Traffic laws? What are those?

Here's a brief overview of our trip to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), for the sake of completing the blog. After our UNC program ended on the 25th, my friend Brennan and I headed to HCMC for 4 days. The bus ride there totaled about 24 hours, including stops, but it was a "sleep" bus, which meant it had beds, sort of like a sleeper train.

HCMC was completely different from the other cities we visited in Vietnam. It was much larger, more populated, and more urban, not to mention the traffic was absolutely insane. Lights and lanes are optional at best, and most people drive on whichever side of the road has the least traffic. Crossing the street typically involved walking straight into an oncoming barrage of motorcycles, hoping that the drivers would swerve around us. I usually either closed my eyes or tried to shield myself by walking close to a Vietnamese person. Aside from the challenges of crossing the street, I really enjoyed my time there and also learned a lot from the people I talked to and the places I visited.

Organized tours and day trips dominate in Vietnam, and I took two during my four days in HCMC. The first day, Brennan and I took a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels, which is one of the sites with fully restored Viet Cong tunnels open to the public. We saw some traps and bunkers that had been set up by guerrillas, crawled through part of the tunnels, and watched some "educational" videos that were - to put it nicely - anti-American. The site also boasts a huge shooting range, where we purchased a few bullets and shot AK-47s - an experience I'm glad I had but would never like to repeat. I don't even know if I came anywhere near the targets because I was too busy reeling from the noise. They provide you with headphones (Lonely Planet describes them as "DJ-style") which do absolutely no good. I pride myself in having seasoned ears (thanks to years of drumline), but this thing left everyone's ears ringing for quite a while.

Day two was spent exploring the city and visiting the primary tourist sites. We went to an art museum, Reunification Palace (formerly the government site of South Vietnam), and the War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the Museum of American War Crimes before the country patched up relations with the US in 1995 and began receiving American tourists). The museum was loaded with pictures of American soldiers committing atrocities, tortures inflicted on prisoners of war, and also images of people throughout the world protesting the American involvement in the war. It was a little overwhelming.

Day 3 I went off by myself and took an organized tour of the Mekong Delta, which is the rural region that makes up the southern part of Vietnam. The trip included boat rides down the Mekong and its canals, handicraft demonstrations, and the sampling of coconut candy and rice wine (which was bad, but not as bad as banana wine, which tasted like a 99% pure alcohol and 1% rum, and "snake wine," which is rice wine that has a snake head floating in the bottle)(I didn't personally try the snake wine). We also were able to bike through a village, which would've been nice had I not been the last one to get a bike. Mine had defective breaks and a chain that caught about 1 out of 4 times I pedaled, making me look like some sort of cartoon character pedaling at warp speed but only moving about 2mph.

The last day, we explored the city on our own, and I was determined to talk to some cyclo drivers about the war. We'd been told earlier (from reliable sources) that South Vietnamese soldiers who had fought with the Americans were essentially stripped of their rights and sent to re-education camps for up to 9 years after the war ended. When they were released, they were unable to resume their previous careers and could only legally take a few jobs - most of them now work as either tour guides or cyclo drivers. We'd had a very spirited and informative tour guide earlier in the trip, but unfortunately, the only cyclo drivers I was able to talk to that afternoon were either too young to be soldiers or too creepy to talk to. This was disappointing, because after hearing the Vietnamese (communist) perspective and American perspective on the war, it would've been nice to get some feedback on how the war affected the South Vietnamese.

The last escapade of the trip was the ride to the airport. We made the brilliant/idiotic decision to take motorbikes (remember the traffic described earlier?). With bags in tow and helmets secured, we whizzed through the masses for quite awhile before my bike was suddenly flagged down by a pair of cops by the side of the road. My driver pulled over and looked like he was about to cry. Of course, no one spoke English, so I was just standing there while the cops yelled at the guy, checked his license, and filled out forms. The driver looked so distraught that I figured: this guy is illegal, something we were doing is illegal, he's about to get deported or thrown in jail, they're going to try to take me away, something terrible is happening. Turns out, my driver had run a red light and was being fined about 100,000 Dong ($6). Of course, his income is so low that this small fine WAS enough to bring him near to tears. This came as a huge wake-up call to me - another example of how Asia is drastically different from the US.

I'll close with that, as this "overview" turned out to be everything but brief...