We flew into Vietnam on Sunday. The airport is new and efficient and we paid the stated rate, $15 to get to our hotel. Having missed the place the first time and going around the block, the cab driver remarked “O my **, that IS it!” Not the most auspicious introduction, but we’ve been around the block a few times ourselves, Pam and I, and we are not easily put off. Our hotel may be modest, but it is clean and moderately priced and in a safe neighbourhood. Anything beyond that we consider conspicuous consumption.
We got in early enough for an evening stroll through the upscale part of town, and I have to say we were pretty impressed. The streets and sidewalks are wide, as they are in Phnom Penh, similarly influenced by the French genius for civil planning, and the sidewalk cafes and rooftop terraces were gracious and friendly. We must have walked 20 kilometers on Monday. We started with a tour through Ben Thanh Market, much more organized than Central Market in Phnom Penh, but not nearly as much fun. Prices are pretty well as stated, and the Vietnamese are not easily moved.
We made the mistake of catching bicycle rickshaws outside of the market whose drivers took us two kilometers the wrong way and into a deserted courtyard for a shakedown. We don’t often make that kind of mistake when we are travelling, but we got off relatively lightly and more than a little chagrinned at our naivete. We hoofed it the rest of the day and found Saigon to be full of the romance of French influence and the legacy of protracted war.
It is an odd combination. The Reunification Palace was everything you remember the archectecture of the sixties to be: angular and airy. The Hotel de Ville and the post office pure French colonial gingerbread.
The War Museum was suitably horrific, as befits a horrible war. The artefacts of the American genius for crafting weapons of death were eye-opening even for one as cynical as I, and the pictures of the human costs of torture, mines, napalm and Agent Orange won’t be easily forgotten. Salad Nicoise and a sweet crepe at a French cafe went some way to restoring a sense of perspective on a troubling day.
The Vietnamese are a hard and hardened people. Their drive for prosperity is being noted even among their neighbours in South-East Asia who are used to seeing such rampant capitalist ambition. A square foot of land in Saigon is now more expensive than Hong Kong or New York. Everywhere you look buildings are going up; expensive buildings. Our shakedown at the market is just the tip of the iceberg: these people are tenacious and determined. Whatever is takes, they are going to succeed, and they are going to be a force to be reckoned with in this part of the world.
Home Thoughts From Abroad 
September 22, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Pretty nice experience. What is shakedown ?
Vietnamese people often say that its possible to see Lenin there. Did you see it ?
September 23, 2009 at 1:08 pm
You can certainly see Ho Chi Minh everywhere in the city that now bears his name. His image is plastered on billboards, walls, scuptures in city parks and their currency, the dong. If you mean can see see pictures or sculptures of Lenin? No. But if you mean can you see the spirit of Lenin? That is a little more complex.
Ho Chi Minh was greatly influenced by Lenin and travelled to Moscow from Paris in late 1923 to meet him. Unfortunately for history, that meeting never took place, as Lenin died in early 1924 (poisoned, they say, by his ambitious successor). Ho attended the funeral in -30 degree weather, sustaining a mild case of frostbite on his ungloved fingers.
Ho stayed the Soviet Union for some time, getting a better education, and in turn educating the Soviets and other Communists about the importance of his own struggle in Vietnam. He wrote “I cannot but help observe from many of my comrades…that they wish to kill the snake by stepping on its tail. You all know today that the poison and the energy of the capitalist snake is concentrated more in the colonies than it the mother countries.”
As an English teacher I think Ho would have been better served by using a scorpion as a metaphor, but certainly there was no denying Ho’s focus, even at that young age.
Uncle Ho, as he is known in Vietnam, is the father of this country, and his personal legacy is assured. His economic and political legacy is a little less secure. There is a capitalist boom going on, at least in Saigon, and any student of history can tell you what happens next after the rise of a middle class.
Lenin might have inspired this country to resistance, and eventually to independence, but his influence no longer rules Vietnam.
September 28, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Was it the driver in the photo who shook you down? And what happened exactly? We know about Mexican & Bolivian run-ins, but how does it work over there?