Well, we made it, we are in The 'Nam!
Took a murderous 15-hour flight to get us here, but we did it, dammit. Over the last couple of years of frequent coast-to-coast flying, I've sorta gotten my flying rituals into a nice little rhythm. Takeoff and climb to altitude. Then come peanuts and a drink, then a little TV, followed by dinner and a movie. If the movie was good I would watch it and we would be landing by the credit roll, or I would fall asleep and wake up as my ears popped from the changing pressure of final descent. Well, the same schedule holds true on the LAX to Hong Kong flight... you just have to be prepared to do the whole thing 4 or 5 times before you're done.
Which brings me to right now... sitting here on my bed at the Rex Hotel in downtown Ho Chi Minh City trying to stay awake for another six hours so that I can get my body onto a regular sleep schedule. But that's not the only issue that my travel-addled brain is struggling with. I'm also having quite a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the concept that we are actually IN Vietnam.
Now back to tales of culture shock. When
our virtually empty flight was on final approach into Saigon/HCMC this morning, we ran into some very heavy weather and weren't able to see the ground until we were at about 2000 feet, which is close enough to
see individual mopeds making their way along the roads of Saigon's suburbs. We broke through the clouds rather suddenly and I caught my first glimpse of the colorful houses, rice paddies, and muddy rivers that dot the deep green country-side that, up-to-now I'd seen only in those undercarriage-mounted rocket cams that recorded the hell raised by American air power in the war. I looked over at Mike and said, "Holy shit! That's Viet-freakin'-Nam down there man!"
And then we were on the ground. We had to fill out a dizzying array of threatening documents on our way in and, during final approach, we were warned that it is illegal to take pictures in or over Tan Son Nhat Airport... both the warning and the documents reminders that this is still a Communist country. These things fresh in my mind, I found our immigration agent intimidating, though Mike did not. Later, during our second round of tourist debriefings, where we were required to declare to a second military-uniformed agent things like cameras, recorded tapes, foreign cash, and any other "cultural items which might be contrary to 'Vietnamese morality'." In their defense, it really was a speedy procedure, but we did spend a lot of time worrying about the answers we were putting on our nerves-inducing forms before-hand.
Our fears were mostly unnecessary, but one slightly scary moment came when our declaration agent took our lists of "cultural items", including my copy of former Sec. of the Navy Jim Webb's novel on the Vietnam War and a couple of Hollywood movie scripts with ICM on the cover in gigantic, official-looking, blue letters, over to her surly supervisor just to make sure everything was copasetic. Apparently, it was.
Damn! It is really coming down out there. Quick anecdote to give you an idea of what rain is really like around here. While waiting in line at customs, I started to hear this bizarre sound. If you've ever been late to a sporting event and tried to figure out what was happening by listening to the waxing and waning roars of the crowd, then you are familiar with the sound we were hearing. Mike and I both realized at the same moment that what we were hearing was actually a thunderous rainstorm pounding the hell outta the tin roof of the main airport terminal. Awesome stuff. In fact, BBC World just reported that Tropical Storm 28W has, in just the last four days, dumped more than a third of the country's monthly average rainfall and is expected to cause the worst Mekong Delta flooding in decades. Great.
Two things the Vietnamese do well, rain and the "hard sell." We're still pretty fried, so we haven't done much yet beyond explore this historic, and pretty ritzy hotel. But we did get out and walk around for a couple hours this afternoon. First, we mastered the art of crossing the street. There aren't that many cars, but there are a staggering number of mopeds and bicycles. And few of them are respectful of traffic laws. Generally, folks seem to drive on the right, but not always, and street lights, when they exist at all, don't seem to mean much.
The act of crossing the street in HCMC is completely counterintuitive to the Western mind. What you do is pick you moment and just go. No running, just a slow, deliberate, non-varied pace. Drivers will find a way to miss you and you just have to trust that. Think of it as feeling The Force. If you lose the "feel", you run the risk of hesitation or panic, either of which could turn out to have deadly consequences. Our trick thus far has been, once that decision has been made to go, to try to ignore anything in our peripheral vision that moves. So far so good, though my brain still has trouble with the concept.
The locals want to sell us something. They really, really want to sell us something... anything! We've been hawked everything from live chickens and bunnies to eels, vast arrays of dried mystery meats, to marijuana, whores, "cyclo" tours of the city, and shoe shines, to one-dollar hammocks (down in the Hammock District, of course) and cheesy knock-off Nike T-shirts... and we've only been out on the streets for a total of about three hours. A man could get himself into quite a bit of trouble here if he really put his back into it.
(By the way, anything sound good to anybody? Adam, there's still time for me to run back and pick up a few live eels!)
Although we have yet to go more than about ten seconds without getting an aggressive sales pitch for some damn thing, it got particularly bad at the famous
Ben Thanh market. This is a large building, right up the street from our hotel, just jam-packed to the claustrophobia-point with stands selling everything mentioned above, plus a whole catalogue of oddities I couldn't even begin to classify. And some of these folks get aggressive enough to get in your way--or actually grab ahold of your arm--in an effort to slow you down as you pass their sale items.
Now, as the day winds down (we're crashing pretty hard now) a quick word about our way-too-luxurious hotel. The Rex Hotel is the famous hotel where US Military officers and journalists spent much of their time during the war, sitting at the rooftop bar watching LBJ's Rolling Thunder B-52's turn the countryside into a parking lot. We decided on the flight to Hong Kong that we would spend our first night at the Rex. It's a little more expensive--more in line with what we paid in Europe--than the 10-20 dollars a night we expect to pay from now on, but we figured it couldn't hurt to ease into the place a little bit. Well, during our negotiation, we were offered the regular double rate on an apartment with a kitchen if we would book for two nights, so we gave in... which is how we found ourselves in this room that is way too big, swanky, and well-appointed for our purposes, But that's OK, the robes look great on us dontcha think? The red really brings out my eyes.
Alright, goin' to bed... see ya tomorrow for the full-on, hard core HCMC tour.
PS - for those of you curious about such things, the first western fast food joint we saw was a KFC. Your guess on what the "C" stands for 'round here is at least as good as mine... and no, we did not stop for lunch.
