Saigon

We're on our final month countdown, most of which is based in Vietnam.  We kick off in Saigon (or  Ho Chi Minh City, depending on your revolutionary bent, comrade).  After Laos and Cambodia, the difference is marked.  The bustle is still crackers, but there is more evidence of the locals having their own disposable cash, whereas much of what we've seen recently has been focussed on snaffling tourist money. 

Still reeling from the lack of coffee-drinking in South America, it gladdened my caffeine-fatigued heart to see that the Vietnamese drink it like water. Funfact: after Brazil, Vietnam is the second largest coffee producer in the world.  They do odd things to it though. It's roasted with margarine -which gives it a sweet taste- and then percolated in small amounts though a small metal filter.  This leaves a short cup of strong coffee which is darker than Satan's coal shed.  Then it's drunk with thick condensed milk, resulting in a drink that meets all of your modern man's food group requirements of fat, sugar and caffeine.

I thought we'd seen busy traffic, but Saigon is something else.  From here and our subsequent travels, we've discovered that there is an art to crossing the road in Vietnam, as it is a constant and unrelenting stream of honking taxis and overladen mopeds. Tourists stand on the kerb, dumbfounded, waiting for a lull that never comes. To cross a road here requires a leap-of-faith, where one walks in front of traffic slowly and confidently, hoping that the paperwork for borschting a tourist causes the mopeds and taxis to steer around you.  It takes some getting used to.

It's a good job I blend into a crowd

We spent one morning at the Cu Chi Tunnels, a nearby tunnel network used by communist guerrillas in South Vietnam during the war.  They would lurk underground, emerging only to tend crops and fight.  Apparently the near constant supply of scorpions, spiders, centipedes and vermin down there were the least of their problems, as up to half of them caught malaria.  The wiki tells me that one Viet Cong report declared: "100% have intestinal parasites of significance".  That would explain the width of the tunnels:

Hang on

I've made a terrible mistake

This is my life now

I must return to my native mole people

The tunnel network was vast and incorporated all manner of innovations.  This termite mound-looking thing below is an air vent, threaded with bamboo canes to provide channels to the chambers below:

The tunnels themselves had three layers, each getting less hospitable as they descend. The top level was stuffy, airless and generally miserable, but the lower two must've been hellish, as one could only spend limited time in them before passing out.  These days they've widened the sections on display, to allow western tourists a fair chance of emerging.

Chan was plainly a Tunnel Rat in-the-making and was far too happy about the whole thing.

Ah, fuck this.

It's the utilities that are most impressive.  Originally this dining room and adjoining kitchen would've been fully subterranean and would've had an earth ceiling where the bamboo roof is now.  Cozy.

The chimney for the stove is diverted about 30 metres away, and is channelled into myriad outlets to minimise the smoke plume.  They'd also only cook in the morning when there was low-level mist, masking the smoke further. Crafty.

Other sneaky-beaky aspects were these sandals, made from recycled tyres and worn backwards, to make it look like the footprints go the opposite direction. Charlie is devious.

And then there was the seemingly limitless innovation when it came to booby-traps:

Interesting though the tunnels were, talking to our guide was more insightful. We ascertained that, while Vietnam is notionally a communist country, it must be a queer version of communism in that seemingly nothing is provided by the state. Healthcare and education are privately provided and costly.  No-one pays tax either, mind, so that kind of works out.  Evidently they did toy with collectivisation, government-controlled supermarkets, ration books and the like, but they binned it when they kept running out of food. So now "communism" means the state does sweet FA and that elections are a bit more predictable.
Apparently there is a bit of a perverse market economy here, where one starts a business and, when the Police come to collect 'unpaid tax', you're either successful enough to bear it and your business survives, or you cannot and it fails.  The police are somewhat more effective than in Cambodia though (high hurdle there) with at least the semblance of the rule of law, but apparently most plod interactions are limited to being pulled over for bribes.

I asked if she calls the town Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City, and her immediate reply was: 

"Saigon! Ho Chi Minh was the idiot who ruin this country.  Saigon used to be such a beautiful capital.".  While Hanoi is the capital city,  Saigon is larger and the main business centre.  The North is known to be more conservative and frugal; the South is more modernist and flamboyant. Or in words of our guide: "Down here we drink beer all the time and are very lazy.  But better than north."

