“When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky”

-The Buddha

Sometimes you have to give up the illusion of control to the universe and cease the struggle against the currents we all float along in. Regardless of the provincial names we assign the forces that govern the current and tides in our lives, they are forces far greater than any among us could hope to comprehend. We suffer and hurt no more or less than we are meant to.

Perhaps in the end, the value and richness of our life isn’t determined by a net sum of our positive and negative experiences reconciled against one another to yield a “final accounting” of how good our lives were. Maybe the people who have the most of both overall should die the most satisfied.

Your heart, adrenal glands and tear ducts don’t know the difference between positive and negative stress; crying and trembling while your heart pounds because you just threw away the love of your life or because you just got the love of your life back. Our bodies don’t know one from the other. At the fundamental level of our physical existence, our autonomic functions, we experience emotion objectively, with no regard for its nature. The only thing our bodies respond to when we experience emotion is its intensity.

My studies up to this point dictate that the more spiritually engaged individual should follow suit, with detached gratitude for the highs and the lows. I know I will endeavor to do so.

My core spiritual value, as always is reinforced by this experience. Gratitude not for the way things unfolded from one moment to the next, relative to my fleeting desires and thoughts. Gratitude for the way things ultimately are: perfect. I will continue to laugh at the sky.

I don’t want to sleep tonight. I don’t want to be left alone with my thoughts.

If I slow down and turn the music off, the only thing left to listen to will be the ghosts of the day’s decisions. Inevitable though the ghosts are, their say is not welcome.

Ignoring them won’t do, of course. My nervous and endocrine systems won’t accept the denial and they will make me lightly sweat, squirm and shake all day just like they have been. My body will rightfully punish me with adrenaline dumping and cortisol saturation for my stubbornness and flight from reality. I will continue to ache and feel unrest, but I won’t have to open my mind to what’s going on and embrace the void that I created. Confronting this new truth will only hurt the parts of me with no cells to answer to.

It’s childish to run from a decision that I made. But I need to, for now.

Doing what has to be done doesn’t mean that it can’t hurt. A whole lot.

I wish that I were the only one who had to live with the decision.

Waking up on the last day of a vacation sucks.

But at least the sunburn was manageable this morning; sitting here in Saigon I only notice it now when I take my shirt on and off, or when I shoulder my backpack (AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH).

- Ann and I just barely got to breakfast on time, I demolished another pound of watermelon, pineapple and dragonfruit (my breakfast staples on this trip – dragonfruit’s unavailable in the US and is awesome) and walked back to the villa to pack. Ann and I went into the ocean one more time even though the resident off-shore wind continued to whip the water into an illogical, non-rhythmic frenzy and even though I was covered in sunburn. I’m glad I did because before this trip I had forgotten how much I like sea water; I kind of rediscovered a love for the ocean. We ate lunch by the resort beach wall and listened to the surf, 50 feet away and just out of view. It was time to go.
- I’m sitting at an overpriced cafe in Tan Nat Son Airport in Saigon after walking through an outer neighborhood of the city and having a final street-side pho dinner (ordered in Vietnamese that the proprietor actually understood!). It will take getting-used-to when I’m back in the US and meals cost more than $2.
- Catching up now on these journals to ensure I don’t surrender my memories to the passage of time. The vacation’s not over yet by any means; I will have a 10 hour layover in Tokyo to recount that hopefully will include real live sumo wrestling, real Japanese sushi, and more adventure. Oh, and 20+ hours of airports and planes before I get home.

