War Remnants Museum and Cu Chi Tunnels

I am a small guy. I'm not afraid to admit it and anyone who has seen our wedding pictures would certainly agree. And in addition to all those great games of hide and go seek I used to win as a kid, it finally came in handy today. Holly and I visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, an area 70 km north of Saigon that was a major staging ground for attacks into South Vietnam. It is a 200 km network of tunnels that served as homes, factories and fighting grounds for the Vietnamese through their wars with the French and the Americans. There was even a nursery where babies were born, all 10 to 30 meters underground. I used to think that most Vietnamese were just small. But now I know that we are small AND crazy.

I was the first to volunteer in the one authentic tunnel that tourists are allowed to use. Let's just say that there wasn't a lot of room between me and the bats. To give you a sense, I'm 5 foot 4, and I was on my hands and knees with not much room to spare. Reminded me of my first apartment in Athens. In contrast, Holly had to bail after 15 meters in the tunnel that was widened and lit for tourists.

We also saw exactly what a B-52 shell can do the ground that it hits. Big....damn....crater. Our tour guide also showed us the ingeniously devilish booby traps made by the Viet Cong. Very sharp objects. I also got to shoot an AK-47 for 1 US dollar a round. Let's just say that we left the tunnels with the knowledge that humans can be especially inventive when thinking about ways to kill one another.

Exhibit Two in this case: War Remnants Museum. Blatant Anti-American propaganda mixed in with genuine, sincere, and grotesque demonstrations of how bad war really is for everyone involved. Through a partnership with the Commonwealth of Kentucky (not kidding), pictures of Agent Orange and napalm victims were juxtaposed with images of dying and wounded American and Vietnamese GI's, to be gazed on by silent witnesses 40 years removed.

Take away message: War is bad. Fried chicken is good.

The Seventeen Saloon

After a hard day of riding a hot bus and hot ferry boats back from the Mekong Delta, Doannie and I needed a cold beer and a comfortable place to hang our hats. What better place than the Seventeen Saloon, a western-themed bar complete with Vietnamese dressed in cowboy outfits and walls adorned with the headdresses of American Indians and some oddly misplaced paintings of Mardi Gras. After getting used to paying only 75 cents for a beer, the asking price of $5 for the local brew on draft was a bit shocking. But when the entertainment came on stage, it quickly became evident that it was worth every penny.


For anyone with me in Thailand in the spring of 1999, let's just say that this place gave the Thai Cowboy in Chaing Mai and the performers in Assless chaps singing "Country roads take me home" in Bangkok a run for their money. What we got was not rockabilly or sounds from the heartland, but rather a metal band with a bit of Bon Jovi thrown in. This was made all the more surreal by the fact that the band was wearing "40 Watt" T-shirts from Athens, Georgia and the debut of coordinated thrashing hair routines. During the instrumental portions of each song, the 3 scantily clad backup singers AND the male lead would launch into highly syncronized gyrations of their long locks. Please see attached video - words do not do it justice.

Arrived safely in Vietnam! + First Day

Welcome to our Vietnam trip blog! We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City safely on Tuesday evening and were quickly welcomed by the hustle and bustle of this crazy town.

We spent yesterday getting our bearings and visiting the VCHAP (Vietnam-CDC-Harvard Medical School AIDS Partnership) Clinic in District 5 of Saigon. We meet with their staff and saw three HIV case presentations, and in doing so, discovered a gap in our respective strengths. I know more Vietnamese than Holly, and she likewise knows more medicine, but my already tenuous ability to piece together meaning starts to break down when words like "Zidovudine" are thrown in there. The situation was made all the more difficult by the presence of Dr. Donn Colby, Medical Director of VCHAP-HCMC, who speaks Vietnamese as fluently as the guy that sold you pho at the street corner. Only he also knows the medicine.

From the Infectious Disease Hospital, we went to the Jade Emperor Pagoda, expecting to see a tourist-oriented, grand and ancient spectacle of a temple. Unexpectedly, but not unpleasantly, we instead found ourselves visiting a quiet, somewhat-shabby, but serene place of worship for the Buddhists of Ho Chi Minh City. We were some of the few tourists tip-toeing around people prostrating themselves before altars, suffused with the smell of the incense placed by worshippers going about their daily prayers and meditations. Turtles big and small splashed obliviously around the moat that surrounded the pagoda, symbols of good luck and fortune. Then the torrential rains came, reminding us that for all of the urbanity of HCMC, we were still essentially in the middle of a coastal jungle.

We decided to make the long walk that transects three of Saigon's 10 Districts back to our hotel. We saw huge differences in wealth, cleanliness and western influence, moving between streets with classic Vietnamese sidewalk food for sale from carts, to high-end shopping streets with young professionals and French pastry shops. We saw the pagodas and rickety shanty huts of Saigon's massive underclass and the huge French colonial buildings that still held the seats of the city's power. But most of all, we saw the scooters of Ho Chi Minh City.

Honda must do brisk scooter business here in Saigon, because you cannot turn a corner without seeing about 800 of the loud two-wheelers buzzing around you like a school of fish. Nor should you turn a corner without looking both ways ten times with three Hail Mary's thrown in for good measure. Only through the powers of divine intervention and Matrix-like bullet dodging do the people of this city survive unscathed. Scooters dip and dive between taxis, zip around pedestrians, plow up onto sidewalks in droves during rush hour. Seriously, the margins of clearance between people, cars, and scooters cannot be more than a few centimeters, and although I'm glad that all scooterers wear helmets, walking in this city makes me want to have a riot shield and a baseball bat.

Holly holds my hand like a small child and is afraid.