Miên Nam Viêt Nam

Sensual Harassment

I’ve been sitting in this little locals vegan restaurant for about an hour now, and the very same traditional Vietnamese song has been playing through the speakers, looping over and over, for the whole time. The end of the song’s been blended into the beginning, so it can endlessly and seamlessly start off again, just when it should rightfully, for the sake of human sanity, finally bloody end.

Aaaargh!

I know every phrase, when each different instrument comes in, all the little basic melody lines, all those little tremolo wobbles in the traditional stringed instruments.

My already hugely irritating ear worm has evolved into a poisonous snake, it’s gonna be very hard to dislodge.

Ho Ho Ho

So, here I am!

I’m in the big smoke of Ho Chi Minh City, along with the other at least 9 million people who live here.

It’s late afternoon, it was a long hot ride getting here from my overnight stop. The last 30kms or so was super tiring, with the masses of heavy traffic around, and some pretty dodgy road edges, potholes, random (wo)manholes and other obstacles. Let alone motorbikes coming at you and zipping past in all directions, frequently too close for comfort.

The laneways that lead to where I’m staying are so narrow that I frequently had to hop off the saddle and walk the bike between my legs, between narrow walls and parked/moving motorbikes or other obstacles, to avoid damaging anything.

But I made it.

HCMC’s a roaring bustling city. The traffic on any road of any decent size appears to be incessant, the major thoroughfares are even more nuts, and it’s not even peak hour yet.

But I guess I’m sorta used to it now. I was just thinking as I was riding into the city how surprisingly comfortable I feel zigzagging through these massive roundabouts and intersections, on the right hand side of the road, just finding my way through, following the motorbikes, anticipating what everyone’s gonna do, just as they try to anticipate my movements.

They’re probably more wary of me than I am of them. They tend to be fairly predictable, within certain wide parameters. If they do something that appears unpredictable, like suddenly stop and look at their phone, or zip in front of me and turn, or just pull out in front of me, knowing I’ll slow down, I’m not actually too surprised by it now.

What used to be unpredictable is becoming quite normal.

The traffic seems to flow quite well, as long as you’re not too hesitant, and go with the flow. And especially if you’re on 2 wheels. There appears to be very little road rage here. You can’t get angry with people for cutting you off, because you just did the same thing to some other bastard 30 seconds ago.

It’s perfect.

Across The Lines

Well, I’m now in my 5th new country since I left Oz.

I’m in Miên Nam Viêt Nam, or south Vietnam.

And last week I reached a mini milestone, for what it’s worth.

It’s now been 6 months since I left the golden shores of northern NSW and started riding.

It’s gone so fast.

And so slow.

I can’t believe how many amazing things have happened in that time, I should fill up a whole journal with them all.

Oh yeah, I’m doing that right now.

Trang Bang

Yesterday I made it to Trang Bang, a medium-sized quite spread-out town, about 20 or 30 clicks on the Viet side of the border, after first riding about 50 to get to the border from the Cambodian side.

The border crossing was pretty painless, I even almost got through without having to unload all my bike bags and have them x-rayed in the pedestrian passport-stamping building, because I left them on my bike outside.

But I got chatting to some interesting German women in the passport line, and then again outside, and eventually the border guards spotted me and made me unload and do the deed. No bother, it was worth it, Rina and Esther are so interesting, we plan to meet up here in HCMC.

Lush rice fields, as far as the eye can see.

Rather grand town entrance.

Downtown Trang Bang

They’ve got a Co-op! The Co-op is a chain of supermarkets in Switzerland, that I remember as being full of great food of all varieties, and brimming with fresh produce. But, as it turns out, the Vietnamese version is not related to its Swiss namesake whatsoever, despite the similarities in the logo.

But, to my complete delight, the place was still jam packed full of great food, things I haven’t seen for ages!

I went to town.

Fresh baguettes (with no surprises inside), fresh salad, cocktail tomatoes, a small block of cheese, yoghurt, fruit, yum! It’s amazing how good a home made baguette can taste, when you haven’t had one forever.

The local park

Notice the signs? Roman script! Yay! I can read signs again! The last time I could do that was 4 months ago, in Malaysia.

Obviously I have to translate the signs, but at least I can type them in to a translating app, or use the camera function, and get to know what they mean, bit by bit.

