Vietnam(Ho Chi Minh City, Danang)

Summary

We decided to take a four day trip to Vietnam and cover primarily the Vietnam War related attractions in and around Ho Chi Minh City, and then visit a less modern area of central Vietnam.  Our visit to the War Remnants Museum, the Cu Chi tunnels, and the location of the Son My (My Lai) massacre were quite sobering, especially as all information was provided from the Vietnamese (anti-American) viewpoint.  Our way-too-short visit to the amazing China Beach in Danang made us want to stay there much longer.

Facts

Currency: Dong (vnd$14,500:US$1)

Language: Vietnamese, English

Population: 78M Vietnam, 7M Ho Chi Minh City, 800K Danang

# motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh City: 3M

Internet connection speed: none (except internet cafes)

English speaking TV channels (in hotel): 8 (1 movie channel)

Religion: 80% Buddhist variants, 20% Catholic

Time difference:GMT +7:00 (11:00 hours ahead of Atlanta)

Driving lane: right side

Temperature: Ho Chi Minh City 97°F, Danang 88°F

Detail

When we finally got through the Vietnam immigration control, met our local guide, and headed to our hotel for a brief rest, we immediately knew that Ho Chi Minh City was a fairly modern but different city.

Ho Chi Minh City

 Ho Chi Minh City has all the major buildings and typical modern stores lining every downtown street, but with the big difference of very few cars.  In place of each car is a thousand mopeds and a hundred bikes.  Supposedly, there are 3 million mopeds in the city, with a population of 7 million in the city and surrounding areas.  On most major  roads we traveled in the city, one lane each way was reserved for mopeds and one for cars, but the mopeds would not fit in their own lane, so both were used by the mopeds.  We often saw mopeds with a family of four people squeezed onto them.  Interestingly, there are few stop lights and stop signs relative to the number of intersections.  We noticed that people enter the intersection, typically after slightly slowing down, and then weave their way through the crowded intersection. Our guide admitted that their were many accidents, but most of them were minor because they involved mopeds traveling at slow speeds.

Our Ho Chi Minh guide, Son, made it clear that his job was to please us, no matter what.  Although that is typically good, it meant that he asked Dan every 10 minutes 'Mr. Dan, are you feeling well, now', and talked  a tremendous amount.  As in Cambodia, most of what he said we could not understand (see Cambodia Language Barrier).  Since we had arrived very early in the morning, we went to the hotel to rest for a few minutes, and then walked around the corner to use an internet cafe to confirm our hotel for our return to Bangkok.  As we had found in most of Asia, the internet cafes were extremely inexpensive -- less than US$1 equivalent per hour.

Our first tourist site was the China Town area of Ho Chi Minh, where  we visited the Bin Thay market.  We were not that excited about seeing another market, worried that we would get harassed by vendors.  However, this market was a wholesale market, and not a single vendor approached us.  There were thousands of stalls, all grouped by category of product, a maze through which wandered.  We then visited a pagoda in China Town, but given all the pagodas we had seen, we did not stay long.

Vietnam War Remnants Museum

We visited the Vietnam War Remnants museum near the center of town.  In the outside area of the museum, we viewed many large weapons leftover by America as we departed Saigon in 1973 including tanks, bulldozers, heavy artillery, large bombs, and aircraft.  We then went into the five large rooms that held the major content of the museum.  Our guide warned us multiple times that many Americans do not like to enter a couple of the rooms because of the graphic detail in the pictures and displays.  Of course, we disregarded that since we had traveled so far to see the place.  As we started walking through the first room, our very attentive guide stood within one foot of us, wanting to describe each picture, as we read the caption.  After 10 minutes of this, Dan had to nicely ask him to let us experience the museum on our own!

It was clear to us as we looked at the pictures and read the captions that this museum was put together by the victorious North Vietnamese anti-American regime, as you would expect.  The pictures were quite graphic and disturbing, but we had seen many of them before in magazines, books, and movies.  However, the descriptions of the pictures were very one sided, with references to GI's or Americans as 'aggressors' or 'murderers'.  For example, there was a terrible picture of a GI in a field carrying the upper torso and head of victim of a large explosion, and the caption said something like 'the murderer GI is laughing as he carries the remains of an innocent victim'.  Looking closely at the picture, the GI is clearly not laughing.

