A colourful religion & a loud, sweaty war – just another day in Sunny Saigon…
Yesterday we decided to see some of the “must-see” sites in Saigion. We booked our tickets with a local travel agency, and had the good fortune to be guided by “Slim Jim” – a former soldier in the South Vietnamese Army with an astonishing capacity for inserting seemingly random snippets of cockney rhyming slang into his speech. The tour was a double-headed day trip from Saigon, the massive Vietnamese metropolis (8 million people, 4 million motorbikes, a shedload of coffee shops, and a small monkey called Trevor) where we are currently based.
Bright & early we were woken by the incessant, synthesized Israeli tune which, try as I might – and despite the fact that it is played by someone, somewhere in the street below me every 3 to 4 minutes 24/7 – I cannot remember the name of. Hoop-da-doop down to the travel agency from where our tour bus will depart. 5 minutes to spare eh? Think I’ll be having me some breakfast. Ahh look: a lady across the street is selling small baguettes (baguette-ettes???). Yes, I’d love one with unrefrigerated soft cheese and potentially unwashed cucumber please.
The bus departs. Our day is to be composed of 2 sections, placed together for geographical rather than thematic reasons. First stop is the headquarters pf the “Cao Dai” religion – an indigenous ideaology which combines Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism & Christianity with a whole lot of brightly coloured buildings & people. It has about 2 million followers in Vietnam. Below is a picture of their symbol: the all-seeing eye, and of some of the officials walking into their temple at the start of the daily ceremony.
By the time the ceremony actually began (about noon) I was starting to feel quite unwell. Maybe it was the cheese baguette, maybe the sun, maybe a mosquito with an as yet undiscovered disease had bitten me on the tuchus. Either way, my temperature was high, my energy was low, my head felt like Maradona had just punched it past Shilton, and my bones ached like a shake. So it was boiled rice for Bucky’s lunch. And then back on the bus for part 2…
The area of Cu Chi saw heavy fighting during the American war. It marked the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh trail – the route through which the North Vietnamese Army moved men & supplies into the American-supported south. My pain had subsided to a sufficient extent that I felt sleeping on the bus would be to do both myself & this place a grave injustice. So in we trooped to watch the obligatory propoganda film. The Americans in the audience squirmed slightly at the somewhat biased take on events, but it was an interesting documentary nonetheless.
Then in we sauntered to the forest. We saw how small the tunnels where the North Vietnamese guerillas (Vietcong) used to shelter & live in were. Some of the group even crawled into one of the holes, as you can see in this picture below.
One of the tunnels had been specially widened for Western tourists (who tend to be somewhat wider than the Vietnamese). So we crawled through it. It was horrible. Hot, dark, suffocating. And this is a tunnel twice the size of the ones that were actually used during the war. We also saw some of the nice friendly surprises that awaited American soldiers walking through the area such as this one below:
And then finally…just as my headache is starting to inch closer to recovery, they take us to a firing range and give people the chance to fire the same guns that were used in the Vietnam War!! What an opportunity!! And one which I politely declined. Every shot was like a sledghammer to my cranial nerves. At least I could just get back on a bus & sleep it off though. For the poor bastards who fought wretchedly over this land that wasn’t an option.
Tags: Cao Dai, Saigon, Vietnam
The Dude
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