Leaving Saigon

On the train, just leaving Hue station. Its about 6 am and I guess I slept ok. Left yesterday morning about 9:00 am.  It is a long ride up the coast of Vietnam.  

My last night in Saigon was eventful, I should have taken more pictures.  I finally met Dave Fox, a travel writer from Seattle who lives in Saigon with his wife Kattina, a teacher at the International school.  We both have the same publisher and our editor Linda Franklin put us together.

I had spent the afternoon at the Cu Cui Tunnel site, about 60 Km up the Saigon River, not far from the Cambodian border. I took a speedboat tour with some Aussies and New Zealanders and we had a great guide.    Cu Cui was a battlefield where the VC held out against constant attacks over several years.  It is the start of the highlands, and when you get off the boat it is a steady rise into a sparse forest. During the Tet Offensive, about 19,000 VC troops were stationed here.  There were no permanent facilities as we think of them because the area was subject to bombardment and frequent incursions of South Vietnamese Army and Americans.  But the tunnel systems and the methods of camouflaging them was amazingly complex.  They had logistics and defense systems that applied ancient and modern technology at every junction. Every student of military matters should come here. There were 75 miles of tunnels, and they used no heavy machinery or concrete to build them.  All hand dug, with shovels and baskets. It would be interesting to study to learn why a modern juggernaut like the US military was stymied here.  

But our guide was no propagandist for the Communist government - much the opposite.  His father had been a fighter pilot in the South Vietnamese Army and most of his family lives in the US.  He was full of interesting facts I hadn’t been aware of.  For example during the Christmas Bombing of 1972, according to our guide, the Vietnamese Politburo had written up a letter of surrender, if the bombing had continued, (he said) for only one more day.  I seem to remember the reason we gave for stopping it, (no WiFi here so flying on memory)  was to figure out how to stop the Vietnamese from shooting down so many of our B-52s. A woman from Wichita I knew at that time,  whose Dad worked for Boeing on the B-52s and said he had been working night and day trying to figure out a way to avoid the Russian-made SAM missiles that could hit the planes at 72,000 ft.   Our guide said the real reason we stopped the Christmas bombing of Hanoi was because the Russians threatened to start a nuclear war if we didn’t stop. I think I remember Nixon claimed we were close to a truce, but am foggy about that too. I am going to do some research when I get back to sort all that out, but if anyone reading this knows more about the situation around the Christmas bombing please comment.

Anyway, it was a very interesting trip, and pleasant too in the heat on the speeding boat.  A few miles outside Saigon, it is the jungle on both sides, although you can see development is creeping out.  I thought about what it would have been like to fight there, and am very glad, for many reasons that I missed it.

It was very dry at Cu Cui, the mud was hard. One of the Aussies asked our guide, wasn’t it supposed to be the rainy season?  He said, yes, it was late this year, it should start any day.

Looking out the window of the train, I see the rain has just started.  I think we are now in what was North Vietnam, north of the 17th parallel. Rice paddies as far as I can see on both sides of the train.  At about the 20th hour on the train. This is the richest agricultural land I have ever seen.    

So after I got back from Cu Cui, I met Dave at the Whistling Seal Bar just down Dang Thi Nhu street from my hotel, the Quy Hung. When I come back to Saigon I am staying there, because I have made friends with everyone (and it’s pretty cheap).   The Whistling Seal is owned and operated by a young American who told me that the beer scene in Saigon was taking off and that a number of breweries had opened in town in the last six months.  He brewed all his beers and I tried a couple, and they were good. Even though I live in Portland, I am generally not a beer drinker, (too many calories for this old mesomorph) but the Whistling Seal  Hef was very good.  Anyway eventually Dave showed up and we had one more and then walked down to Bui Vien street, which I had missed in my self-guided three-day walking tour of Saigon.  Dave called Bui Vien street the “backpacker’s ghetto”, and on cue, there were lots of westerners wandering around.  It definitely had a hip feel and the shops reflected it.  An old propaganda poster store was right next to a massage parlor.  Teams of cheerful, beautiful young women gently tried to coax young foreign men into their establishments. To me, they were respectful and deferential.  Respect for age has not completely died in Asia. There was a movie house down the street. I only made it about a quarter of the way down the street before we stopped, but I imagined San Francisco might have had this feel in the summer during the 50s.

Dave was acknowledged by many of the locals and we stopped at his favorite spot, sat out on little chairs on the sidewalk and drank Saigon beer - amazingly cheap, less than 50 cents a bottle.  We were joined by a couple of educated English speaking hipsters who said they were Thai. They had just met each other that evening oddly and were extremely smart and they both had a sophisticated understanding of society and world politics that you rarely find  even among older Europeans. We were joined by an Aussie about my age, who lives in Bangkok, and for reasons he did not explain, said he, “will never go back to Australia”.

 

So we sat, drank, and talked, and I felt very much among interesting friends, at ease, at home, and I watched the action on the street, which was a kaleidoscopic verte’ theater.

I don’t want to steal any thunder from Dave, because he has written some travel books, (Globejotting, published by Inkwater Press - globejotting.com) and is working on one about the local Saigoners who live on Bui Vien street.  He has worked with and for Rick Steves and has an extremely sympathetic eye for the hard difficulties of the local people trying to make a living and feed their families on the streets of Saigon.  I am going to order his book on writing Travel Journals (Globejotting) as soon as I get back. (I definitely need some guidance). But for the short time I spent with him, the Bui Vien street experience was fun and eye-opening, maybe a  high point of my visit to Saigon. Dave loves the city.  He said what he really loves is the spirit of "getting it done" that surpasses anything he has found elsewhere.  I see it.  People step up to help strangers with no ceremony and accept the inconvenience others might cause them with a relaxed “let me help you fix it” attitude.  It isn’t just because I am a foreigner and they are hoping to make that connection, although there is some of that of course.  But everyone applies their best effort and ingenuity to finding practical workarounds to the many inconveniences of living here. And that makes all the difference between a drag and a delight.

Dave’s wife Kattina showed up and joined the conversation, adding some funny acerbic observations about conversation and behavior of the rest of us, who were further into our cups than she was. Soon it was time to go, because I had to get up early to catch this train.  As for Bui Vien street,  I have to stress that the company and the conversation was only icing on the cake of the evening.  If all I had done was sat and watched the street, it would have an amazing experience.  It was a 360 degree carnival of reality, commercial, yes, but lively and in the moment.  Life is what you make it, and they make it well here in Saigon.