Good Morning Vietnam!

Up at 5 AM, I slipped quietly out of Ro and Chris' house, hopped the locked gate and caught a cab out to the airport for my early-morning flight. After a hiccup in the visa process that was quickly taken care of, I boarded the plane out of Bangkok, touching down in Ho Chi Minh City just after nine o'clock. The weather is no less sweltering here, but I made the most of my day, first dodging the grossly inflated fare of the airport taxi service and catching a bus into the city. When the man at the taxi stand inside the airport asked me "You want get you taxi?" I told him no thanks, that I would be catching a taxi outside. "It's a better deal out there right?" I said. He looked a trifle abashed. "Yeah, it cheaper." It turned out the taxis outside were nine American dollars less compared to the twenty he was charging inside. And that was still highway robbery compared to the fifty cents for the bus, which I decided was my best option. After getting into the city centre, I got a scooter taxi the rest of the way to my hotel, and the only reason I wasn't positive I was going to die was because the driver's own life was at stake too. The roads here are much more congested than in Bangkok and the scooters are all over the road; dipping and weaving through traffic; up on the sidewalks; on the opposite side of the road against traffic - basically aiming for wherever they can see a hole or believe one will appear before they get there.

I got a bike-powered rickshaw to take me around to the sites of the city, though that is a little misleading: I finally succumbed to the countless offers to take me wherever I wanted to go by every second person who saw a white guy on the sidewalk. Sung, the driver, sat on the bicycle seat behind me, alternately puffing fiercely at his cigarette and then tapping me on the shoulder to direct my attention to the various landmarks that we passed. I didn't pick up much, as his commentary was largely unintelligible, though I caught the gist of it usually. I think. Sung was picking his way through a traffic jam of taxis while saying something about his vehicle being so much better than a car when a scooter, with two business men on it, zipped around one of the taxis. The scooter was driving perpendicular to the curb against traffic on a crosswalk, which I assume gave Sung the right-of-way. Sung ploughed into them, coming to a dead stop. The front of his rickshaw was reinforced for just such eventualities, which I was grateful for as I was perched on the front. The scooter driver caught most of the impact on his leg and was examining his torn pants and bloody leg as Sung leaned his weight into the pedals to get us up to speed again, yelling abuse over his shoulder through his cigarette.

Sung and I stopped at a variety of tourist highlights, though the one I found the most gripping was the Vietnam War Museum, previously know as the American War Atrocities Museum before Vietnam-American relations became more amicable. There were numerous pieced of weaponry, including tanks and aircraft, all of which had been seized by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. The exhibit that really made the museum unique, and that I found disturbing, was the one focusing on documented cases of American human-rights abuses during the war. These deeply graphic pictures left nothing to the imagination and made me very glad to be a Canadian.

Tomorrow I will get another taste of recent history as I head out to the Cu Chi tunnels. It was this extensive network of tunnels that gave the Americans so much trouble in engaging the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. I'm don't know if there is the opportunity to go down into the tunnels, but if there is, hopefully I will be able to squeeze myself in.