In order to fully comprehend the southern culture, we went out and got drunk.  We met up with Hamish -a school friend of Chantelle's- who was celebrating his birthday. He and his better half have been living in Vietnam for several years now, so we got some local gen.  We ended up talking each other's ears off, as you do miss conversation with fellow anglophones when you are travelling - much less living abroad like they are.

And on the tourist front, here's the Reunification Palace (previously known as Independence Palace), which was the residence of the President of South Vietnam prior to a North Vietnamese Tank parking itself on the lawn in 1975.

Here's Notre Dame, a cathedral built during the French years for the fairly significant number of local Catholics.

Across the way is the Saigon Central Post Office - another glaring bit of French influence.  The architect was Gustav Eiffel, who I'm sure did nothing else of significance.   It looks a lot like a train station, but is still a functioning post office.  There is a lady there who -with infinite patience- sells the region-specific postage for postcards to bovine tourists who've varying levels of English comprehension.

Uncle Ho peers down paternally at the crowd, presumably as an archly-ironic reminder of what you can build when a country isn't ruined by student politics.

And then there's the War Remnants Museum - another perfectly decent museum marred by political bias.  Outside, it has a fairly comprehensive collection of U.S armour and air power, alongside an exhibit detailing horrors inflicted on communist forces in prison by the French and US-sponsored South Vietnamese. Of course this last is presented in such a subjective fashion as to undermine it, regardless of its veracity.

Inside is the excellent 'Requiem' photo exhibition which provides a profound insight into the reality of the war. It consists of 330 framed war photographs snapped by 134 photographers from 11 countries who were killed on assignment.  American, North Vietnamese and non-aligned photographs are shown side-by-side.  Free from subjective commentary, the pictures and the brief descriptions provide (as far as I can ascertain) a great deal about the realities of that conflict.

Which highlights the thing that has bugged me about the museums in the 'communist' countries we've visited:  there were plenty of bad things about the opposing sides to be documented without resorting to bias and hyperbole.  I didn't think it'd annoy me as much as it does - it's certainly no surprise-  but I'm only used to museums being drily academic and factual.  When we've spent so much time on this holiday learning from museums in each country, finding the only facilities available so undermined -and with a really complicated and involved story to tell- feels like a betrayal to collective humanity.

In summary: dictatorships are bagshite.  Take that one to the bank.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Die erste Station in Vietnam war Saigon. Es ist eine sehr lebhafte Stadt, vor allem, wenn in Kambodscha und Laos zu den Städten verglichen. Der Krieg Museum ist interessant, aber für mich war es von Propaganda ruiniert. Wir trafen Freunde und betrank sich. Gute Zeiten.

Into Cambodia

*** Fair warning - unpleasant images after the halfway point***

Next stop was Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  Cambodia is a place not short on issues, having spent the twentieth century being successively ruined by the French; the Americans/Vietnamese; a ridiculously diverse number of internal factions; and finally and more comprehensively destroyed by the four-year reign of the communist regime of Pol Pot.
This last managed to set Cambodian against Cambodian, killing what amounted to a quarter of the entire population, and reduced the remnants to a miserable agrarian lifestyle of subsistence farming. The rice they managed to produce was 'collectivised' and sold to China for guns, leading to mass starvation. Schools, hospitals, factories and offices were all closed. Money was eradicated and the central bank was blown up.  You can read the details yourself.

So Cambodia today is up against it:  corruption is endemic; the rule of law is notional; the countryside is thoroughly landmined; justice is arbitrary; medical and educational services are pretty bad, largely because the doctors and teachers were all killed; poverty is widespread; anyone over 40 has survived a genocide and so is likely working through some issues beneath the surface.   So it's easy to come here with some fairly dire expectations.  But subsequent to the unpleasantness they have seen exceptional growth and a fair amount of foreign investment.   

The first thing you'll notice about Phnom Penh is that it is busy. The traffic is unrelenting. When on foot we'd wait at the side of the road for a natural break in the traffic from a traffic light or something, only to realise after ten minutes that it wasn't coming.  Then we'd notice a local just stride in front of traffic, gesturing indifferently at the oncoming cars.  

The largest family unit we've seen on a single moped is six.

