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I know I owe you all a few entries from the week I missed back there earlier on my trip, so here’s part one of two: Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, also known as “the expensive place in Vietnam.” Which is to say, sure, I’d go back in a minute.
The first thing that stood out about the city was its breadth — far more spread-out than Hanoi, much like, in fact, Los Angeles, which maybe explains why all of the South Vietnamese refugees settled in Gardena. Unlike Hué, you can’t walk the whole thing, but, like Hanoi, it can more or less be divided into zones between which you take moto or cyclo and within which you walk.
Before I go any further: a note on the name. Part of the city, the part which Westerners are most likely to visit, is still correctly called Saigon, as it is next to the Saigon river. Northerners and many people from outside the Mekong Delta area call the city Ho Chi Minh; most residents call it Saigon. A Westerner can, as I discovered, call it either and be perfectly well understood. The word Saigon itself is actually Khmer, as the city was once part of that empire.
Anyway, less history, more visit. The first thing I found — and this remained true throughout my visit — was that Ho Chi Minh was cooler than Hanoi, just as Hué had been. I can’t think of any coherent explanation as to why this would be. But I was able to walk around, and to do so substantially unmolested. Moto drivers in Ho Chi Minh would only bother me every other block, while cyclo drivers were positively lazy and hardly ever showed up even when I wanted them. It was positively relaxing!
But somehow I got around: specifically, on the first day I visited the Chinese-style Jade Emperor Pagoda; Notre Dame Cathedral; the Ho Chi Minh City Museum; the War Remembrance Museum (formerly, American and Chinese War Crimes Museum); and the Reunification Palace (formerly, South Vietnamese Presidential Palace). On my second day, I travelled to the Cu Chi tunnels and got to go around town with a couple of university students I met who wanted to practice their English. Oh, and I was involved in a traffic accident while on a moto ride. But more on that entirely harmless event later.
Now, in Vietnam, everything closes between 11am and about 2:30pm. This is very French, and also very inconvenient, two adjectives which may in fact be synonyms. The main effect on a tourist, such as me, is that alternative plans must be made during the mid-day hours. If, also like me, you’re determined to eat street food, you can be sure that lunch will take no more than twenty minutes (not only will people be clamoring for your seat, but you’ll probably be tired of sitting on the little child-sized plastic stools that leave your knees at mid-chest, above the level of the similarly child-sized plastic tables that street kitchens seem to prefer). As a consequence, I hired myself a moto to visit the Jade Emperor Pagoda, some distance out from the tourist center. This small temple, nestled directly in a residential neighborhood, would have been easy to miss but was beautiful inside:
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Also beautiful was the city-center Notre Dame cathedral, built, of course, by the French:
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Next was the early-opening Ho Chi Minh City Museum, which opened right after I finished a lovely pigeon roasted in coconut juice, onions, garlic, and red peppers, at a joint just around the corner (it works better if you say it French-style, “pee-zhon”). The Museum is in the beautiful Gia Long Palace, once the center of government of French Indochina. This late 19th century building, which may not have received maintenance since the fall of South Vietnam, has all of the touches that you never see anymore, complete with a great old elevator, beautiful interior doors, and the obligatory military hardware parked in the courtyard.
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The War Remembrance Museum had even more hardware, and incredible exhibits of photos that made me feel awful about the activities of my countrymen during the American War (as they call it over here). Torture, napalm, antipersonnel munitions, Agent Orange — all of these left horrible scars and the photos were heart-rending. As tragic was the hall showing photos of combatants, almost all just before they died; this exhibit conculded with a display on the journalists killed during the war, with brief bios for each. Each photo, of American or Vietnamese or correspondent, was heartbreaking, and I can’t imagine the work required to attach a note as to how the major subjects of each photo died. The replica of the infamous prison at Poulo Condore was underwhelming, however, with no substantive discussion of French use of the facilities and “tiger cages” for the prisoners that were two to three times as large as I’d expected. Little underwhelms as much as discovering that what was thought to be terrible is, instead, banal.