Thoughts To Wrap Up Vietnam:
- It might be impossible to ignore the chaotic hodge-podge of Chinese, Buddhist, Cambodian and French Colonial influences that have swept over it in the last millenium, but this country definitely has a claim to a unique and vibrant culture. At first glance they seem dissonant. One looks at this society and sees an awkward country wearing strips with polka dots, but the mix is the message; Vietnam has taken colorful pieces of its many past trespassers and woven them into a daily energy and texture that I found myself appreciating and now already nostalgic for.
- If nothing else, tourists should be able to leave here appreciating the food. I’ll be spending more time at Eden Center after this trip.
- This will make one more country I’ve visited where people opened their doors and minds to me; when people say that the natives in “X” country are hospitable and nice, they are missing the bigger picture. PEOPLE are hospitable and nice until society or an urban urgency makes them otherwise. Everywhere. Israel and the Middle East, Spain, Africa, Canada, Asia. Communist, Capitalist, Fascist. Black, white, yellow. We are missing the point. People mean well and every new place I spend time confirms this.
- Beaches are special. For some reason I had almost given up on them. They suit me as a more reflective grown-up then they did as a high-schooler, I guess. Just wear sun-block.
- I’m getting addicted to travelling. I wonder how long it will be before I jump for another passport stamp.

These pictures are going to come together well, I think. There are still several to put together. I will do my best not to let them sit.

I’m going to discuss my time in Phu Quoc as a single blog entry – it runs together and weaves the same sentiments.

- Arriving on Friday was everything it needed to be, as discussed in the previous entry. Cassia Cottage demurred until the final moment when we walked past the reception pavilion and realized how personal and elite our venue was. There were two staff members for every guest, you could get a drink or meal served at any spot on the premises, and everybody knew which room you were in. It didn’t hurt that the beach was 70 feet from my bed and I could (and did) sit on the front porch at least once a day and watch/listen to the surf.
- Phu Quoc is usually in the “Top 5 Beaches on Earth” conversation for its combination of natural awesomeness and lack of commercial development. I would say it lived up to that in degrees. Friday night and Saturday morning were the best of the beach in terms of the ocean and time in the water. It was like being in a swimming pool; calm waters, as warm as the air. I spent half the time floating on my back and watching the clouds (really good ones, especially on Friday) and the other half diving along the bottom to hunt for hermit crabs and holding my breath competitively with Ann, Alex and Thao (I won with a self-impressed 2:27 underwater).
- We woke up to early morning rain on Saturday, but by the time we left the villa for breakfast, it had stopped and showed signs of clearing up. After eating heaps of fresh fruit with Kenyan Chai (my souvenir from Africa) we jumped eagerly into the ocean and proceeded to allow the sun to sneak out overhead during the 3 hours we were in the water. This proved to be a turning point in my beach experience, as I contracted a world-class unprotected sunburn on my whole back and calves.
- Skin warning me of unhappy times ahead but not yet critical, we rented scooters around noon and set out for a self-guided trek around the island. Yes, we wore helmets, and yes, I observed the most conservative interpretation of the absurd local road rules, but no; I don’t want to ride things with both a motor and 2 wheels at any other point in my life. Even after navigating fluidly through a couple of denser areas on the island, I can’t fathom how people do it in the surging tumult of Saigon’s streets. I can only assume that people do die and get maimed, and that these statistics go unpublished since nobody can afford a car anyway. We road South along shore road (all poorly maintained red dirt) with a brief stop at a pearl farm and around the South tip of the island in the village of Anh Thoi. Along this leg we got to look on across cottage properties and open swaths of sparse coconut palms at untouched stretches of beach and lazy, anchored fishing boats off shore. The wind was picking up and blowing off of the ocean across us. Anh Thoi has a chain of protruding smaller islands where the best snorkeling/diving is found, and we thought we might find a beach with a view of them; no such luck as development and fishing industry occupy the shore there. We turned the corner and proceeded up along the East coast of the island. The East side’s roads were paved but farther interior; our view now was of the island’s lush forests and ancient volcanic hills. We drove through small roadside outposts (food stalls and hammock bars), past small family homes with chickens and semi-wild Phu Quoc dogs laying around, past small peppercorn orchards and fishing villages in inlets. Though not having been there yet, I imagine the landscape of Phu Quoc’s interior to be somewhat similar to the Hawaiian islands. We ended our ride before returning the scooters in Duong Dong a couple clicks north of our resort. I was in town with a single mission: to find Banh Bao, steamed meat and quail-egg filled buns. We succeeded and they were awesome.
- Unforeseen benefit of the scooter ride: I extended the morning’s unwise sunburn to the tops of my legs, which laid unprotected in the sun for the 4-hour ride. Joy.
- By the time we left for the Duong Dong night market to eat dinner, I was getting a better idea of how unpleasant my folly would be. I had full-body chills and couldn’t put a shirt on without wincing. Apparently it was also a mistake to go the whole morning and scooter ride without drinking water. I was exhausted and an idiot. Dinner was amazing though. Fresh seafood from a street vendor with a seating area set up on the market’s main drag: grilled prawns (about 4 ounces each, seriously.), scallop kebabs, grilled squid, steamed snails and other Vietnamese delicacies for 8 people, to the point that everybody was stuffed full, all for $75 US. 8 people. That meal would have cost $45-$60 each in the states and we got it caught-that-afternoon fresh on 18″ stools on a sidewalk in Vietnam for $9 each. That’s what I’m talking about.
- I woke up Sunday morning really, really regretting the sunburn. This sentiment endured the whole day, spent in a mini-van on an “essential Phu Quoc tourist attractions” tour that lasted 8 hours. We saw a Phu Quoc museum with terrible but appreciated english translations on the wall plaques, another pearl farm, a peppercorn plantation that I bought the next 2 years of gourmet grinding peppercorns at for $5 US, a huge fish sauce (Nuouc Mam) distillery that smelled unforgettable, and spent lunch time lounging on Sao Beach, the icnonic white sand beach on the East side of the island. Bai Sao (Star Beach) would have been awesome, except that I had to wear a hat and a buttoned shirt the whole time, couldn’t go in the water, and wanted to sit in an ice bath. It was pretty though, and the spicy scallops were very very good.
- By Sunday morning the ocean on the west side (our side) of the island had given into the now constant 15 mph winds coming from the ocean; gone was the blanket of meditative, lapping water and here to stay was a choppier and less inviting Gulf of Thailand. Whatever, I was on the burn ward anyway and content to steal half hours where I could in the resort pool outside our villa to disperse some of the extra heat my lobster-red skin was producing. Sunday was the worst day of sunburn.

