good concept) and/or 2) if you combine this with wonderful Angkor Wat in Cambodia (an hour’s flight way). The people, for the most part, are kind and tolerant of tourists, and many speak enough English to make it easy to find what you want and get where you want to go.
The local food is good–and if you stick to the places where actual Vietnamese eat, it’s embarrassingly cheap. (Standard price at most street restaurants for a healthy bowl of pho–noodle soup with some meat and other good things in it: 64 cents.)
Hotels are reasonable. So are taxis. Aside from the odd postcard-pushing waif and overeager cyclo-path, the city is, for Asia, relatively benign as far as sales pressure. It feels safe, even without a large visible police presence. (Whether there’s a large invisible police presence in this nominally communist city is . . . well . . . frankly, I don’t know.) Good values in silk and other things.
On the other hand:
Folks, this isn’t Bangkok. There is no Grand Palace, the gold leaf shimmering in the sun, visions of Yul Brynner, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It’s not polished Singapore or dynamic Hong Kong; there’s little of the faded colonial architecture that makes Penang appealing. Antiquity? Not really. Not here.
Also not here: tsunami damage. Vietnam, which faces the Pacific Ocean’s South China Sea, was a long way from the devastation suffered by villages and towns along the Indian Ocean.
Ho Chi Minh City is at once dull and frenetic, with plenty of energy but without a single essential, iconic tourist site. There are temples, but none truly exceptional. The history museum, unless you adore pottery fragments or creative chunks swiped from Angkor Wat, is a propaganda-filled bore.
Yes, there are remnants of the French era: Notre Dame Cathedral (built in 1880, when just 13,000 lived in the city proper), which could pass for a neighborhood church; a post office (1880-1887) that looks like a Paris suburb’s old train station; an opera house (1899) that’s almost a mini-Sacre Coeur; the ornate onetime City Hall (early 1900s) that’s now the People’s Committee Building; the frilly-elegant Majestic Hotel (1925). But the overall French-colonial feel of the city, to the degree it existed, is pretty much gone.
Also gone: the old wartime R&R red light/bar district. Not that the city is chaste–if you want it, it’s there–but these days and nights, on the street now called Dong Khoi linking the Majestic with the storied Continental Hotel, they sell silk and good artwork, not sex and bad hooch. The aggressively promoted foot massages, at least on this street, are actually foot massages. (One promotional leaflet did promise “food massages,” which generated interesting thoughts.)
Even the old U.S. embassy–the one the Marine Corps helicopter famously fled in 1975 (see “Miss Saigon”)–has been flattened, replaced by a U.S. consulate that looks like a vaguely Oriental bunker.
Good things: Parks and parkways are pleasant places to stroll among locals practicing tai chi or badminton in the mornings, before the afternoon heat kicks in. Ben Thanh Market, largest in town, is an interesting place to explore; in the evenings, streets alongside the building are taken over by portable outdoor restaurants more inviting (i.e., cleaner) than your average Asian street stalls. Affordable French restaurants. Half a million Chinese–mostly in Cholon, a city within the city–with their temples and noodles and traditional medicines.
And, again, it’s nice to be among the Vietnamese, who, aside from a few cranks, are welcoming, helpful, quick to smile–and, something of a surprise under the circumstances, seem to like Americans.
“I thought there would be some bad feelings, from the war,” I told a taxi driver old enough to remember it all.
“That,” he replied, “was long, long ago.”
It was. For many, it never was at all. In a city of 7 million or 8 million or 11 million souls (estimates vary; many residents are off the rolls), there are 2.5 million registered motorbikes, and at least 2.2 million (that’s a guess) are driven by people, male and female, who were not alive in 1975. That’s when Russian-built tanks crashed through the fence of what was then Indepen-dence Palace and is now Reunification Palace, emphatically signaling the fall of the South Vietnamese government. To these mobile young people, and to the companions who ride behind them, and to millions more of their siblings, the war is a bloodless schoolbook lesson.
But for those of us sensitive to the thing, for whatever reason, it’s impossible to disregard the reality of the Vietnam War–the “American War,” it’s called here–while in Vietnam.
The Russian tanks, though not operational, are still on the palace grounds. Ho Chi Minh, in statues and portraits, is an omnipresence. Many of us remember antiwar demonstrators in Grant Park waving the flag of North Vietnam during the runup to the 1968 Democratic convention; now it’s the flag of the one Vietnam, and it’s everywhere.
It’s also a popular T-shirt.
The War Remnants Museum, as close to a tourist “essential” as there is here, is not a particularly sophisticated museum. It’s a courtyard strewn with captured American war machines–planes, tanks, artillery pieces, the inevitable helicopter–plus rooms devoted mainly to photos. They are, as they must be, troubling photos.
At a souvenir stall within the museum compound, American soldier dog tags, presumably replicas, sell for $5.
There is a dance club in Ho Chi Minh City called Apocalypse Now. The day-trip everyone talks about is to Chu Chi, where we all can tour part of the tunnel network that helped make the Viet Cong so formidable a force (and, at a buck a bullet, where anyone can fire war-era weapons just for fun).
I skipped that excursion. Instead, I took another day-trip, a pastoral one that took me onto the Mekong River and into a jungle canal that unintentionally led to chilling flashbacks–and I wasn’t here during the war.
But back to now.
There’s a reason Ho Chi Minh City lacks the special feeling of other Asian centers. Well into the 1920s, Saigon–it officially became Ho Chi Minh City soon after the takeover–was something of a backwater, with a population of less than 200,000. In 1943, 498,000 lived here. By 1954, when Ho’s army was humiliating the French, it had become a city of 1.7 million. Thirty years later, the population had doubled.
