After laying on the tranquil beaches of Mui Ne, staring up at the palm trees swaying in the salty breeze, the roaring streets of Saigon really came on fast and hard. An hour and a half before we even stepped foot off the bus in official Saigon (District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City is still referred to as "Saigon," although almost everyone will regularly refer to the whole city as "Saigon," as it was before the communist takeover in 1975) the streets already seemed overwhelmingly busy.
When we did step off the bus, it was into a raucous tourism festival swarming with the burgeoning middle class of Saigon. It was quite loud, between the blaring car horns (more often motorbike horns), the cacophony of overlapping Vietnamese pop music and the unrelenting construction. We quickly located a room for USD$8/night, which is more than we usually pay but it's the big city so what can you do. The diversity here is astounding, from the height of decadence to the divest of the absurdly cheap (which we've come to deem "reasonably priced" under our budget). We braved the festival for dinner and scored some reasonably priced weird sweet soup with lotus flower bulbs from the temporary food stand of a 4 star restaurant/hotel trying to coax people into their expensive rooms.
The tourist district is like that: everyone is trying to sell you something. Whether eating dinner in a restaurant tucked down a small alley or walking down the broad busy streets, people with huge stacks of books, racks of sunglasses, wallets, candy, gum, cigarettes, nick-knacks, and massages ready to order off the street will accost you, in the friendliest way possible, of course. Did I mention it's very loud? We were awoken before 8am every day by the banshee screaming of a drill and erratic pounding of hammers from the construction crew next door. Walking down the streets, we often had to shout to talk over the din of traffic.
But it really is an interesting and exciting city with several lifetimes worth of exploration available. On several occasions we found ourselves wandering through mammoth markets, twisting down endless labyrinthine narrow isles with a preposterous diversity of products available. There is such hyper-specialization here that we saw a store that sold nothing but scissors and one with only elaborate Day-Glo dragon masks and accompanying sequined robes. The food stands here are ridiculous, offering up so many delicious fruits that I'm fairly convinced do not exist.
We sauntered through the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts, where we enjoyed witnessing the progression of Vietnamese art until 1955, when it became invariable war propaganda until the mid-to-late 1980s when people again resumed their creative pursuits. To be fair, even the most propagandistic paintings were far more interesting than a lot of the stupid modern art at the MoMA, although many artists really liked golden brown Picaso-esque depictions of soldiers helping the common people.
We went to the first active Hindu temple I've ever witnessed. It was elegant, with beautiful statues of various gods (many of which were flailing four arms) on the ornate friezes. The next day we went to Cholon (Sholom Cholon!), Chinatown Saigon, to check out the Chinese-style Buddhist temples. The temples were elaborate, with ceramic figures of fishermen and deified generals lining the ceilings and the air thick with incense burning in long hanging coils, also from the ceiling. The floor was mediocre tiles but the walls had elaborate bass-relief dragons and tigers---RAWR!
We spent a while meandering misguidedly through the streets of Cholon, where we happened upon a craft market with the most vivid array of fabrics I've ever set eyes upon. Sarah bought several balls of yarn, which she forces me to schlep around in my mochila (backpack), which she uses to make colorful bracelets of increasingly complex design as her fingers fly into wild patterns. She even sold a couple of bracelets for USD$6 (I mean legit U.S. dollars) to a couple of Australian women on a bus; quite the entrepreneur.
Water puppets once again filled us with wonder and awe as we marveled at the incredible ways they can depict traditional Vietnamese life, farmers sowing and growing rice under the pouring rain, and fantastical folklore, unicorns playing with balls (as often depicted on elaborate brass incense burners in museums and on the streets). They had cool special effects too: dragons that spit raging sparks, a fisherman smoking a bong (presumably tobacco, which is actually somewhat common), and a fox nabbing a floating duck out of the water and running up a palm tree.
Continuing with wild animals: the next day we explored the Ho Chi Minh City Zoo. We saw giraffes munching, zebras grazing, gemsboks and blesboks with big horns, and a variety of Asian reptiles. A Burmese Rock Python had just strangulated an adorable little rabbit and was drawing a big crowd. We watched Silvered Leaf Monkeys playing in the setting sun as the bats and birds mingled in the twilight. Then we visited the white tigers in the dark, them looking at us with as much interest as we had in them (I think they wanted to eat us). But I think we were the biggest attraction amongst the swarms of local youth; actually people of all ages. They came up to us in droves, requesting we be in pictures with them and commenting on our outlandish hair. One girl even paid Sarah in cotton candy---YEAH!
I'll spare you the details of the history museum, which gave us a good perspective of the development of the many ethnicities that have occupied this region for the last 3000 years, leading to the domination by the Viet people and the ultimate creation of Viet Nam. I won't spare you the details of our Visa Extension process: it was tedious.
Vietnam is so vast and diverse that we just didn't have enough time to explore it all in one month and had a great time at the Immigration Police, MVA-like in its inefficient bureaucracy. We waited for 2 hours only to be told that we had to have a "sponsor," meaning we had to pay a travel agent. That is what we did and are now exploring the Mekong Delta for a week before returning to Saigon to retrieve our passports and shiny new visas (they really are shiny).
More Photos of the big city:
http://www.facebook.com/album.
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