My time at Cassia Cottage was winding down and had been worth every minute; even if half of them were spent in tender, burning misery. I hope to go back to Phu Quoc and use more sunblock, earlier.

Drive Notes:
- We set out to drive south to Rac Gia, an oceanfront town from which we could catch a high-speed ferry to Phu Quoc island.
- The drive took us past Sam Mountain into a very different region – flat rice patties broken up by palm and banana covered hills with chalky white rock outcroppings. As in the rest of the delta, the roads were lined with homes, hammock bars and small villages. These communities had more dark-skinned Cambodian immigrants walking around, and more Cambodian buddhist temples with intricately detailed golden arches and spires – a departure from the distinctly Chinese pagoda style of the Vietnamese buddhist temples farther north.
- Almost the whole drive took us past a 500-year old canal called the “8,000 Days Canal” because it took that long to build by hand. Our guide communicated a great sense of pride that the Vietnamese have in works like this – they made their country fertile, all the while defending against invaders (more in the South than elsewhere, fighting the Funan, Chinese, Khmer, Champa, French and Cambodians again in order).
- I’ll say it again – it is crazy how deep the green color on the patties is.

Rac Gia Notes:
- We arrived in the southern coast town of Rac Gia to catch a ferry to the island of Phu Quoc (everybody’s final destination, I would be there for 4 days less than the others). Like most coastal towns, it has a huge market which we drove through, and a vibrant fishing industry.
- We waited in an improvised cafe on the side of the ferry station. This day in that cafe between a grill and large, bare concrete pad was the hottest time of my entire trip. Did I mention that Vietnam’s hot?
- The “Hydrofoil” was, indeed a high-speed ferry by nautical standards. Inside, it was a very close cousin of the Chinatown Bus of old as far as I’m concerned. Traits: 100 or more asians for every white person, salty looks from the locals, crowding combined with an un-American omission of climate control, a funny smell, and most classic of all, terrible asian low-fidelity movies playing on the tv’s. Whatever, it got us over about 100km of the Gulf of Thailand in an hour and a half, although I wouldn’t have minded a better view of the many islands we glimpsed out of the dirty, high windows en route.