That’s especially handy when you’re wandering the streets looking for food or accommodation.

Most of the hanging bags are filled with rice paper, spiced, coloured and flavoured. Yum.

Deep fried as well as raw spring rolls are a fave amongst the Viets, so rice paper is used a lot. There's also a huge variety of dried rice cake snacks everywhere.

Satisfying My Wanderlust

It’s so interesting exploring a new city. Esther asked me the other night why I decided to go on this long trip in the first place. My first answer was curiosity. Somehow I never seem to get bored exploring new places. There’s always something new to see. Always.

And yeah I know that’s true of any place actually, no matter how long you’ve been there.

So HCMC is a little like Bangkok, in that it’s huge, densely populated, full of big Asian city semi-chaos, a bit messy in certain places, and there’s a huge disparity between rich and poor.

And in both places it seems like almost anything goes.

Riding over a bridge on the outskirts of the city

Public beautification, private uglification

Each little city-village has its own entrance points, these little archways.

Vegan food!

I’ve learnt that looking for anything on Google Maps is really problematic in Asia. Maybe it’s the same in other places, I can’t remember. But here, there’s been such a huge turnover of businesses as a result of Covid that 50% of what you’re looking for on your map app doesn’t exist anymore.

So I found this vegan place by chance, whilst looking for another one that no longer exists. There are many vegan Buddhists in this country, which is bloody good news to me. Even many non-vegetarian Vietnamese Buddhists tend not to eat meat on the 1st, 15th and 30th of every month, as well as on full moon nights.

Wandering the late afternoon streets. So interesting!

Real footpaths! Wide ones! I mean, they’re not everywhere, but they do exist. And of course the scooters (motorbikes) invade them during peak hour, so they disappear for awhile then. But they're a real treat, I’m tellin ya.

About AUD5 for an hour in the hotel. Now why on earth would you need a hotel for just an hour?

That’s a serious root vegetable collection

Ho Chi Minh City used to be called Saigon. This is the Saigon Opera House. It’s a very ritzy area, full of high end fashion and jewellery stores.

Unplayable, unfortunately

Modern ex-colonial city.

The Ho Chi Minh Sin Bin

Duong Bui Vien is HCMC’s version of Bangkok’s Khaosan Road, it’s one of the main nightlife streets, along which locals and foreigners alike party their brains off until the piss hours of the morning.

Bui Vien’s also added its own extra spicy flavour - there’s young women (and occasionally young men) dancing on platforms outside some of the clubs and bars, enticing people in, and providing a bit of eye candy to keep the punters where they are, once their bums are on seats.

It’s also a complete ear gauntlet, the music's excruciatingly loud. I noticed a few young kids automatically covering their ears whilst strolling through with their parents. Oh to have such sensitive hearing. My own’s been compromised by years of pummelling by loud PAs.

Bui Vien also happens to be HCMC’s redlight district, and women are everywhere for the taking. With the risk of sounding like a broken record on this topic, the problems in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam around sex work are very similar.

Although prostitution is highly illegal in this country, it’s definitely alive and kicking (off its stilettos). There’s approximately 200,000 sex workers in the country, many of whom are under 18.

A recent survey found that 40% of sex workers in Ho Chi Minh City had experienced physical or sexual violence against them at some time.

Sex trafficking is also rife. These days internet savvy traffickers form online relationships with young women, entice them to go abroad with lucrative offers of (non-sex) work, and then imprison them and confiscate their passports when they get there.

Some people are so fucking nice aren’t they.

Government agency websites warn foreign tourists about having encounters with sex workers, with warnings like this:

“…. Nevertheless, hooking up with strange girls on the streets may lead to some unexpected situations after pleasure of sexual moments. There are cases reported in which ladies vanished into thin air along with men’s wallet, cell phones and other valuable belongings. Hence, be careful and guard your possessions while having girlfriend experiences.”

Notice how they don’t mention trafficking, or the risks to the women.

The Reunification Palace

Ho Chi Minh City has some super interesting (and some very confronting) museums, and they all have really bad names.

The Reunification Palace is where the former presidents of South Vietnam lived, until the country was finally united in 1975.

It’s on the site of the previous French colonial Governor General’s residence, which is also a museum, and the gardens are beautiful.

Except that they’re littered with the cruel weapons of war.