The next thing you'll realise is that any preconceptions you might have about the maximum working payload of a common scooter or moped is about to be shatteringly confounded.   The local variety of tuk-tuk is a scooter towing a trailer with benches in it.  Families travel en masse on a single bike (not that that's specific to here; we saw that in Thailand too). Trade vehicles are just mopeds with elaborate brackets and trailers attached, pulling everything from mattresses to steel bars.

We had seen these old pop bottles full of amber fluid previously, sold from bamboo stands on the side on the road in the Cameron Highlands.  I had assumed they were selling some manner of home brew, but I subsequently found out here that they were full of petrol.  Evidently a Pepsi bottle is all you need to top up the moped's tank.  The colour difference between bottles implies dubious contaminants though.

We spent one day at a sanctuary for bears run by FreeTheBears.org, an Australian charity started by a granny from Perth, who set up the organisation after reading about the plight of bears in Asia farmed for their bile.  Naturally if it involves doing something awful to animals for a bullshit medicinal reason, you can generally blame China without looking it up. This is no different: farms in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and China catch bears, put them in small cages and insert catheters to drain their bile to be sold for nonsense. The bears live for about 2 years before infections or liver cancer kills them.

They are also traded as pets and their body parts are used in food - bear paw soup being a Cambodian delicacy, coming in at US$150 a bowl.

This park, which lives on a separate compound in the Phnom Penh zoological park, does not have any breeding programs, nor does it rehabilitate for release (unless the bear is a wild one that just needs patching up because its been caught in a trap or something): it just finds caged and abused bears and gives them a better life. They aren't released into the wild again because there is nowhere deemed safe for them to go, owing to the illegal activities mentioned above and also because of the staggering rate of Cambodian deforestation, and they often have no skills for the wild because they've been captive all their lives.

The two Asian bears are the Asiatic black bear (or Moon Bear):

And the very dog-looking Sun Bear (or Honey Bear):

We did somewhat envy their facility to jump in the pool when they felt like it.

We were there to check out the facility and lend a hand with some of the bear-keeping stuff.  One thing they create -as the bears never now have to forage for their food- are "enrichment exercises". These are foodie treats hidden inside of hollowed out medicine balls and bamboo sections, which make the bears work a little for their goodies.

We helped out making them up. Today they contained a mixture of bananas, dried dog food, honey, some manner of local vegetable and some morning glory - a local spinach that grows on the river banks. After thoroughly coating ourselves in honey as an offering to the ant gods, we took these out and threw them to the bears.

Chan thinks this qualifies as one of her annual meals that she cooks for me.

This was quite cute.

"Whats all this green shit?"

"Dunno, but it comes out easily enough"

In the afternoon we spent some time in the kitchen, preparing food for the bears.  I felt a lot better when they took the cleaver off Chan and had her weighing portions for the different bear group sizes instead. When it was all prepped, the bear enclosures were emptied and we set about hiding the food in interesting places for them to 'forage' for.

Release the bears:

Outside of the bear facility, there are several other animals that have been rescued from one place or another by other NGOs and housed here for their own safety.  This gibbon was being kept as a pet, chained by its ankle, which is why it has no fur there now. 

Gibbons are monogamous, unlike monkeys, but she has not taken to any of the males they've introduced her to, so she's on her own.  Picky, picky.  But because she used to be a pet, she has no problem with human contact.  When she sees someone she knows, she offers something to be scratched.

Asian otters were also present, so that my record of being shouted at by the world's otters is 2 for 2.

There were also some monkeys here, but they were only caged because the were juvanile.  Once they've figured out climbing and other monkey business, they get let out.  This poor sod had an altercation with an older male who gave him a serious bite on his head, blinding him in one eye.  This has buggered up his depth perception, so his jumps between platforms were more faith than judgement.

One of the kids who worked at the park was taking a nap with a couple of the baby monkeys that had been rescued from the pet trade, after their bottle feed.  There are definitely worse jobs.

Our guide assured us that this boy is 18.  But he also said his parents have a lot of kids and might've forgotten his age.

Having contributed to one worthy cause, we thought we'd keep up the good work by going to Friends The Restaurant, a tapas place run by Friends International.  FI work with all manner of vulnerable and marginalized kids, and in this restaurant they train them up as chefs and front-of-house staff.  The restaurant is now world-renowned and the queue was in the street when we got there.  We had reservations, naturally.  Our karmic goodwill took a bit of a nose-dive after we ordered, however.  We had the Khmer-style Scotch Egg (described as "adventurous"), which is made from a fertilised duck egg - with a baby duck inside.  It tastes like egg, but a bit meaty and with hints of corrupted innocence.