Arrival Notes:
- Phu Quoc: as advertised. We got off the ferry and caught prearranged taxis across the island to Duong-Dong, the most developed town at the head of the largest beach/resort area on the west coast of Phu Quoc. At first I drew comparisons to Isla Roatan in Honduras – obvious natural beauty and typical poverty among natives in a locale with limited options outside of under-developed tourism. We didn’t really know what we had until we got to our home, Cassia Cottage. Until the last moment; Duong Dong turned out to be alot smaller than I expected as we drove through, the road turned to dirt 100 meters out of town, and the turn-off for Cassia Cottage, with no beach in site, was so steep and rough that the taxi high-centered for a second while scrambling onto the lane leading back to the resort.
- It was the most genuine and striking hideaway I’ve been treated to. After wondering for an hour what we were in for, we got out of the taxi in the middle of the dense tropical forest at a wrought-iron gate, walked through and were met with manicured grass and tropical trees, opening down a narrow walkway to a glaringly small collection of buildings and…the beach. We were greeted at reception with fruit and a briefing, then shown to our rooms – Beach House 1 and 2, flanking the pool, opening to the ocean. Wow. It took about 12 hours for the thought that I could watch the surf from the front porch to sink in. But I was ready to be here for the rest of my vacation, that is for sure.

Morning Notes:
- I was able to get up for the sunrise over Can Tho, which was awesome – fire orange and good cloud formation (lack of dramatic clouds can make the best possible colors and landscape boring. Clouds make it ‘pop’.). Once my lens stopped fogging up from the ridiculous humidity I think I got it.
- We headed up-river to Cai Rang, the biggest floating market in South Vietnam first thing. The mass of boats and activity on the water was really neat – no other way to explain it – just a sprawling network of boat “stores” with bamboo poles holding a sample of their produce up in the air like a billboard, and merchants going back and forth to prepare inventory for their street stands that day. I got my first impression here of the micro economy behind all the fresh produce. Our guide explained that even as we saw fruit on the boats, it was two or three degrees removed from the original farms where it was grown. The vietnamese are masters of wholesaling and bringing a product to end user and they do it with a smaller network – no storage depots, no tractor trailers or highways. From farmer to wholesaler to boat to street vendor to you. Everybody makes their cut.
- After Cai Rang we got back on the van for Chau Doc, the longest driving leg yet of our trip.

Afternoon Notes:
- Chau Doc’s a highly diverse town right on the historically contested Cambodian border. Smuggling here is a huge back-door economy as Cambodia’s tax structure is really weak compared to Vietnam’s and there were inumerable scooters driving away from the border with cartons of cigarettes loaded up on the back. Because of the location, Chau Doc has a large population of Khmer (cambodian) immigrants and also significant groups of ethnic Chinese and also Cham minorities. The Cham people are now a severe minority but represent the remnants of a civilization that was dominant in central and southern vietnam well into the thousand-year long occupation by the Chinese. After the Vietnamese rebelled and expanded their own kingdom into the South the systematically pushed out and compressed the Cham communities and they are now confined to small backwater villages.
- We headed out quickly from the hotel to check out a floating community outside of Chau Doc – these people all live in simple, small houses on floats in the river off of town and are exclusively fish farmers. Their homes sit on top of large underwater pens that maintain as many as 100,000 fish, used for their own food and sold to merchants for livelihood. You can’t grow rice from a floating house. Despite being told that this community was expanding, we noted a distinct sense of poverty among these people – they didn’t seem to care. It’s an interesting way to live.
- We stopped as well in a Cham village farther up-river. This setting was not unlike the tribal villages I saw in Kenya, with very simple housing – in this case on flood-conscious stilts – and dirt thoroughfares between homes. I got a little suckered and bought some souvenirs from them, but it WAS really cool to see a few girls working on looms across the “gift shop” under somebody’s house, making the same items. Maybe soccer isn’t the only international sport after all – boys in the village had a volleyball net set up and were playing an older kids vs younger kids match that was a bit one-sided but energetic. I’ve since seen a few nets up in yards along the canals. Another popular sport here is an asian version of hackeysack that uses some kind of plastic weight with feathers coming off of it.
- After we got back into town, we headed past the hotel to Sam Mountain, a spiritual site. The “mountain” is about is only about 600 feet tall, but it stands in the middle of a very flat area. It’s been a spiritual site for all of the populations in the area, with various shrines and temples at the base and on the hillsides. There is a tourist trap area at the base of the mountain centered around a large temple. It’s hard to define the faith here because there is a lot of folk tradition interwoven with confucianism, ancestor worship, and buddhism. We hitched rides on the back of local mopeds to top of the mountain, which I didn’t enjoy at all – as soon as we all got off the bikes Ann and Alex told me I was uncomfortable with my “gay moment” riding behind some Viet/Cambodian guy on the back of a bike. I was quick to correct them that it was a “not raised to use vehicles unfriendly towards my ability to walk upright” moment and I had never been on a motorcycle, moped, or even scooter. The meanest I’ver ever gotten was a Segway. At least they gave us helmets; I wouldn’t have been willing to go up without one. There’s not much more to say about Sam Mountain because we were kind of rushed – I’d have preferred to hike up and down, allowing time for reflection and maybe taking in some of the spiritual significance of the mountain. There were dozens of tombs and shrines on the drive up – like Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, people pay a lot to be dead somewhere important.

