I want to cover a lot of ground during my 3 weeks in 'Nam, so I decided to join up with a tour. We started in Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday and are currently making our way up the coast. Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon) was pretty much what I expected, particularly the chaotic traffic. The Vietnamese wrinkle is the ubiquity of the motorcycle and motor scooter. Looking at the roads, it often looks like a horde of locusts swarming around the odd car or truck, I'd say about 80% of the roads consist of 2-wheelers of various kinds, bicycles included. We went to the Cu Chi tunnels some 40 km outside of Ho Chi Minh, an elaborate network of tunnels built before and during the war with the U.S.A. We got to crawl through a hundred meters of the tunnel and it felt claustrophobic as hell despite the fact that it has been enlarged twice for (fat Western) tourists. We emerged dripping wet with sweat and with a new appreciation for the indescribable toughness and dedication of the Viet Minh. There's a shooting range set up there as well, so I shot 10 rounds from both an M-60 and of course an AK-47. Packed a punch and loud as hell.
The War Remnants Museum in the city was unrelieved grimness, picture after picture of destruction brought on not only by the war with America but wars all over the world, from Angola to Iraq. A sobering experience. There were pictures of Vietnamese folks deformed by Agent Orange that I could barely look at.
The next stop was a sleepy little beach town called Nah Trang, highlighted by the most exquisite cup of coffee I've ever tasted at a Lonely Planet recommended hole-in-the-wall called Pho Cali. Hazelnut iced, absolutely sublime, nectar in a cup. I'm also quickly falling in love with the Vietnamese dietary staple Phở, a simple dish of white rice noodles in clear beef broth with thin slices of beef. It's light and tasty especially with some basil and lime mixed in. Most of you know that I adore Vietnamese food and the food here so far has lived up to all of my expectations, absolutely amazing! The final verdict is not yet in, but I'm probably gonna have to give Vietnamese food a bit of an edge over Thai, as much as I love Thai food.
We've already taken a couple of sleeper trains, and this morning we arrived at around 7 a.m. in Hoi An, a gorgeous little town on the coast, left largely untouched by the war and boasting some charming French architecture. Another beach town. Me and this American dude from the tour have been hanging out a lot and we went to the beach today. As expected, we were deluged by the usual requests for food, trinkets, beads, etc. while lounging away our day, but my friend came up with the ingenious solution of using some choice Vietnamese phrases to stave off the unwanted attention. The phrase "I have diarrhea" in Vietnamese had a magical deterrent effect on the food vendors. Pretty amusing stuff, and an excellent opportunity to learn some Vietnamese. Most people are happy to teach foreigners a few phrases in their native language and the Vietnamese are no different, and we ended-up drinking a beer on the beach with a 23 year-old student who started out trying to sell us pictures but then gave up and just began hanging out.
On a completely unrelated note, I recently finished reading JG Ballard's brand-new autobiography Miracles Of Life. Ballard is one of my favorite writers and I've been reading his books basically all of my adult life. He's most infamous for having written Crash (not to be confused with the shit Academy Award winning about racism in L.A.) and most famous for Empire of The Sun. Reading his autobiography was a moving experience, especially the last chapter in which he announces that he's dying of terminal cancer. Very sad.
Comments