No one can argue that the Vietnam War was terrible, but seeing this generally one-sided view was also very disturbing.  In the napalm section of the museum, they had deformed fetuses in glass jars as examples of the lasting impact of napalm.  In the prisoner portion of the museum there was a life size 'tiger cage' where the South Vietnamese kept prisoners between torture sessions.  To be fair, every item was not as one-sided as others, but in general that was our impression.

That first, night we did not realize that our package included the obligatory river obligatory river boat dinner cruise on Saigon river.  Fortunately the cruise was not crowded and only lasted only about an hour.  Even though the food was terrible, it was nice to see a different part of the city and to see the river.

Cu Chi Tunnels

The next day we drove through the rice farming areas outside of Ho Chi Minh City on our way to Cu Chi.  We witnessed the manual rice harvesting in several fields, and visited a shop where  a woman was expertly manually mass producing rice paper.  The main reason people visit Cu Chi is to see the network  of tunnels dug and used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

On arriving at the welcome center, we watched a very old scratchy documentary (circa 1970) about the tunnels and how they were used.  The Viet Cong dug over 250km of tunnels in the area, mostly to evade American/South Vietnamese forces as they moved between locations, and to serve as an ambush vehicle against enemy forces in the area.  The tunnel network was incredibly advanced, as we could see from the model in the front of the movie room (see picture at right). The tunnels were three levels deep (8-30 feet below the ground), and had all kinds of features to fight the enemy.  They had trap doors and booby traps in case the enemy entered the tunnels. Entrances to the tunnels and portions of the tunnels were extremely small, purposefully  too small for the typical American male.  They had ways to cut off sections of the tunnel to trap chemicals or water poured into the tunnel.  They had many hidden entrance/exits so that they could surprise the enemy, or disappear after an attack.  They also had whole rooms underground, for sleeping, meetings, medical care, and cooking.  The venting system for the kitchens were set up so that the smoke seeped out of hidden leaf piles far from the tunnels -- they had a sample kitchen working and it was almost impossible to see the smoke.  And the network had emergency escape routes on the lowest level hidden under the river.  Because of the high-Viet Cong concentration around Cu Chi area, it was the site of some of the heaviest American bombing in South Vietnam.

The pro-Viet Cong movie explained many of these  features, and also had live footage of the Viet Cong surprise attacking enemy troops.  It also showed the many villagers who used the tunnels with the Viet Cong.  They had a woman villager who received medals for her role in killing so many enemy troops.  The real life footage made it clear to us how difficult it was to tell the difference between the Viet Cong and civilian villagers.

Some sections of the tunnel network are available for tourists to enter.  The first tunnel we entered had been enlarged almost a foot to enable tourists to more comfortably get through it.  Even with the enlarged size, it was quite claustrophobic as we duck-walked through the dark, damp, very hot, mosquito-filled tunnel.  They offered to let us out via escape routes along the way, but we went the entire length (300 feet), down through all three levels.  It was hard to imagine being in the tunnels for weeks on end while bombs were being dropped above.  

We chose to enter another section that had not been enlarged, so that we could see what it was really like during the war.  We had to actually crawl through some of the second tunnel up and down the different levels.  After the available 150 feet, we were happy to get back above ground, as we were completely soaked with sweat and dirty. 

As we walked through the woods around Cu Chi, on our way to the tunnel entrances, we realized that they were trying to help us realize what it was like during the war.  They had booby traps set up so that when your foot broke a string across a path, there would be a large bang next to the path, simulating an explosion, showing how hard it was to avoid the traps.  Because there was another couple just ahead of us, they hit all the traps, and we just saw it all second hand. Even so, the effect was real -- the idea of being in the thick woods, with Viet Cong popping up out of perfectly hidden tunnel exits, and booby traps around every corner, was very scary.  They had several real life examples of the pits they dug in the area to injure and kill the American troops.  Each hole had some sort of spiked arrangement of metal or bamboo, to impale the person who had happened upon the pit.  Some of them were barbed so that the victim could not get the contraption off his legs, and he would have to be taken to the medical area with the contraption, slowing him down and making vulnerable the assisting troops.

They offered an M16 shooting range, but given our sour mood at that point, and since we had already shot large weapons in Cambodia (see Cambodia-Shooting), we passed on it.

Back in HCMC, we visited some of the other recommended but less interesting tourists sites, including the old post office, the Notre Dame Cathedral, and Reunification Palace.