Southern Starting Point: Saigon

Expectations were low for Saigon (aka, Ho Chi Minh City, HCMC). I hadn't heard good things; most of them warnings about savvy thieves on motorcycles cutting the straps of tourists' backpacks as they whizzed by them. But our thirty or so hours there were wisely spent and we enjoyed leg one of the trip.

We walked by Notre Dame Cathedral and a vintage post office on our way to the War Remnants Museum. American war planes and tanks (Vietnamese trophies?) were this museum's garden sculptures, encircling two sides of the plain, open-air building. Its third side was a replica of prisoners' living quarters and torture chamber, a foreshadow of the other horrors that waited to be detailed inside. The first floor covered the protests of Americans and other nationals against the U.S. Government, while the next ones documented the atrocities of the war with photographs of the maimed, the tortured, and those born with birth defects caused by the use of defoliants (chemicals like Agent Orange). By the end of it, I couldn't bear to look at another picture or read another description. Yes, the museum was terribly biased and propagandist, but I left the place feeling sick to my stomach and hoping that if I had been a child of the 60s I, too, would have stood up against such inhumanity.

One of the less horrific photographs, but just as heartbreaking, I think. 

The next tourist spot was less brutal -- the Reunification Palace, which housed the president of South Vietnam. It was a walk back in time to 1975 when communist tanks crashed through palace gates, seeing Saigon surrender to the North. The building was left just as it looked on that day.

We ended our stay in HCMC with a food tour led by two college students employed by Tiger Tours. With Mike on the back on one motorcycle and me on the other (!), we rode with them to four different spots in the city (don't worry, Mom, we wore helmets). Details coming tomorrow for Fatty Tuesday.

A flower market pit stop during the food tour