This Is The End…well, almost

Follow-up to Chuc Mung Nam Moi! from Esprit de l'escalier

Saigon…shit; I’m still only in Saigon…Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle.

- Willard, Apocalypse Now

So I’ve made it to Ho Chi Minh City, or, if you prefer, Saigon. Neither is the politically-correct name, but apart from all the Soviet Union flags, there’s no longer anything that makes the city appear very communist – Nam seems about as free-market as countries come – so I’ve been calling it the latter.

In order to stop me going on any big tangents, I’ll rewind and start from where I left off. About an hour after my last blog I caught a bus to Hoi An. On the way, I met Colorado Phil, who I originally met in Fiji and last saw in Auckland. That was pretty freaky, mainly because of how long it had been. Then in Hoi An I met a British couple I’d last seen in Austin, Texas. Then I saw another couple who I could swear I recognised, then realised, after they’d disappeared, that I’d met them on the Kiwi Experience. That is the kind of backpacker trail place Hoi An is.

Hoi An is also the kind of place – like streets in the Old Quarter of its anagramsake Hanoi – that’s full of a certain type of business, namely arts and crafts shops, and, more importantly, tailors. You wonder how they make a living with all that competition. Apparently, after the communists took over in South Vietnam, they rounded up all the artisans and sent them off to a re-education camp in Hoi An. The Ho government didn’t reckon on these staunchly petit bourgeois folk making such a fuss as they did, and before long, the quaint little town had turned into a haven for the small businessman. The army was never called in to quell the resistance as the camp guards, in their fine new bespoke uniforms, kept curiously quiet about the situation.

With only two weeks left I reckoned I wouldn’t mind carrying about a backpack bursting at the seams, so I went crazy and bought a three-piece finest Italian cashmere suit (pronounced “syoot”, as the only class of people normally rich enough to afford such things do), a bog-standard tuxedo and four shirts, all for less than ninety pounds. As you can probably imagine, I am now making Sinatra look like a hobo.

Hoi An was pleasant, with a cool bar called Tam Tam, a restaurant that served 10p beer, and a nice beach nearby, but it was easy to run out of things to do so after three days I went to Nha Trang. Because Vietnam is so long and skinny, there is an unavoidable series of stops on the journey south. Nha Trang seemed at first to be the token Costa Del Sol/Surfers Paradise-style beach resort, with high-rise, high-price hotels, but I ended up staying for three days and I quite liked it. I think it was because of the multitude of bars and their crazy happy hours catering to people like me at an unavoidable stop. We (myself and Bhupen, from Bradford, with whom I travelled from Hue) also scored a cheap room, after visiting dozens of expensive places. And there was a fun boat trip to outlying islands with a floating bar and Rotorua-style international karaoke. There was also diving, but I never stayed sober enough to be okay to do it the following morning. I wouldn’t’ve minded going surfing again though, but, of course, Charlie don’t surf. I’ve been trying to cultivate a wild man of Borneo look for when I return in a week, but I had to maintain my level of decadence so I went for a cutthroat shave after three weeks of abstinence. It wasn’t too scary, except when he threw in an exfoliation (blimey, I almost put “defoliation”, which would’ve been a bit of a faux-pas here in post-Agent Orange Vietnam) and ran the razor around my eyes. I didn’t lose any blood, or organs, but my chin was possibly smoother than it’s been since I was ten.

I ended up staying an extra night because the Vietnamese’s week-long holiday was over, so the night bus to Saigon was full up. By the way, I put two and two together and realised that it’s automatically a Happy New Year, because it’s an excuse to jack up the prices. So yesterday, instead of wandering about Saigon (or perhaps going mad in my Saigon hotel room and breaking a mirror) I was stuck on a boiling 11 hour bus ride, with only the tiresome, derivative, straight-to-DVD foxy boxing Holly Valance vehicle, Dead Or Alive, my Conrad book, which I was trying to make last, and killing the scores of mosquitoes that entered the bus every time its doors opened to keep me sane.

Saigon’s alright, but it’s impossible to get a banana shake outside of the backpacker zone. The War Remnants Museum is excellent. So powerful that it’s kind of put me off firing a Kalashnikov at Cu Chi tomorrow, which I thought would have been the more tasteful place to do it, given that the Vietnam War was slightly better than the Pol Pot genocide, the Killing Fields being the other place one can play Soldiers with real guns. We’ll see.

Daniel Wilson Craw : 26 Feb 2007 13:53 |  Tags: Hoi An Nha Trang Saigon Tet Travel Vietnam |  Comments (1) |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem