A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

Wednesday 1 October 2008

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

So this day was a trip around the Mekong river area and also a few sights of the city. We took a bus out of town to catch a tourist boat across the Mekong. There is currently a normal ferry for cars, with a Danish flag on the side as apparently the Danish helped set it up. The Vietnamese are also in the process of building a huge bridge across this part of the river (which includes two large islands in the centre). There is a lot of construction going on in Vietnam. There seem to be new elevated roads being built everywhere. It's easy to overlook the commercial revolution that is going on in this country of 80m people, when it's bigger brother - China - is grabbing all the headlines.

Once across the river we saw a place where they made sweets from coconuts. I bought a couple of packets of coconut, peanut and sesame mix. After that we took a bike-truck (a motorbike with a bit added on the back where six people can sit) through the back roads and jungle of the river bank. We visited a few other places and had lunch somewhere, then back across the river to the bus back home.

With the sunny weather, the jungle foliage and the outside trips I even managed to catch some sun, albeit in t-shirt tan format. It truly is the rainy season here but the mornings are on average sunny, and I'm looking forward to hitting the beaches in Thailand.

Back in town we took a cyclo tour - this is where you get a bicycle with a reclining chair attached to the front, and then pedaled round the manic streets. It's great fun and I took some good videos of it with my phone. We visited the "War Remnants Museum" which used to be called the "War Crimes Museum" until they changed the name because for some reason it annoyed the Americans. It's truly shocking some of the stuff in there, particularly the things that future US Senator Bob Kerrey did, and all the stuff about Agent Orange. I took some photos of some of the plaques in there, as the tales they told spoke more of the horror than most of the rest of it.

Interestingly, the US spent about USD 700 billion in Vietnam, more than in the Second World War by a long distance, and about the same (though much more in relative terms) than the current financial system bailout that it still being discussed.

We saw a couple of other sites as the rain started to fall again, before heading back to the hotel and to a restaurant for our final group meal. It was also Sylvia's birthday, so that, combined with saying goodbye to Hung, made it an emotional night. We then hit up a few bars in town, the Blue Gecko, the Rex Hotel (a fifth floor outside bar with a view of the city, and live lounge music band) and a bar called Apocalypse Now which was full of hookers, pool sharks and techno music, and I know that the good Doctor particularly enjoyed it - very much his kind of place! (Only kidding!) And some of the others apart from us, Stephen and Hung actually made it out for a late one.