Vietnamese tank, displaying the yellow star of Vietnam, over a red background. Same as their national flag. At last, another flag colour, instead of just red white or blue.

Angry bird

Pining for each other

Camphor laurel of manageable size

Holey man

The main building of the palace was rebuilt in the 1960s, and is actually a classic example of 60s concrete, wood and glass architecture. The outside reminds me a bit of some of the buildings from my university days in Adelaide.

But inside it’s hip classic minimalist 60s design.

Dining room, where they had little shindigs like this:

The building served as a government (which was often military) headquarters too, and the head honchos would meet around this table.

Lounge area for having well-crafted stuffy conversations with foreign dignitaries and VIPs.

Perfect seating for circular arguments

Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon visited here once, when he was already corrupt, but before he became the corrupt US president. Tricky Dicky was actually his nickname.

Great chairs

I so wanted to play this

I actually thought that I could possibly get around this sign by doing an Elton John and playing the piano with my feet. But I thought I’d better not be too pedantic.

These poor elephants were de-feeted.

There’s a display of gifts that the various South Vietnamese Presidents have received from other dignitaries and heads of state. I mean, I don’t know who gave him the elephants’ feet, but I can just imagine them thinking, “Shit, this is hard. What pressie can we give Pressie that he hasn’t already got? I know! Let’s chop off some elephant feet, gouge out the insides, polish up the toenails, and give him that! He’ll love it!”

What strange ideas reside in the minds of men.

These 2 North Vietnamese happy chappy pilots took it upon themselves to bomb the South Vietnamese palace one day, even though they were actually on a mission to bomb something else. Naughty boys. They broke away from their flock of planes and did their own thing, and managed 2 direct hits on the helipad of the palace.

Better than nothing I guess. But builders just repaired the holes in no time.

There’s a huge bunker network below the building, for special events, like bombings and assassination attempts.

Rather spartan bedroom (for a Pressie)

Man! This is so annoying!! Which bloody phone’s ringing??!!&@$#*#!!

There were various war rooms down there, which was quite appropriate given that there were wars going on the whole time. They were full of maps and diagrams and communication devices etc, where the generals could get live reports from the front.

The president got around in this old clunker.

The War Remnants Museum

Another badly named place.

And a place to which I shall probably never return, as it’s just too traumatic.

I felt sick to the stomach, disgusted, confused, angry, and overwhelmingly sad as I made my way through the horror show of exhibits in this place.

The brutal history of the wars that Vietnam fought against the French colonists, and then its own civil war, which eventually involved the superpowers, (a war which is officially known here as the American War), is displayed there, in all too graphic detail.

I talked about the history of that conflict a couple of blogs ago, from the Cambodian perspective, but here’s a summary with more of a Vietnamese focus.

French Colonisation

The French colonised Vietnam in the 1860s, and, right from the start, faced armed resistance from local Vietnamese groups. The French colonial period was tainted by examples of unconscionable brutality, and periods of food insecurity and widespread malnutrition, which led to deep resentment from the locals. Uprisings were brutally suppressed. As time passed resistance groups became better armed and more organised.

The Japanese invaded in 1940, and quickly disposed of the French. Towards the end of World War II Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces, the Viet Minh, fought a brutal battle against the Japanese, who themselves had committed shocking atrocities in Vietnam. The result of the Japanese occupation was the deaths by starvation of a million people, whose rice supplies were stolen by Japanese armed forces, and who were forced to grow cash crops like cotton and linen on land they needed to grow food.

After losing the Pacific War against the Americans and their Allies, the Japanese left Vietnam, and the Viet Minh immediately declared independence.

But the French came back, didn’t they, and for the next 9 years fought a brutal battle against the Viet Minh, who’d been elected to power by the people in north and central Vietnam.

The Viet Minh orchestrated a very successful and organised war against the French, and the colonial forces finally capitulated, after the famous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.

The last French troops leaving Vietnam in 1955. They’d been there for almost 100 years.

Partition

In 1954, at an international conference in Geneva with all the big players, it was decided to split Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh ruling the north, and the regime of the rightwing dictator Ngo Dinh Diem ruling the south. One of the conditions of the signed agreement was that national unified elections were to be held.

But the South (supported by the US) reneged on this promise. It was the Cold War, and the US and its Allies were determined to crush communism, and the communists were committed to crushing capitalism.

So basically everyone got crushed.

