Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Another big city, Saigon is the biggest located in the south. It is also newer than the capital Hanoi. They still don’t like each other but can’t really talk about it. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, two years after America left, Vietnam has been ruled by the Communist Party from the north. The south wasn’t happy to be defeated by the north and the north is very happy to have the south now too thus expanding their reach. Most people work for the government and you won’t get any information from them. The few that don’t work for the government, like tour guides for example, will talk, especially southerners. The government has their hand in everything and they don’t like it, especially email and Facebook. The Internet is heavily censored so they don’t see a lot of news, only select things. Plus they watch who they are friends with and what they are saying if they aren’t happy they will be called in. Most of the police are corrupt and the traffic police make a lot of money detaining people for bogus traffic offenses and since they usually have plans, they hold them a long time until they finally pay them to let them go. I am sure this is money that never gets reported to the government! Then when people warn others on Facebook about areas of these traffic stings, they are punished! If you noticed, the city is officially called Ho Chi Minh City because he was the leader of the north and who wanted to reunify the north and south under the Communist Government. Up north in Hanoi he is a hero, down south he is not but they have to pretend he is. They never wanted him or to change the name of the city, so they still call it Saigon. Up north and officially it is called Ho Chi Minh City. Our guide was amazing in the fact that at a lot of the tourist attractions, he skipped all of the HCM statues and propaganda films about how they won the war, and their defeat of America. He was just as unhappy with these tributes and monuments as we would be. The city is separated into districts similar to the way they do it in France with most of the tourist attractions in district 1. Mostly everything was in walking distance so it made things easy for us, especially in the heat. We took a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels and saw some of the tens of thousands of miles of tunnels in the area northwest of Saigon. The Viet Cong, or VC, were the Communist guerrillas from the north, who dug these tunnels and used them to their advantage against the better supplied American and south Vietnamese. It was amazing to see the tunnels and to try to imagine what it was like for our troops here in this brutally hot, humid jungle climate. The boys loved crawling through the tunnels, I found them a bit claustrophobic! Then when I saw 4 inch long millipedes all over I had no interest in any more tunnels!! Jeff had fun getting to shoot some of the guns used back then like the AK-47, wow was it loud!! We went out to the Chill Bar at the top of a high rise hotel and it was just beautiful! The skyline of Saigon is gorgeous and we had Martinis with a very clear view of the city. A great experience. Some typical tourist attractions to the gorgeous Post Office that looked like an opera house! Amazing architecture and beauty. Notre Dam cathedral is in the middle of the city and beautiful, most of the building materials were brought from France during their long occupation. They converted a lot of poor Vietnamese during the colonial era so you still have a small community of Roman Catholic Vietnamese. How does this work in a Communist government? They are free to choose their religions but they will never have jobs working for the government. The gates in front of the Reunification Palace are a very famous place in history. It is where the Northern tanks crashed through in 1975, two years after America withdrew. They weren’t able to compete with the north who was supplied by Russia and China and without our support anymore, the fell to the north and Communism. After spending a week in this country, I still feel like I am just skimming the surface of understanding the people and politics. There are still so many places we didn’t see in this large country that would allow more understanding. I would have to come back and see more of the central area and countryside. I am happy that the people we have spent time with have been very friendly and gracious.