Also banal was the Reunification Palace, formerly South Vietnam’s Presidential Palace. It always amazes me that the leaders of poor countries spend millions on edificies to project their grandeur, rather than on the bridges, schools, libraries, and hospitals that will cement it. Every room of the palace had little touches of power, from the different-sized chairs in the receiving room, shrinking as status declined, to the elevated seat for the President in the audience chamber, to the mere fact that there was an audience chamber. And let’s not even talk about the Casino, or the persistent use of the color yellow — the color of Vietnam’s emperors — in many key rooms. Also, the place looked like a Hilton in 1950s South Florida.
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One up-side of the Reunification Palace was that I met two university students, Anh and Cuong, who had tagged along with the English-language tour I took to practice their comprehension skills. Later, we went out for dinner, and I got a good Vietnamese meal.
The next day, I went to the Cu Chi tunnels, 250 km of underground tunnels dug by the Viet Minh fighting the French, and the Viet Cong fighting the Americans. We saw a few exhibits, including an animatronic virtual Communist Bear Jamboree showing how the VC made antitank rockets from unexploded American bombs. Then we walked through a length of the actual tunnel, a bizarre dark place, only about four feet high and less than three wide. This was where the VC hid from the Americans, where they survived our bombings, where they lived, and I couldn’t see even a bit of it with the few small bulbs they had in there. After about 30 meters I gave up and took a side exit, I would have gone further but I wasn’t sure I’d gain anything from that experience except maybe a feeling of bravery for having survived such claustrophobic, dark places.
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Also at Cu Chi was an exhibit on the traps used by the VC to kill and disable American soldiers. So much ingenuity was put into these instruments, and the results were awful, with many different assemblages of spikes, all designed to hurt the soldier, to prevent his escape, to maim him, and, worst of all, to lie hidden at every moment. I will allow that, after seeing these, I felt much less bad about the napalm and Agent Orange and all that — the truth is that people are exceptional at killing each other, that war is awful, and that we all do awful things to the utmost of our abilities during wartime.
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Then it was back out, in a rainy evening, with Cuong and Anh, and more good Vietnamese food. One of the benefits of meeting actual natives was that I ate things I never would have thought to order, including some Com with a slab of pork that looked to be all fat but was in fact filled with tender meat (Com is Vietnamese for rice, and refers to any dish of rice topped with anything at all). On the way to that dinner, I finally got to see a traffic accident in the chaotic roads of Vietnam, in which people drive in all four directions at the same time on the same streets — in fact, I got to be in that accident. Another driver cut too close to another moto, hit it, bounced off, and hit us. Since the little motos brake so quickly, the whole thing took place at about 3 mph; the worst I got was a knee that was sore for about 10 minutes because I had to put down my foot to steady us when we were still going about 2 mph. The other guy drove off looking frazzled, we picked up our bike and got on as the traffic swarmed around us, and then it was off to dinner and a quick downpour. After dinner came coffee — Vietnamese coffee is truly incredible, I hope I can figure out how to make it at home — at a coffehouse straight out of New York, with hip Asian decor, except they weren’t aiming for an atmosphere, and live music of a rather rebellious nature, apparently unrestricted by the state. At any rate, nice Vietnamese girls don’t stay out late, they go home to their parents by 9, so I turned in early, too, and got a great night’s sleep to make up for our early departure to the tunnels, and to prepare for my early wake-up call for the boat up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, starting the next morning.

For an introduction to Cambodia, I’m not sure how I could have done better than today. I saw the bad in the city — the Killing Fields, the infamous prison of Tuol Sleng — and paired it with the good — the Royal Palace, atmospheric traditional music at Wat Phnom — finally ending things by eating grilled meat and drinking rice wine with moto drivers on a dirt field in the middle of the city.
First came Wat Phnom, the temple dedicated to the founding of Phnom Penh. I almost wish this site had come last, because, once I worked my way past eyeless and legless beggars, I entered a beautiful temple filled with smoke from joss sticks and incredible xylophone music from a troupe of traditional players.
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From there the car I rented took me to the surprisingly bucolic Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, a short distance outside the city along busy dirt roads. At the Killing Fields the genocidal Maoist Khmer Rouge disposed of 17,000 of their presumed enemies — principally totally innocent, average Cambodians — over a period of four years. The centerpiece of Choeung Ek is a large glassed-in stupa containing the skulls and other remains of more than 8,000 of these victims (Cambodians believe that, unless dead bodies are properly buried, the souls wander the earth endlessly; placing the remains in a stupa is an attempt to give the souls rest).
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Behind this monument lie the killing fields themselves, beautiful, rolling green open space, criscrossed by small paths — except that each dip in the earth is a mass grave. Today, rice paddies back up directly onto the outer ring of mass graves, and cows sun themselves in the valleys.
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So, this trip not having been depressing enough, I went to see Tuol Sleng prison. Originally a high school, Tuol Sleng was changed into a prison by the Khmer Rouge when they took Phnom Penh in 1975; of the 20,000 prisoners held there, only 7 survived until the liberation of the country by the Vietnamese in 1979. Prisoners inside were tortured on bare metal beds; today, the deteriorating, dull campus is principally occupied by sparrows and by bats, who hang upside-down from the roofs of the deteriorating stairways and intimidate visitors with high-pitched squeeks as said locals and tourists climb to the third floor to see photo exhibitions on surviving Khmer Rouge.
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Until 1979, the US supported enemies of the Khmer Rouge; but, after that year, when Vietnam invaded and installed a puppet government run by current Cambodian PM Hun Sen, we switched our support to a broad set of opposition armies dominated by the Khmer Rouge. Aid, principally from the US and Thailand, kept the Khmer Rouge going for nearly another twenty years, time they spent commiting more atrocities in the deep junglles of Cambodia that they still controlled. In the name of fighting communism and isolating Vietnam, we chose to sponsor an organization that we knew to have committed genocide (they killed between two and three million Cambodians, out of a population of about eight million, between 1975 and 1979). Today, we’re continuing similar policies, sending our enemies to secret prisons in Eastern Europe, sequestering presumed terrorists in Guantanamo, and the like. Nobody outside of Cambodia has ever been punished for the Khmer Rouge (nobody inside, either); it would be good were we to send those who commit the crime of standing beside criminals to The Hague.
But there is beauty in Phnom Penh, too, and I saw some of it at the Royal Palace. While, admittedly, the Palace is an imitation of the Thai King’s residence, there’s something to be said for all of Thai culture being an imitation of Khmer culture (much of Thai culture was imported from the ancient Khmer empire, when the old Thai states of Sukothai and Ayuthaya became ascendant over the Khmer empire and took and sacked Angkor, Siem Reap, and even Phnom Penh). At any rate, the king’s throne house was done in something approaching good taste, and, altogether, the complex was only somewhat unseemly in its volume of gilt, precious statues, and overall number of buildings, in a terribly poor state.
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Then, to end the day, I walked up the street in front of my hotel and found a large dirt patch on which sat four or five Cambodian street restaurants. I sat down at one, ordered some food, and was swiftly offered a drink of rice wine by a gaggle of _moto_ drivers who were having dinner. I joined them in a few bottles of the not-particularly-strong brew, and had a long and happy conversation with a bunch of people whose only English words were “friend,” “peace,” “wine,” “drink,” and “ok!” I think that vocabulary tells us a lot about Cambodians. That and the fact that their cars are a hotch-potch combination of Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cars, with the drive on both the right and left hand sides, and no working instrumentation. That’s good stuff. Tomorrow: bus to Siem Reap, the site of Angkor Wat.

I’ve been out of the country for more than two weeks now — in fact, I passed the halfway mark on my trip yesterday — and I was starting to worry that I would soon need a relaxing day off. That was before I took a boat ride down Hué’s Perfume river and visited the tombs of the Nguyen emperors. Let me tell you, those emperors knew how to pick a spot for their mausoleums!
The day’s organized tour started with a boat trip down the Perfume river (which, contrary to popular legend, has no particular odor, pleasant or otherwise). Little junks sat low in the river, heavily laden with riverbed sand and gravel that the families living on these junks dredged up with complex combinations of lever and pulley, then took upstream to sell to cement companies. Dense belts of trees — not jungle, but tropical forest — lined each bank, small houses and the occasional colonial villa peeking out from the foliage as our boat rounded a bend. Remarkably enough, both the junks and tourist dragon boats kept to one side and to marked channels, the first time I’ve seen anything approaching traffic control in Vietnam.
