Saigon and the Mekong Delta

Saigon

After arriving early in Saigon early in the morning, I checked into a nearby guest house and took a nice snooze (until noon...oops, little longer than I had meant to). Earlier upon disembarking, a French girl who I had chatted briefly with invited me out later to hang out with some friends so I had my evening plans set.

Despite its bigger size, I found Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City) to be a little more relaxed and less stress-inducing compared to Hanoi. There wasn't too too much I was interested in doing there so I decided to just spend one day there and booked a 2-day, 1 night boat trip through the Mekong Delta ending in Phnom Penh for the next morning. I started out checking out a large market where I got some souvies and food. Thus phởrtified (admit that's some of my better word play), I headed to reunification palace. This was really just a place of historical interest to me, as it was when the North Vietnamese army crashed a tank through the front gate of the palace that the war was symbolically won by the Vietcong.




The restored gate

After the palace, I headed to the nearby War Remnants Museum. It was a very mixed experience at the museum to put it mildly. At times I was inspired by the heroism of armed forces (misguided as their missions may have been) or the journalists who risked their lives to document what was really going on over there. Other times I struggled to choke back tears--seeing photographs of panicked mothers and their terrified children fleeing bombings; the effects of phosphene, agent orange or napalm on living things or the barbaric treatment POWs were subjected to. I don't know why, but these things hit me really hard and it's hard to know what to make of it. Does my over sensitivity make me more empathetic and help with interpersonal relations, or does it just make it harder to live in a world with a history and present of such intense suffering. The thought occurred to me that the world can be neatly divided into two groups: those that can see the images of war and say it's a necessary evil and those that see the same images and are pushed violently towards pacifism. On some intellectual, pragmatic level, I understand that armed conflict is a reality; that some things need to be fought for, but in my heart it is just destruction, misery, chaos, wrong.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around town, trying to parse the earlier events of that day. Fortunately the evening ended the day on an upbeat note. I met up with Delphine at our arranged meeting point and she said, "OK, now I have to find my friend." She got a text, walked across the street into the large park area in the Pham Ngu Lao district and asked a Indonesian-looking girl sitting down looking at her phone, "Are you Natasha?" I was a bit confused about how Delphine wouldn't know what her friend looked like but soon found out that this was going to be a couch-surfer meet-up. I had heard of, but never checked out http://www.couchsurfing.com/ but after that evening, I'm determined to sign up. For those who don't know, you make up a profile and then host or crash with people from all over the place. There's an ebay-style feedback mechanism so you can be reasonably assured you don't end up in the home of a psycho and you make friends from all over the world in the process. Among the 12 or so people that ended up joining us in the park for some casual drinking were Vietnamese students; American, Aussie, Norwegian and Finnish English teachers and some itinerant Argentinians with guitars in hand. We had a great night hanging out in the park and eating cheap food at the nearby noodle house.

I walked the 15 minutes or so back to my guest house most satisfied with my one and only day in Saigon and set my alarm to be ready to depart early for my trip through the Mekong Delta the following morning.

The Mekong Delta

It took a few hours to drive south to our boat departure point by bus, but we were still on the river before the late morning. We spent a few hours chugging along the river, stopping at floating markets and floating villages on the way.



At one stop, we saw how coconut candy was made and I bought about a kilo of the stuff it was so good. We also stopped and learned about some really evil cure-all liquor the rice field workers drink to ease back pain and increase virility. It's basically some sort of distilled rice whiskey that they throw a bunch of poisonous snakes (sometimes scorpions as well) into, with a whole dead bird for good measure on top. The brew is sealed and left to steep for months--the longer the better.


Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god

Free samples were poured and I surprised myself by actually taking a shot. Remarkably it wasn't all that bad, but the hell if I'll drink it again. Another snake encounter came later in the day at the place we stopped to eat lunch:


This guy wanted down

Later on that day we stopped in a little town and had some free time to wander around for about 1.5 hours. I had befriended the two other solo travelers on the boat and we decided to try and check out some purported rose gardens outside of town. As this was a small little village off the tourist track, it was surprisingly hard to find any tuk-tuks zipping around and we ended up hailing down the first motorbike we saw with a cart in tow. Everyone who caught sight of the three of us in town thought we were riotously funny and shouted hellos from every direction. We never ended up finding the roses (despite extended and nervous trespassing though a couple properties) but it was a hoot just being carted around town feeling like rock stars. These are the moments of travel that you have to work a little harder to find and be willing to venture off the beaten track for but almost always end up being highlights of any trip.

We had a nice evening on the boat puttering up the Mekong, knocking back beers and chatting. The next morning we visited a Cham village (an ethnic, Muslim minority in Vietnam) and then headed for the river border crossing into Cambodia before switching boats and heading to Phnom Penh. We were scheduled to arrive at 6, but due to our motor breaking down and resisting all repairs, we ended up getting towed up river and didn't make it until about 9. I would have liked to have booked a charming little guest house on the river in PP, but due to the late hour and lack of food in my belly, I ended up just checking into the cheap (but decent and clean) guest house we were dropped at. After a meal and a quick shower, I was ready to hit the hay.