It was, nonetheless and in many ways, a large small town.
“When I came here 10 1/2 years ago,” said Sue McKinney, a Saigon furniture dealer, “there was one functioning traffic light. The pace of traffic was set by the oldest man on the oldest bicycle.”
Today, anyone riding a bicycle is just in the way. There is a boom of sorts going on, fueled in part by investment that took off when the United States dropped its trade embargo in 1994, in part by offshore oil and in large part by money sent home by Vietnamese immigrants who settled in the United States, Australia and Europe after the war.
It’s why, in part, United Airlines last month launched the first service to Vietnam by a U.S. commercial carrier since the war ended.
Communist? The nephews and nieces of Uncle Ho may be watching on hidden monitors somewhere, but free enterprise rules, and has for at least a decade. Commerce is everywhere.
“People are free to do anything they like,” a guide said. “Of course, it must be legal.”
They’re evidently also free to call this city whatever they choose. The newspapers, at least the two English-language dailies, and official documents call the place Ho Chi Minh City, but in daily conversation it’s still Saigon. That, as might be suspected, is not an expression of quiet subversion.
“It’s easier to say,” said a shopkeeper. “It’s friendlier.”
It’s a friendly city. It isn’t what it was, but neither are we.
It is what it is–a city that deserves a look, and, before you get run over, an ongoing flight.
Next week: A place you won’t want to leave.
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IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
United Airlines, in a development with all kinds of implications–international and internal–on Dec. 10 began direct daily service into Ho Chi Minh City out of San Francisco, with a stop in Hong Kong. Recently quoted fares (subject to change) from O’Hare were about $1,200. The journey, including time for connections, will take from 21 to 25 hours. Non-U.S. carriers, including Korean Air, Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific and two Japanese airlines, All Nippon and Japan Airlines, can also get you there, using various gateways and partners; expect to pay more.
GETTING AROUND
The options are taxis, cyclos (see accompanying stories) or hopping on the back of someone’s motorbike. Taxis–cheap, metered and clean–are the best option; they’ll get you to most places near town center for 12,000 dong, the equivalent (at press time) of about 76 cents. Don’t expect much English from the driver; have someone at the hotel write down your destination and take the hotel’s card for the return ride. Cyclos, pedal-powered rickshaws, can be fun, if a little embarrassing (it feels uncomfortably colonial–but you’re supporting the economy). On motorbikes, if you dare (I did; I’m still here), a buck will do it for a short haul. Driving yourself is not a rational option.
STAYING THERE
Many of the popular tourist hotels are located on and around a short stretch from the former Opera House down Dong Khoi Street toward the Saigon River. Best of the bunch (at least until the Hyatt opens later in 2005) is the gorgeous Sheraton (from $155/double), less than two years old and the closest thing in town to a Peninsula. Lovers of tradition will adore the colonial yet contemporary Majestic (from $90; ask for a river view). The nearby Grand (from $74) shares the Majestic’s traditional feel–just as the nicely renovated Caravelle (from $190 officially, $118 if you ask nicely) seems akin to the Sheraton. The famous Continental (from $90) has a literary pedigree (“The Quiet American” was set here) but dreary rooms; a better value, steps away, is the Asian, a budget hotel (from $40, including breakfast) that’s clean and comfortable for its class. I paid $80 for a room at the corporate-style New World, a bit away from the tourist core (a minor inconvenience; see taxis, above) but steps from Ben Thanh Market, a plus if you can handle crossing the streets.
DINING THERE
Plenty of possibilities, but the most fun, some of the best flavors and most reasonably priced eats can be found at small family restaurants that open onto the streets. They’re especially good (and saf-est) for noodle soups such as pho, a Vietnamese breakfast (or snack) favorite, or bun moc, which adds dumplings and other good things to the mix. Moving upscale (but still bargains): Two restaurants near the Sheraton, Lemongrass (don’t miss the seafood soup) and Vietnam House (perfect spring rolls), offer variations on local favorites in a pleasant, air-conditioned atmosphere; people I trust were high on Hoi An, another restaurant in the same class. Nam Phan is stylish and relatively pricey for HCMC, but the Hanoi fried fish slices ($8.06) were heavenly. A smoked salmon starter and chateaubriand with foie gras will set you back all of $22.28 at Camargue, a justly celebrated French restaurant. And don’t leave town without surfing the options (especially seafood) at the street restaurants that spring up after dark outside Ben Thanh Market.
DAYTRIPS
The state-run Saigontourist (www.saigontourist.net) offers a cluster of quick trips out of Ho Chi Minh City. Among the more popular: Cu Chi Tunnels, a look into the Viet Cong tunnel system ($25; all rates subject to change); a Cu Chi-Tay Ninh combo ($43), which adds a visit to a religious pilgrimage site; My Tho, which gets visitors onto the Mekong River, largely industrial here, after a mostly uninteresting two-hour drive ($40); Vinh Long, a slightly longer Mekong experience that adds a floating market ($48); and Can Gio, a mix of mangrove ecosystem and war leftovers ($55).
INFORMATION
For visa (you’ll need one) and other basic background material on the country, try the Vietnam Embassy’s Web site at www.vietnamembassy-usa.org; 202-861-0737. For general tourism information: www.vietnamtourism.com, which also has links to other useful sites.
— Alan Solomon
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E-mail: asolomon@tribune.com
Next week: Hoi An, a different Vietnam.