During this period huge political oppression and violence occurred on both sides of the Parallel. In the north, the Viet Minh executed around 13,000 political opponents, and in the south, Diem also brutalised his opposition, killing thousands.

War Between North and South

The Viet Cong, a military group supported by the north, initiated a guerilla war in the south, and the North Vietnamese army also began to fight an open war against South Vietnamese troops.

In 1964 the US claimed that one of its warships in the Gulf of Tonkin had been attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats. The US used the attack to justify to the American people the immediate need for massive troop increases in the conflict. In fact, according to classified documents revealed later, the attack on the US warship never even happened. Surprise surprise.

The war escalated, and became a war of attrition. The US sent in hundreds of thousands of troops every year, and Ausralia, New Zealand, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines joined them. The north were supported by the Chinese and the Russians.

It was a particularly brutal conflict, even for a war.

And it was one of the first wars (and one of the last) where journalists could move quite freely around the front lines, with the troops, with their reports flowing through to media outlets all over the world without any military censorship.

The brutality the journalists saw was beamed across the world throughout the many years of the conflict, right into people’s lounge rooms, and, as the war dragged on, was an important factor in the growing strength of anti-war movements worldwide.

This museum includes hundreds of large photographs taken by international journalists during the conflict. I can’t begin to describe how horrific it was to see many of them, to begin to understand the scale of the suffering.

Brutality on such a level doesn’t happen by chance.

It requires deliberate decisions, massive funding commitments, extensive organisation, and huge logistical support.

Search and Destroy

The US/South Vietnamese strategy was twofold.

The first part was to flush out the North Vietnamese from the jungles in the west of the country, and from Laos and Cambodia, where they were carrying out a very successful guerilla campaign against US and South Vietnamese forces. The US called their flushing out technique search and destroy.

How positively Hollywood.

The North Vietnamese had developed a vast network of tunnels, which they used to avoid detection, and they established what came to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of trails that ran from North Vietnam, through Laos and Cambodia, to South Vietnam. This enabled them to ferry people and military supplies for their fight in the South.

One of the keys to the success of the North Vietnamese was their support by the local villagers in those areas.

So the US strategy was just to go in there and totally wipe out the place. They’d bomb and strafe the villages first, from helicopters, and then go in with flame throwers and burn them down.

The use of napalm was common, in bombs, flame throwers and other weapons. Napalm is basically a highly flammable and very sticky chemical. When napalm bombs hit the ground, or exploded above ground, incredibly intensely hot fires (with temperatures of between 800 and 2000 degrees Celcius) spread within 50m, and the burning chemical would stick to people, burning them alive. Napalm didn’t just kill, it tortured while killing, or left the most brutal permanent injuries.

After the initial terror, captured villagers would then be brutally interrogated. Many were then massacred openly by young US soldiers, who themselves had been indoctrinated and brutalised by the conflict, and/or sought revenge for the loss of their friends on the battlefield.

Flamethrower, for burning down villages, crops, forests and people

Bulldozer for clearing buildings and infrastructure, and for military landscaping projects

Agent Orange

Another important part of the US strategy was the use of Agent Orange, an extremely toxic and dangerous chemical defoliant, which they sprayed from the air and from trucks over huge expanses of the country. They sprayed over 3m hectares in Vietnam, which included over 26,000 villages, as well as large parts of Laos and Cambodia.

A quarter of the total area of South Vietnam was sprayed with the deadly chemical, 86% of which was sprayed twice. This had huge and long term environmental consequences.

The chemical kills plants, the forests die, and crops are ruined. The cleared forests made it more difficult for the Viet Cong to continue their guerilla war under cover. The destruction of food crops also resulted in famine in the villages, and the inability of the soldiers to secure adequate food supplies themselves.

But the most overwhelming effect of Agent Orange is what it did to humans and animals. It contains a particular dioxin called TCCD, which is the most toxic of all the dioxins, and is classified as a carcinogen. When it comes into contact with humans it causes permanent damage, both to the person exposed, but also to their offspring.

Loading up Agent Orange, for spraying

The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that over 1m Vietnamese people were disabled, or have health problems, as a result of their exposure (or their parents’ exposure) to Agent Orange. It’s hard to get your head around the size of that figure.

US military personnel were also the victims, with their own health problems, and increases in the rates of birth defects in their children.

