Saigon - Into the Dark

Saigon is what you'd get if you took the commercial and tourist-friendly vast metropolis that is Bangkok and crossed it with the Vietnamese motorbike chaos of Hanoi, and then the two exploded. It's like any big city I suppose, chain brands and busy backstreets. Like a lot of Asian cities it's got that shiny modern front but it's in the alleyways and the back of restaurants where life really happens. Saigon has the same level of chaos as other Vietnamese cities, with the noise and the touts and the traffic, but somehow it all feels much more intense. Also the endurance sport of finding a room is made so much harder here as the buildings are so outrageously tall and thin they all have at least five floors and no lift.




Groovy Baby

As the largest city in Vietnam Saigon obviously has some pretty major sights but the main tourist attractions are morbidly linked to the war that scarred this country for years, leaving a legacy that endures to the present day.

The Reunification Palace in the centre of the city is most famous for that iconic picture of a tank crashing through its huge gates when the soldiers of the north took over Saigon. The palace is a massive, modern place built in the 1960s by the then president of South Vietnam. He was a pretty unpopular guy by all accounts and the palace had to be rebuilt several times after it was bombed by his own air force, and subsequently contains a lot of 60-esque shag-pile carpet, a night club and a bomb shelter.

The Reunification Palace

Into the Dark

The war in Vietnam set the country back years. In the north cities were flattened, meaning that the only style of life that was sustainable was in the bamboo huts of the villages. In the south the story was different, the cities were held by the Americans but the villages were under constant threat from the guerrillas. In many places (especially where locals had been relocated into enforced fenced off towns) the villagers waited until it was night then let the guerrillas in.

A original tunnel entrance at Cu Chi

One area that became a particularly troublesome spot for the Americans was Cu Chi. The Cu Chi tunnels are particularly famous, a vast network of tight tunnels wound all over the area, connecting villages and popping up deep in the jungle to attack American platoons. The Cu Chi tunnels were a truly amazing feat and a horrific fighting technique in a barbaric war. The tour however was totally not what we had expected. Driving far out of the city we stopped off at a factory where victims of the agent orange defoliant worked making souvenirs to sell in the shop next door. At one table a woman sat small and shrunken next to her wheelchair painstakingly making pictures out of crushed eggshell.
Just out side the now innocuous town of Cu Chi a large and busy tourist site marks the location of some of the most brutal fighting of the Vietnam war. In dug out bunkers we watched a dated propaganda video praising the local "hero American killers" of the war before being led out into the forest to see the original tunnel entrances and a captured American tank. Despite the light-hearted tone of the tour guide and the laughter of the tourists as they squeezed themselves into the minute holes the atmosphere of the forest was oppressive. We couldn't leave the path at any point, the risk of traps and UXO still a very real threat, and the tank we looked at was riddled with bullet holes, a huge steel trap lumbering through the forest, in which, presumably, several men died. The guide demonstrated to us a line of sinister looking recreations of guerrilla booby traps, behind bad-taste cartoons showing American troops stumbling through the forest, falling prey to the traps and screaming in pain. Afterwards we were invited to fire AK47s on the shooting range.

A recreation of a guerrilla booby trap

Witnessing the ingenuity of the tunnel system though was incredible. It was amazing how people managed to survive, digging themselves into the ground and continuing their lives. They devised air vents that looked like ant hills on the surface and built levels of tunnels with air locks to prevent gassing, they also built careful systems for cooking, only boiling root vegetables so that steam could be let out at dawn thereby passing for mist.






The Remnants of War

An American helicopter at the War Remnants Museum

Back in Saigon we were dropped off at the War Remnants Museum, which is home to hundreds of photographs taken by foreign journalists during the Vietnam War. It was a truly awful sight. Villagers lay dead or bleeding in heaps by the side of the road, American soldiers dragged prisoners behind tanks. One soldier held up the ragged remains of a blown apart body and women and children, burnt by napalm, wept bitterly. The shiny intestines of a massacred family in a boat caught my eye and Theo steered me away from the dismembered corpse of an UXO victim. It was without a doubt the worst thing I have ever seen, I glanced at the photos, barely even mustering the will to read the details of the atrocities. The sheer numbers of civilians caught up in the war was horrific. Conscripted Americans and Vietnamese alike died in droves, fighting a war that was never openly declared.
Leaving the museum I was mystified how people were walking around taking photos, talking to their friends or even looking closely at the photos on display. Back on the streets I found myself starring at every passing local, working out if they were old enough to remember the war. How could anyone live through such times and go back to leading a normal life? How could you settle down and become a taxi driver and welcome westerners into your country? How could you even survive? That evening I continued to be mystified by how the people of Vietnam dealt with their tragic past, it just didn't tally with the noisy women in pajamas who made our street food and the young women selling books who chased Theo across the city with history books. Flipping through the book we finally bought I was struck by a quote from an American mother, she said she had given the army a good boy and they had brought him back a murderer. Thinking about it how did anyone associated with what happened here readjust to peace time, and that I'm afraid was my lasting impression of Vitenam's capital, a healthy growth of life, sprouting from the rich soil of a grave.