Mathew Biadun | Column Writer
Getting to Vietnam had been a turbulent journey, to say the least. By the time I had finally gotten to the hostel, just looking at the mattress nearly made me pass out. I fell asleep nearly immediately, knowing that tomorrow I had an early morning.
There was barely enough time to eat and shower, and grab a complimentary breakfast (just eggs with bread; nothing special, but free breakfast was free breakfast) before the day tour arrived to pick me up. Day tours are truly one of the most convenient ways to see a place. A day trip understands where tourists want to go and what they want to see. It’s their business, after all. They’ll make sure to pack it with things any average person would enjoy. Often they’re a little more expensive than if you planned it yourself. But having all the travel, tickets, and dining arranged for you is a comfort and ease of its own.
On our first stop we found a rather strange place to be a tourist attraction. The guide told us on the way that it was a ‘handicapped crafts factory’; a place where the disabled, particularly the elderly and/or women, were given jobs. They toured us around, and we got to see the people at work, crafting small jewelry boxes or teacups, and intricately painting each one. The guide praised the establishment. He described it as a place where anyone could come and make their wage, and work with honor and pride. That much was true. These people were here to make an honest wage, and that’s always respectable. Yet, it was still strange to be toured around, gawking at these people as if they were some kind of zoo attraction. We didn’t spend long though, before moving on again to the true attraction of the day.
The Cu Chi Tunnels are some two hours drive from my hostel in Ho Chi Minh City. Once, when that city was but Saigon, and Ho Chi Minh but another anti-colonial revolutionary, the Cu Chi Tunnels had been transformed from mere jungle into an elaborate, labyrinthine series of underground bunkers, stores of weapons, ammunition depots, even living quarters. Air vents disguised as termite hills allowed men to sleep down, so far beneath the earth that an American bomb wouldn’t impact the tunnel. It was a guerilla fortress, and from it the Viet-Cong terrorized the US and ARVN (South Vietnamese) forces. It was from here that the Viet-Cong attacked during the Tet Offensive.
Given what a seminal legacy this location has in the canon of the current Vietnamese government, one would expect some respect to be paid to it. That wasn’t the case, however. There are a few scant references to the brutal impact of napalm, or the destruction of nature, but very few and far between. The tunnels have been turned into a massive tourist extravaganza. The Vietnamese soldiers stationed there acted more like tour guides themselves, recording tourists who dipped to hide and ‘disappear’ in a Vietnamese hiding hole. Everyone took videos as they crawled through the tunnels, took selfies by destroyed American tanks or statues of Vietnamese soldiers. Everyone gasped and even laughed at demonstrations of brutal booby traps, replicas of feces-covered spikes that someone in their bloodline might have fallen victim to.
The lack of respect is not a condemnation. For the Americans, it has now been fifty years since the war, and it is only natural that as time passes, old wounds heal and we treat it as less of a historical trauma and more as just history, equivalent to the Revolutionary or Civil Wars in their minds. As for the Vietnamese, they can treat their own battlefields however they like. If they want to charge American tourists to witness the sight of their own defeat, then all the power to them.
As for myself, I enjoyed the experience just as much as everyone else. I even got to shoot an AK-47 for a fee, the weapon being so old and jamming so often that I suspect it was a relic of the actual war. It was definitely still a worthy and informative experience. Getting to crawl through the tunnels yourself is a very interesting method of historical immersion that truly lets you feel how this war was waged.
We stopped for lunch, and drove another two hours, down to the Mekong River Delta. We were handed little coconuts with straws as we boarded a little boat. The Mekong is wide, wide enough to house several small islands within its waters. We hopped from island-to-island, seeing curious stops in each one. A coconut candy factory, live music performances, a bee farm, fresh fruit venders. We got to board a canoe and had locals paddle us down a murky, thin stream leading back to the main river. It was interesting, bouncing around and seeing much calmer, yet much more authentic Vietnamese lives.
Near the end we boarded a few Tuk-tuks which drove us around, not to any particular place, but merely to see how the locals lived. This wasn’t Ho Chi Minh City, but a far more rural area. The housing was hard to explain. Right next to each other there would be a house that could’ve fit into middle-class suburban America, and then a hut with a rusted tin roof. People with business ties whizzed by on motorcycles besides old women in faded dresses, or children who didn’t even wear pants. There were the poor and the rich, all clustered in this one town. I suspect that the motorcyclist was whizzing back from the city, where he works, but that’s only a theory. The tour guide dropped me back off at the hostel around 8PM, but not before texting me to ask for a five star review. After I did, he recommended a good food stand for a quick dinner, after which I turned in for the night.
The next day was spent entirely in Ho Chi Minh City itself. There was certainly enough to see to occupy a day, and it felt strange to be in one of the two greatest cities of Vietnam (Hanoi being the other), only to spend all my time outside of it. There was plenty to see in the city itself. A quick list of highlights would be the Ben Thanh Market for souvenirs, the Ho Chi Minh City Museum for municipal history, Book Street to buy some books about Vietnam, and some good food courts. All the reflective, thoughtful history that had been missing from the kitschy Cu Chi Tunnels was found in the War Remnants Museum, dedicated to the effect of the war on civilians and POWs, although most guests were ironically focused on taking selfies besides giant military vehicles. The Independence Palace, the residence of the South Vietnamese President until the end of that country’s existence, was certainly a worthwhile story.
That just about concluded my story, as the next morning I already headed back. However, it's worth mentioning the sheer abundance to see in Vietnam. I never stepped foot in the north, and never saw Hanoi. Several of my friends were on motorcycle loops, where you ride motorcycles around scenic roads and views for a few days. Those are fun and cheap, but it's worth mentioning that affordability has its drawbacks. The path is dark and slippery sometimes, and renting a motorcycle for fifty bucks a day ensures that the motorcycle probably isn’t in the best condition. I know of one friend whose bike broke down, another who scratched his arm, and another who suffered a leg wound bad enough that he had to limp back to Thailand and go to a hospital there. Thankfully, he was alright in the end. The point is, however, that Vietnam certainly has an abundance to do for anyone intrigued in going, no matter what you’re interested in.
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