When we got back, Ann and I ended up sleeping all night. Not much to report but it was awesome. I have found on most long trips, especially with itinerary and schedules involved, that it’s worthwhile to push pause at some point and force yourself to slow down and rest. Could we have gone to dinner, drank and shot pool with our guide for a second night in a row? Yes. Might I have stood a chance this time? Unlikely. But sleeping was the pro move.

Morning Notes:
- I got up around 6:30 and walked up to street with local ease and a customary espresso with condensed milk and ice bought from the stall up the block. The streets were fluffy and inocuous now in daylight and I could wade through the scooters with my eyes closed at this point.
- I wanted tourist T-shirts and good candids of people around Ben Thang market (one of the largest in the city). I got .75 of those 2 things. Light was tough and the T-shirt booths weren’t fully deployed yet. Once one of them was, the grizzled 14-year-old proprietor used the early hour to give me a “morning price” 4 times higher than the one that had been too high the afternoon before. Sorry Miss Saigon, I’m leaving on the 8:30.
- We drove past old canals on the way out of town with groups of shanty houses dotting the sides of the water that we were told were being steadily displaced to gentrify the area. When the socialist (read: bottom 50 on the corruption report card of Human Rights Watch) governemtn owns the land your shack sits on and there is a 25-story condominium next door…you know you’re about to take on for the party.
- We also drove past Saigon’s “Chinatown” – apparently there are over 800,000 Chinese immigrants living down there – no idea why, it’s not exactly movin’ on up to East side.
- As we got out of the city into the agricultural areas, I got a better picture of the “real” South Vietnam. We started getting into the Mekong Delta proper, but the first few miles of rice patties we crossed were all dry, waiting for the rainy season (about three weeks out) to raise the river level and bring in the higher water table. Quick geography: the Mekong river is massive and flows through Saigon, all the way from the Himalayas in Tibet. Just south of the city it splits into five huge tributaries, which bleed into man-made canals, irrigation trenches and cappilary waterways – the result is a wet, nutrient rich delta area of maybe 300 square miles that is probably the most fertile region in Asia. Our guide mentioned around this time that the Chinese government has built several dams on the river within their borders in recent years to constrict water flow and generate hydroelectric power. Apparently they are building a really, really big one now that is expected to constrict the river’s flow enough to start messing with the delta’s crops. We take the increasingly dry summers in Virginia for granted because all it means for us is the inconvenience of yellow/brown lawns. Imagine your dick neighbors turning off the spigot to your country’s single largest export overnight. Everybody hates China.
- We passed before long into greener land as we started seeing planted rice patties and cruised through small villages hunkered onto the road. Most people had simple, two-room one story houses built with brick and stucco – there’s a lot of building going on. Where the houses weren’t right on the water or in the middle of the patties, you could see everybody’s front yard and all the side roads were lined with coconut, papaya, mango, jackfruit (massive green fruits that grow directly off of the trunk of the tree) and banana trees. It’s a little perverse of me to single this out given the differences in standard of living but the idea of being able to grow exotic fruit trees as easily as oak or maple in one’s yard makes me jealous as hell.
- They have an institution in the rural parts of Vietnam of bars that consist of huge, open tin-roof overhangs with rows of hammocks inside instead of chairs. You lie in a hammock and drink. How has this not caught on yet in the US? Solid gold.
- We came to Cai Be, a mid-size town where we got onto boats for a leg of our travel day.

