Ho Chi Minh City

HCMC/Saigon was an interesting contrast to Hanoi.  It was more modern, cleaner, and easier to walk through due to wider and less crowded sidewalks.  As the guidebooks will tell you, it also doesn’t have the same kind of charm that Hanoi has (fewer trees, fewer older buildings).  The pictures below show an example of the interesting contrasts within the city:  the first shows people eating on the streets and a fancy coffee shop in the background and the second shows a building that appears to have been built by the french in front of a run-down building, in front of a new high-rise.


 

 

Art Museum.  The first painting depicts the effects of Agent Orange.  Most of the museums we went to had nationalistic and anti-American rhetoric.  Many of them, also, openly communicated the pain and destruction the “American War” caused.  Agent Orange was part of that pain and destruction that effects both adults and children’s lives today–and something the U.S. government and people have never paid reparations for.



 

 

These were a couple of my favorite spots.  The video is of a Buddhist pagoda.  Somehow we snuck in during lunch hours when we weren’t supposed to be there, so we were practically the only people there.  It was a lovely spot among the trees, where you could hear the crazy traffic down below. This was also the spot where in 1963 Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, left from to burn himself to death on a nearby street corner to protest the persecution of Buddhist monks by the South Vietnamese government.  The next place we visited was the corner where the self-immolation occurred.  There’s a beautiful space devoted to him.  In the pictures below I’ve included a photograph of the self-immolation so you can compare it with the monument to him.





 

 

More shots of Ho Chi Minh City:









 

The Beach!

I love the ocean and this was an excellent spot because at high tide, the waves came right up to where we were staying and we could hear them crashing all night.  Our 2-day visit was also timed perfectly because we were both sick and it was a wonderful place to recover.

 

We spent most of our time outside reading.  Ahh…

Ha Long Bay

I’m still trying to come to terms with how I feel about this part of our trip.  Ultimately, our 2-day visit to Ha Long Bay was full of contrasts:  it was both breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly ugly. The limestone islands that spring out of the bay were truly magnificent, but the whole experience left me feeling like nothing more than a consumer–and an irresponsible one at that.  

Part of the problem was that to view the bay, you pretty much have to join an organized tour, so you are herded from place to place by people who go through the same routine every day. The other part of the problem is that 40% of all foreign tourists in Vietnam go to Ha Long Bay.  That’s about a million and a half people a year.  And we’re all killing the place.  As Bill Hayton writes in Vietnam: Rising Dragon, “Ha Long’s beauty endures but beneath the surface it’s dying.”  Mangrove forests have been stripped from the coast.  That, along with the effects of coal mining in the area, has filled rivers, streams, and the bay with coal dust, killing the corals and sea life that once flourished there. What’s more, the boats on Ha Long Bay are supposed to unload their passengers’ “toilet waste” when they return to shore, but only the most expensive cruse ships have the necessary technology to do so. So, insteady, they empty it into the bay.  And, as Hayton puts it, we were all sailing around on “the shit of a million and half boat passengers a year.”  

As you’ll see in the pictures below, the views were amazing and it was truly an exceptional experience to sit on top of our boat and look out over the misty sea as the sun went down.  But if I could change one part of our trip to Vietnam, I would choose to not contribute to the destruction of this magical place.









Hanoi!









 

Lenin Park was one of our favorite places. It was so interesting because it had a ghost-like quality to it.  The lake was polluted, although men still fished in it.  And it had all these run-down-no-longer-in-use amusement park rides that helped you imagine what it was like 30 or 40 years ago.  






 

 

 

Another interesting spot was the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, or “Hanoi Hilton,” where John McCain was imprisoned. The museum stressed how horrible the Vietnamese prisoners were treated by the French and how wonderfully the Americans were treated.  (Make sure you look closely at the books that were in the gift shop.)


 

 

 

 

We enjoyed the number of birds kept outside of shops.

 

 

The most challenging part about traveling in Vietnam, and Hanoi in particular, was walking around and crossing the street.  We had no idea how crazy the traffic would be.  Pedestrians have few rights.  Once you’re out in the street, cars and motorbikes probably won’t run you over.  But, they definitely won’t stop for you if they see you coming.  So, what happens is you have to slowly weave your way in between them.  As Lonely Planet says, it is an artform.  At first, we would find a Vietnamese person and follow them across, but eventually we got the hang of it.  Now that we’re back in Seoul, it’s so quiet and orderly, it seems as if we’re in a small town.