Photographs of the people devastated by Agent Orange are some of the worst I’ve ever seen. I’m not gonna post them.

But importantly, the museum also displays many photographs of how generations of victims have been supported by many organisations within Vietnam, both government and non-government, to this day.

Carpet Bombing

The second part of the US/South Vietnamese strategy was to use overwhelming firepower to try and destroy the North Vietnamese spirit, in the form of a relentless carpet bombing campaign of Vietnamese cities, of both military and civilian targets.

You’ve probably heard the statistics before, but, incredibly, the US dropped twice as many bombs on North Vietnam than they dropped in the whole of World War II.

It’s really hard to believe that that’s actually true, when you see pictures of Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Nagoya, and hundreds of other cities in Asia and Europe that the US were largely responsible for almost completely destroying by bombing in World War II.

But it’s true.

The US bombing of North Vietnam remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.

There’s also no doubt that the War Remnants Museum actually doesn’t tell the complete story of the war, as it’s told only from the perspective of the north. The war is described as a war that Vietnam fought against the US and its Allies, but, in fact, the war was between North and South Vietnam, and both sides had massive support from various superpowers.

It is true however that the US came to be the dominant partner in the coalition with its Allies and South Vietnam, and regarded winning the war as a crucial warning to communists worldwide. It was also crucial to its own self image as a protector of capitalism and democracy, and as an invincible power.

But the war proved that the US is, in fact, particularly vincible.

As US forces faced decisive defeats on the battlefield in Vietnam, as the US body count grew exponentially, and as the anti-war movement and then the general US population lost its appetite for the war, the US government faced pressure to withdraw.

Disillusioned US troops began refusing to deploy, and disobeyed orders. Morale crashed. Instead of fighting in designated areas, troops would deploy to a safe place and radio false coordinates to superiors, so they could avoid any conflict. Marijuana usage became widespread, and 10-15% of troops regularly used heroin.

Australia and NZ withdrew its troops in 1971. The US eventually followed suit, but not until 1973, after it negotiated a ceasefire, with the country still divided along the 17th Parallel.

For the next 2 years the North and South continued their war, and the North eventually won, despite the fact that they had less than half of the military hardware that the South possessed.

Saigon fell/was liberated in April 1975.

Busting through the palace walls in Saigon

The US finally got everyone out. It was chaotic. I'm not sure who thought of the name for their helicopter evacuation operation, Operation Frequent Wind, but they def had a sense of humour.

In 1975 Vietnam was finally fully reunified and independent, after over a century of colonisation and conflict, and has remained so ever since.

My Apologies

I’m sorry.

Maybe you’re wondering why I’ve spent so much time describing such horror, when I could be focusing on all the good stuff I’m seeing around me.

Well, it’s just that I’ve been in some pretty disturbing and thought-provoking places lately.

I see the incredibly inspirational beauty of humans all the time, but lately I’ve also been experiencing the horror of what humans are capable of doing to each other.

All these events I’ve been describing lately actually happened.

In many of our own lifetimes.

The lesson I’ve learnt is that it’s crucial that people are never given the opportunity to have too much power. Every system of governance needs checks and balances, because if anyone gets too much power, they tend to abuse it. It happens all the time. Impunity breeds crime.

And that’s not just within governments either, but also within corporations, organisations, large or small, and actually within any group of people, right down to the family and relationship level.

If there’s absolutely no consequences for our actions, who knows what we’re capable of doing?

Us beautiful humans need to be stopped.

So Glad That’s Over

So, it’s only a few days until Lali arrives, and I’ve decided to spend that time down in the Mekong Delta, a huge area which spreads right from the outskirts of HCMC, all the way down to the coast to the southwest.

It’s an amazing expanse of land, which includes the deltas of a multitude of major rivers and waterways, including the Mekong. It’s an area of absolute natural beauty, as well as a hugely productive and fertile farming area, which includes massive rice fields, orchards, and other crops.

It’s also heavily populated by human animals. 20 million people live in the region, which is actually over 20% of Vietnam’s 97m people.

I can’t wait to be there.

And then Lali’s coming!

As usual, many more heavens loom on the horizon❤️

And I’m still drinking coffee. And coffee proxies.

I’ve been loving it. Thank you so much for supporting my writing efforts.

http://buymeacoffee.com/krolesh9