Afternoon Notes:
- The boat ride from Cai Be to Vinh Long made a real impression on me that I am hoping will have been captured in the pictures. We got a look at the lives of thousands and thousands of people who depend on the many backwater rivers and canals of the delta. One group lives on the water permanently, in long shallow boats that work like a home office; a long, open cargo hold in the front that you take your fish or transported produce to the floating markets in, a rear canopy with a hammock in it to lie in while you steer or take a shift, and bunks below, perhaps with a stove. The other population of people lived in small villages and neighborhoods that dotted the banks of the waterways. I saw children playing in the yards opening to the water, bathing in the river, men working on their boats and loading goods off to friends on shore, and some people just getting through the day on hammocks under the jackfruit trees. It was a beautiful, simple setting to see – similar to the way our guide grew up.
- We came to Vinh Long, a larger and bustling town on a huge (maybe half-mile wide) tributary of the river that’s known for a sprawling market. Our guide and I looked first for a cobra to buy and eat later but the vendor didn’t have any King Cobras, which is pretty much the point. I’m hoping that another opportunity will present itself before the end of the trip. The array of unwelcome smells and sights that you get when you walk into a live market in Vietnam is something you can’t prepare for. I have never even thought about that many dried, pickled, live, fresh, salted, preserved, chopped or wriggling options for a squid. But they are all there. And stink. And people eat that shit. And like it.
- We got back into the van in Vinh Long to go the rest of the way to Can Tho. This leg of the drive featured some of the first sprawling views of rice patties on the trip – it’s awesome how solid green everything in the fields was.
- There’s a newly built, world-class suspension bridge right outside of Can Tho – really neat architecture from the Japanese. Vietnam’s growing pains continue – apparently 70something people were killed in a huge construction accident due to shoddy subcontracting by the Chinese firm hired to build the bridge – that shit doesn’t happen in the First World.

Evening Notes:
- Can Tho was an awesome town, and I knew it would be a highlight immediately. Sometimes on a trip you hit a point when you have everything clicking for good photography – good scenery in a diverse looking town on a busy riverside, a neat landscape feature in the bridge, and the rain we have seen on the way into town cleared up as soon as we arrived, leaving a dark sky with dramatic breaks of light. On top of that my hotel room opened right onto the river and bridge, and a rainbow formed next to the bridge 10 minutes after we walked in. Serendipity. The sunrise pictures the next morning were even better.
- Can Tho’s “action” is mostly along the river in kind of a strip that our hotel was at the top quarter of. Ann and I walked around before dinner and saw more of the neat scenes Can Tho had to offer – it’s not as packed to the gills with people and things as Saigon but still has over a million people. The streets weren’t as dirty but still had the character of neon lights and signs, busy low-lying markets spilling over the sidewalks and copious scooter traffic. Being on the water was pleasant- we only saw the Mekong River in Saigon for a minute.
- After an awesome dinner on the water with our guide and van driver, Ann, Alex, Thao, myself and our guide broke off from the adults to check out the nightlife in his hometown. The five of us piled onto a cyclo (moped with a carriage seat attached to the back, super safe) and sped down the main streets to Xe Loi, the numer one location in town. Xe Loi is a combination of a huge, well lit outdoor garden courtyard lined with big open porches that have lounge seats and pool tables. The second part of the club is the interior, a Vietnamese interpretation of “Western Stlye” which means all-wood interior to look more rugged, and a lot of scotch. Johnny Walker – from the bar to the ceiling along a 100-foot wall. Maybe a thousand bottles on display. There was also a house DJ pumping away already at 11pm. We got our drinks from the girls in wierd leather cowboy hats and got ourselves a pool table. A staff member stood by the table handed us the bridge, retrieved scratched balls for us, and racked each game. Service. Unfortunately the luxury of the atmosphere didn’t keep our guide from destroying me twice in a row. Apparently his 6 years of bartending in a Saigon pub counted for more than my two years of Fast Eddie’s in college.

