We finished breakfast and prepared for day one in Saigon. We discussed getting around town to a few places we want to visit with the tour desk in the front lobby. We settled on a 4-hour tour of the city that would take us to a handful of sites we already knew we wanted to see ... the Re-unification Palace and the War Remnants Museum. They did not disappoint.
We had a private car from the hotel, proving, like most hotels, the Rex does just about anything their guests want, for a price. We had a driver plus a guide named Binh. We drove through some busy streets and arrived at the palace in about 15 minutes. This dwelling is somewhat palatial, though not as much so as what I remember of the likes of Hofburg I saw in Vienna in 1993. This is where the ruling family in South Vietnam lived up to the end of the Vietnam war which we found out officially started in 1954 (or 1955 depending on one's source). The President and First Lady orchestrated the running of the country from here and they each had their own quarters to entertain from. The meeting and party rooms are nicely preserved with period furniture. During conflict, the war effort was managed from bunkers in the basement. There was a wide assortment of rudimentary (it was the 50's remember) communication devices, ham radios, telegraph paraphernalia, and the like.
Binh commented that they did not have the internet in the palace during the war, a statement I found as amusing as it was intended to be. There was a secret door on one of the upper floors through which the family could be evacuated to safety on a moment's notice. The grounds around the dwelling were very nice, the grass especially green and well kept. The rooms were all roped off, and we were able to view them just inside their open doors. There was lots of marble and granite everywhere and the floors were immaculate. While sitting in the lobby this morning, I noticed someone dusting the marble floors in the hotel with a cloth broom ... these floors in the palace get wiped as frequently. They must have sensors that alert cleaning staff to the appearance of a new speck of dust so they can descend and fix the intrusion post-haste. This obsession with cleanliness (a good thing) we have seen in Africa and Asia before.
We then climbed back in the vehicle and arrived at our next stop in about 20 minutes. The streets were teeming with much of the 8,000,000 inhabitants of HCMC. We were told there are 4 million scooters in the city, meaning every other person is the proud owner of one. Even though they are plentiful on the streets of Saigon, there seem to be nowhere near as many as I encountered in Hanoi. The Remnants of the War Museum was moving ... the most I have been moved by that very very unfortunate slice of our history (the mid-50's to the mid-70's when the war raged in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) since I visited the Vietnam Wall in DC in 1991. There were "during" and "after" photos of spots all over the country, showing what war did to this beautiful enclave in southeast Asia. There were artifactual pictures of dignitaries and politicians that wafted their way through the area during the conflict. As upsetting as it was, there was specific attention paid to the atrocities performed on the Vietnamese people by the aggressors led by the USA. Agent orange and napalm in particular remind the western world of those two decades. Part of the display highlighted the effect exposure to these chemical weapons had on the members of the US forces and the natives of the country ... all the way from deformed limbs to missing arms/legs and grotesquely malformed parts of the body. It is predicted that close to 60,000 US soldiers perished in the fighting and over 400,000 were injured.
I remember the first time I attended an anti-war demonstration in Ottawa and my first glimpse of the peace sign which to me, in those early days, more meant "ban the bomb". Outside the museum was an assortment of military equipment like helicopters and small jet fighters that pummeled the country with hundreds of thousands of incendiary devices during the conflict. I remember the free and the not-so-free world condemning the aggression going on in Vietnam, complaining bitterly how the activities violated just about every treaty that all had signed in the past related to military aggression in foreign lands. We then piled into the very high-end Toyota for our last stop ... who would'a thunk ... a pagoda. When I was in Hanoi I saw a number of these houses of worship when out and about with Junie.
Like the other seventeen thousand or so :) pagodas I have visited, this one was full of likenesses of Buddha himself with burning incense and the whole nine yards. It was not as well kept as some of the other pagodas I have seen. We were informed that Buddhism (50%) was the most popular religion in Vietnam with Taoism (unsure of %), Catholicism (10%), and Christianity making up the religious landscape. There was the assortment of beggars and street vendors wherever we went and they all looked as needy if not even more so that the previous. I surfed the web and found (unsure of the date of the hits but pretty close to present day) there are reported to be 100 or so Jews in Hanoi and 200 or so in HCM. We are going to get more details and rumour has it there is a chabad here that doubles as a synagogue.
We have lined up the Cu Chi tunnel tour for Thursday at 9AM. Tomorrow we will walk the city, checking out the market close to our hotel and many other outlets I am sure. We were told the main industry in Vietnam is clothing. We went to Pho 2000 for lunch, close to the hotel. I put so many peppers and squirts of hot sauce in my soup that my eyes watered. I got my ST some coconut juice which she did not end up liking and go some more traditional sustenance instead.
We came back to the hotel for 2'ish and grabbed what I hope is the last of our time-change naps. We are meeting a local at 7PM in the lobby and will do dinner.
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