Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

The food in Saigon was very good. Unfortunately, it took me to my last days in country to find the best bowl of Pho in Vietnam. Phuc Dat! To be honest tho, the best bowl of Pho I’ve ever had was in the most unlikely place in the world, Miami at Karen’s restaurant, Hy Voung, on Calle Ocho.  She lived in Vietnam for 14 years and learned to cook some of the best Asian food you can find in South Florida, but I digress.  I wandered around chinatown looking for good food and interesting sights.  I saw a couple elderly Chinese ladies selling young coconuts.  They motioned me over and started to hack open a coconut for me.  They started the bidding at 40K as I laughed and responed to them in Cantonese.  They instantly dropped the price to 20K as I continued to laugh and banter with them saying that I was Chinese and not just born yesterday.  After being in Vietnam for almost 3 weeks, I learned that most of the hawkers have figured out that in the barganing dance that tourists will be very happy with 1/2 the starting bid.  So they’ve learned to start at outrageous prices up to 4x their rock bottom price.  I ended up giving them 10K ~.62 cents for it, but I told them that was only because they were Chinese otherwise I would have only paid 5K and they were quite happy with it. 

I also went to the Chinese and American War Atrocities Museum.  They changed the name to The War History Museum a few years back to be more politically correct and to avoid offending their main tourists, but the theme was unmistakenably still there.  I was a bit perplexed by the number of Americans I saw in Saigon and Vietnam in general. I saw more Americans in Vietnam that I had seen on my entire trip to SE Asia 12 years ago. The museum was full of pictures of said atrocities. One featured an “innocent Vietnamese civilian” tied to the back of a half-track being dragged around by his hands. One has to wonder what was going thru the minds of the people behind the torture. I can only imagine what seeing the torso of your best friend being blown to bits by a VC hand gernade would do to the psyche of an 18 year old soldier or any one for that matter. They also had deformed still born babies in jars in the agent orange section along with pictures of people trying to live their lives with the aftermath of the agent orange sprayings. Those parts of the museum were a bit disturbing, but my favorite part as always were the tanks, artillery, aircraft… parked all over the grounds of the museum. I took some nice black and white photos of the grounds, but unfortunatley, I can’t show them to you now.

I also made it to the Cu Chi tunnels while in Nam. I think it was mostly because of the name. I love going into Cuchi tunnels! LOL Actually, I went there mostly because I had heard that you can fire AK-47 assault rifles there, but unfortunately the day I went some diplomats and big wigs were visiting the tunnels and they didn’t allow us to shoot the guns. The VC tunnels were built under an American Army base. It was like a 2 story base with the Americans running the surface and the VCs running the basement. The construction was ingenious with multiple entry and exits. They even had underwater entrances and escapes. The best was how they released the smoke from the kitchen underground. They built air holes into trees with the smoke coming out in the top of the tree to avoid detection. There were also all kinds of traps that really weren’t concerned with the health of the unfortunate victims. One of the traps were sharp bamboo sticks meant to impale and poison the victims. The poison was used to interrogate the prisoners that would only get an antidote if they answered the questions quickly. Nasty little buggers, I tell ya. Off to the Mekong Delta on my way to Phenom Phen, Cambodia

Tags: Saigon, Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 6:52 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.