Between the boat ride through the delta backwaters and the scene in Can Tho, I might even get a few pictures out of this trip. They will come – I’m behind on my journal and haven’t had time to sort pictures yet but I think I will when we are in Phu Quoc and itinerary-free for the final leg of my trip.

Cu Chi Notes:
- We had a 1.5 hour bus-ride to Cu Chi, a town about 60km NW of Saigon city limits. The scooters, believe it or not, were out.
- This was my first chance to “bond” with our guide. He speaks near flawless english with a UK accent thanks to his teachers. Unfortunately when the van’s full of Ann’s family he doesn’t use it and I don’t figure heavily into the conversation. After the slightly scathing experience of the Reunification Palace and War Remnants Museum I was very curious to learn a more honest perspective on how natives, particularly those born after the war (the vast majority of the country) felt about the war, the United States, and Communism. His thoughts came across as far more common sense-driven than the displays and “facts” I had been exposed to the day before.
- Vietnamese people, by and large, don’t care about Communism. They feel the same way most educated people do about it – great idea, and the movements have been founded by some very charismatic leaders but the result has sucked ass. Ho Chi Minh spoke 8 languages and spent the majority of his life travelling the world and becoming superbly cultured and educated. His party didn’t follow suit.
- He said this in a careful way before confiding that alot of common people don’t care for the Communist regime or the way things are run, but just like they did in the 1950′s, 1960′s, and 1970′s…if you become known as an open critic of them…they will make you disappear. His words. Sweet government.
- Also his words: “They just came in and took everything from everyone.” One way of making everyone equal and yourself more equal than everyone else.
- The Tunnels At Cu Chi – this is a network of tunnels that was a huge thorn in the side of the US military during all of Vietnam. We built a base on top of it and created an easy ambush situation for the VC. We placed strategic hamlets that were supposed to keep Vietnamese villagers away from the communists…on top of the tunnels. We blew up, burned, and defoliated every square foot of the region over the tunnels and still couldn’t figure the tunnels out. The Tet Offensive? Planned and launched from the Cu Chi tunnels. I’ll give them one thing after twenty years of digging and living in tunnels. That is some persistent shit.
- Part of the tunnel area has been preserved as a national park, to celebrate the heroic perseverance and ingenuity of the Vietnamese in defeating the American cowardly demons. There was a DVD presentation that was actually a propaganda film from the 1970′s. Literally. It was a good lesson in spin, but long story short the US bombing the tunnel area because the VC inside were killing us = cowardly and evil. The VC setting infectious and maiming traps, ambushing US soldiers from secret doors while they slept and killing hundreds of soldiers inside the tunnels = national heroes. The phrase “special award for killing American soldier” occurred at least 26 times. If I were any more glad to have sat through it I would actually be Ho Chi Minh.
- I crawled through a tunnel. The communists can have it.
- Lesson of the day: I’m not a Communist sympathizer. They actually totally piss me off. Totalitarianism and information-whoring, not so much.