I have made a friend of horror

We were in Phnom Penh, but I was cynical about visiting the genocide museums fir the victims of the Khmer Rouge.  I was reminded of the museum in Santiago that made all the effort in the world to describe the actions of the junta in Chile, but little in the way of its background and motivation, and therefore - to my mind- failed to achieve its primary purpose: to preempt and prevent this kind of thing happening again.

I found the commentary at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek a bit more helpful in that it gave testimony from victims and guards, and some pre-history to the events.  What we were less impressed with was the repetition of lurid details, not because we were squeamish, but because it distracted somewhat from the larger picture. It sometimes felt a bit too much like our emotional reaction was being dictated to us by rote.   We don't need to see replicas of the murder weapons where no originals survived - that only adds artificial ghoulish spectacle.

There have been reports before now of tourists taking selfies with the skulls or with the tree that was used to kill babies, because people are often odious fucking cretins. Thankfully, the atmosphere on the site when we were there was one of quiet reflection -as one would normally find at a war grave or cenotaph- and we found the audioguide and headphones isolate you and your thoughts quite effectively.

The central stupa houses hundred of human skulls recovered from the mass graves.  It's an odd contrast of reverent (stupas are built around relics of the respected deceased) but also coldly clinical - the tiers of the display are sorted by age group and forensically colour-coded by the likely cause of death.  I think it's walking a very fine line between striking memorial and ghoulish spectacle, but I am culturally alien to here and so my opinion counts little.  Chan was bothered by the encouragement to take photos and the lack of any mention of consultation with affected families.  

The other half of this particularly grim tour takes you back into town, into the school that was turned into S21: the notorious prison and torture center.  From what I had read previously, I expected a ghoulish London Dungeon-type exhibit showcasing goreand torture methodology.  It wasn't really like that.  The ground-level rooms are largely empty, except for an iron bed frame and a photo on the wall, each showing one of the last 14 victims of the facility, who were hastily murdered when the town was being liberated by the combined Vietnamese-Cambodian rebel forces. 

The upper levels have exhibits detailing the murderous policies and privations of the Khmer Rouge, with a special exhibition on the forced marriages organised by the regime.  Men and women were paired off by committee and forced into relationships against their will. If they failed to act the correct part, they ran the risk of being taken away for tortured re-education.

One of the particularly shocking facts was the complicity of some in the west  -particularly a delegation from Sweden- who came to observe the country during the height of the regime, saw the state of things and then went away to write a completely false rosy report for the rest of the world. Because no other information left the country, the UN would only recognise Cambodian representatives from the Khmer Rouge for twelve years after they were ousted.

The translation isn't wrong - the KR had a bizarre vernacular which made the sentences sound like that in Khmer.

I've read that Cambodians don't normally speak of the Khmer Rouge: they deal with things by burying them down deep and trying not to think of them.  The more pragmatic among them (adopting a rather Buddhist attitude) accept it as a thing that happened that cannot now be undone.  What this does to a national psyche, I cannot imagine. The commentary at the killing fields implores the listener to learn their lesson, and that of the genocides in the USSR, China, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Chile and of the native Americans.  I take his point, but I wonder what lesson they've taken from the ordeal, when so many of them were involved from both sides and yet none of them speak of it to the younger generations.

Evidently the evening constitutional consists of walking/jogging around the national monuments every evening.  It is possible, however, that they were just trapped like us by the constant traffic and couldn't cross the road to escape.

Ending on an up-note:  the city really grew on us.  The whole place is a glorious mess, but it's getting better.  I was reading the other day about the chap who took over the dirty and dysfunctional water utility service and turned it around.  He sacked all the lazy and corrupt staff, improved sanitation and piping, modernised the payment system such that money actually appeared and almost got shot for his trouble by an army officer who was irked because he received an actual bill.

We will be coming back to Cambodia in about a week, but we're popping over to Laos first.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Kambodscha ist korrupt und chaotisch. Die Auswirkungen des Völkermords der Roten Khmer sind heute offensichtlich. Die Museen sind stark und störend, sondern auch informativ. Trotz der Probleme, gefällt uns die Stadt von Phnom Penh und wir hoffen, dass es bald verbessert.