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Our first stop was Thien Mu pagoda, at the top of a steep riverbank. The center of Buddhist resistance to the preposterously ineffective regime in South Vietnam during the Vietnam/American/Second Indochina War (depending on where you’re from), the pagoda dates from the beginning of the 17th century. The pagoda was a wonderful first stop, with fresh air and a relaxing atmosphere that even the small town of Hué can’t offer, and even the throngs of camera-toting Vietnamese tourists — they’re even more photo-obsessed than the Japanese — couldn’t disrupt.
Next came Tu Duc’s Mausoleum. Emperor for nearly 40 years, Tu Duc apparently sought a life of quiet contemplation and poetry writing (and 104 wives), all of which he happily enjoyed in his lotus-filled mausoleum, where he lived for sixteen years before he died. The mausoleum itself was a bit disappointing, architecturally almost identical to yesterday’s Citadel, but it was a good example of what the Nguyen emperors expected out of life (that is, an incredibly rich and decadent existence in a fairly poor country).
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As we boated down the river, the sky opened up into a torrential — but thankfully windless — downpour. I was one of the few people on the boat who had brought a raincoat, so I was one of the few to scramble up a muddy hillside rising straight from the river Hon Chen Temple, an ancient temple of the Champa people that was expanded by the Nguyen Emperors as the Viets expanded into the area during the 19th century. Hon Chen contained a mirror that was reputed to show heaven as it was taken out of the temple to look across the Perfume river from the verdant col in which Hon Chen itself sat. Remarkably enough in a communist country, Hon Chen is still an operating temple and, despite the thunderstorm, I had to take off my shoes to go inside.
I took off my shoes again a short time later, as I returned to the boat. The poor, coatless masses had been cleared out so that the floor could be cleaned and mats laid down for our lunch; we ate foods typical of Hue, cooked onboard, and it wasn’t bad.
The skies cleared for our next stop, Khai Dinh’s mausoleum. I hopped on the back of a motorbike for a ten-minute ride down wet roads, past a few water buffalo, to find the mausoleum rising up the side of a verdant mountain, three levels high. Khai Dinh reigned in the 1920s, and this tomb shows the French influence in its architecture and internal decoration. In fact, the architecture, painted walls, and tilework are so baroque that the mausoleum took two years longer to build than Khai Dinh reigned. With all of the expensive imported Chinese and Japanese porcelain, gilt, and brocaded cothes, it’s no surprise that Khai Dinh’s son and successor, Bao Dai, was a disaster as emperor and was happily drummed out in the mid-1940s by the deeply uninterested Vietnamese people (I asked my tour guide how the Vietnamese felt when Bao Dai died in Paris in 1997, and he looked at me funny, as if the question itself were absurd).
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The last mausoleum was Minh Mang’s. Only the second Nguyen emperor, Minh Mang ruled for 21 years and was apparently relatively effective, if authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-Catholic. Quite some distance up the Perfume River — only Nguyen dynasty founder Gia Long’s mausoleum is even further away from Hue — Minh Mang’s mausoleum radiates serenity. Coming through the gates we found a small, tasteful pagoda at the end of a simple stone path. To our left was the main entrance of the mausoleum, which was only opened once, when Minh Mang’s body was taken through it. The pagoda hid the entrance to a large walled garden with rivers topped with floating lotus, planned plantings, and francipani and longan trees. With a shortage of tourists and remarkably unmotivated souvenir hawkers, Minh Mang’s mausoleum was a practical resort getaway at the end of our river trip.
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Then, two hours back downriver, we were back at Hué. I crossed into the Citadel to have dinner at the famous Lac Thien restaurant — which appears to be recommended in every single guidebook for the city and is thus flanked by the Lac Thieu and Luc Thien restaurants, both of which hope to capitalize on tourist confusion — and ate traditional Hué _nem_, or rice-paper spring rolls,, _banh beo_, little dishes of rice pudding topped with pork rinds, fried onions, and dried shrimp, and _banh koai_, egg and rice fried pancakes with meat and shrimp.
So that was day two in Hué. Now, some readers of this blog have doubted that I am in fact in Vietnam, since I do not appear in any photos. The real answer is that, except on guided trips, I don’t trust any of the Vietnamese to not run off with my camera should I give it to them for a third-party snapshot (it’s not that the Vietnamese are dishonest, just that the only ones who would actually come up to me and make contact almost certainly are; the rest are tremendously nice, with the elderly beaming back if I throw them a smile, the children excited to practice their “hello! how are you?” with any visiting Westerner, and both thrilled and surprised any time I manage to eat actual Vietnamese food). Anyway, the obligatory proof of either my presence in Vietnam or my skill with Photoshop:
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I’ll admit that my first impression of Hué was “hicksville” — after all, I arrived on Saturday and found the kids all hanging out at the gas station, leaning on their motos, while the sidewalk seems to peter out a few blocks past the main drag, in a few places; and, of course, there’s no in-room internet in the mid-priced hotels, like there was in Hanoi.
But then I got out and saw the city today. With those sights and its incredible cuisine, Hué is a beautiful city that well deserves its role as the middle stop in a tour of Vietnam. For over 150 years, Hué was the imperial capital of the country, and, although it’s a small, quiet town today, it’s a small, quiet town today. That is to say, after Hanoi, it’s nice to be able to cross the street without taking my life into my hands, while, with the beautiful, ancient Citadel, and classic Imperial cuisine, mean that the visitor gives up nothing in culture. And, hey, even though it’s south of Hanoi, no higher in the mountains, and not that much less inland, the weather here seems to be 5-7° cooler, which is more than welcome, because my goodness it’s hot and humid in this country!
Today I got up early and booked tomorrow’s tour in Hué and my passage on to Saigon. I’m two days behind on this trip because I took my time making plans from Bangkok and from Hanoi, but I’ve learned my lesson. Unfortunately, I’m flying south, not taking the train as I’d planned, because there’s just no non-overnight rail option and, what with the two days behind, I’m not blowing a day on a train.
Not that I’m in a rush to leave the city; it’s lovely here. I walked across the Perfume River this morning and entered the Hue Citadel, built by the Nguyen emperors between 1805 and 1945. The Citadel, and the Imperial City it contains, are a mix of sumptuous palaces, gardens, and gates, and the ruins that built up during the five years of World War Two, ten years of fighting for independence, and, most of all, the 1968 Tet offensive, when Vietcong forces took and held Hué briefly, until a massive American assault reoccupied the city (as shown in the culminating scene of Full Metal Jacket). Some of the palaces have been levelled, others are bullet-pocked, and still more burnt down in a large fire during the ’80s. Either way, the Citadel is incredible — and the juxtaposition of ruins and restored section is powerful.
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While I was there, I made sure to take an elephant ride. I’d had such an experience heavily recommended to me; while the ride itself was bumpy, and the elephant jockey kept whacking the poor beast on the side of his large head with a fairly large mallet to turn him (to say nothing of the spike the jockey carried, to drive into the elephant’s brain if he stampeded), but the view was unique and the event interesting.
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Then I walked around the old area inside the citadel walls, down a street famous for its little cafes. It wasn’t a few minutes before I was drawn to an old woman serving steamed rice-flour dumplings stuffed with shrimp or banana; then, shortly after I left this little cafe, I was pulled into a little place serving a sweet-brothed beef noodle soup, heavily spiced with black pepper. I took a brief break to actually visit a museum, then I ended up at another soup joint, serving another sweet-brothed soup. When I was about to leave, five 20-something Vietnamese invited me to join them in some weak distilled rice beverage. We drank for an hour, attempting to communicate, until they sent me on what I think was some sort of practical joke. I got lost on the way home and found some museum park filled with old American tanks, children playing on them.
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Finally, I actually broke a cardinal rule and ate dinner at the same place I ate dinner last night. But it was a quick place, and I got home in time to make reservations for Saigon/Ho Chi Minh city. And, hey, topping off the evening with some great coconut cookies really brought things home. Tomorrow: up early for the Perfume River.