Lunch Notes:
- We went back into town and straight to the family home of Ann’s Great Aunt for lunch – we had a lunch scheduled as part of the tour but Ann’s mom found out that the relatives were expecting the kids and it was important not to disappoint them.
- The hospitality they set forth from their 800 sq ft home without AC blew away any I have been shown in a mansion.
- I made friends with one relative who had a surprising grasp of English – way better than my Vietnamese. I might have been one of the only foreigners he had met.
- We ate Chinese spinach, garlic tofu (dau hu), pork puree (jaa) and fresh fruit with a load of rice and fish sauce (nuoc mam) – everybody kept looking at me to keep eating and minimize leftovers and I thought I was going to die but it all tasted awesome. Their dining area was a second floor “sunroom” that was completely open to the outside patio and had 4 fans in it. It was sunny out and we had shade but we could look out to the neighbor’s roofs and adjacent alleys. Don’t ever try to use a roadmap to find a residence in Saigon. Waste of time – folks around the corner from Ann’s relatives couldn’t tell us which way to go to find their house. Labyrinth. Second time in as many days that we got lost looking for a private address.
- Tiger Beer. 333 (Ba Ba Ba) is the leading export if that counts for much, but it’s a lot lighter (Greg and I found 333 in Chinatown, NYC before I knew). Tiger’s an awesome lager, somewhere between MGD and Yuengling. Most importantly, it’s Vietnamese. I do a couple with meals out here to keep up with her family.
- On our way out Ann’s relatives noticed me getting on my Fivefingers shoes. Pandemonium ensued in a language I don’t speak but they seemed to all want a pair. I think. They seemed positive about it.

Evening Notes:
- Ann and I got full-body massages offered at our hotel (not full-release, Greg) for $7 plus tip. Why not. That girl was 4’8″ with the hands of a professional arm wrestler. I found out from Ann’s mom at dinner (another happy customer) that they have a leasing agreement with the hotel whereby they get free food. We take these things for granted. Lease = food. We don’t have to do that math in the US.
- We slept through dinner and I went out for a photo walk around 11:30pm. Needless to say, in Saigon after dark I stick out like a sore thumb.
- Lesson #1: When a guy on a scooter or cyclo starts badgering you to offer directions/transportation/tours you wave him off because you don’t speak vietnamese and you keep walking briskly. Stop to have a conversation or hear him out and his friends will notice.
- Lesson #2: When you’re alone you check your 6 every 50 feet for lazy scooters.
- Lesson #3: Hookers offer combo-deals after 11pm.
- Lesson #4: The 5-star hotel across the street from yours has security guards and no, you can’t use the swimming pool even though you told them you were staying at a made-up room number and left your key upstairs.

I did get some cool pictures though. Patience Jeff.

Morning Notes:
- People here have a weird sense of nutrition/diet compared, with my practices anyway. Traditional breakfast can include pho (beef noodle soup), Vietnamese spring rolls with pork, grilled pork, fried rice, croissants with patte, and fresh fruit. All of those. I had a small omelet and a heap of fruit.
- We visited a well-known indoor market a half mile from the hotel. Fresh produce and seafood stalls with fish swimming in 20-gallon buckets and wriggling crabs packed into crates like video tapes, huge shrimp. There were also funkier local foods like dried shrimp, pickled/dried fish and meats, and pickled Cobra and Scorpions. In other aisles of the market were super dense rows of textiles, knick-knacks and tourist bait like t-shirts and myriad knock-offs. This place introduced some new smells that I didn’t need to know existed and teamed up with the heat to expose my lack of sleep and acclimatization to the air in the city. I had a headache and general unease following the market that is with me now, 12 hours later.
- Crossing the street in Saigon. Step #1: pray. Step #2 commit. Step #3 buy new pants. The leap of faith gets a lot easier once you realize the hundreds of honking scooters know you’re there and expect to have to weave around you. But the initial pucker factor is about 8.4.
- People in Vietnam don’t use full-size chairs. They sit on stools or chairs that are 8 inches off the ground – they eat in alleys next to food stalls using plastic chairs and tables of the kind that you and I would expect to host a 6-year old’s tea party. More common is the practice of simply squatting during conversation or repose. This must be a nation of excellent knees.
- I ate lunch at a restaurant that completely re-branded itself around a well documented visit from Bill Clinton in 2000. “Pho 2000 – Pho For The President”. Lots or round-eyes inside.

Propoganda Notes:
- The main event today was a van tour of the down-town sights including the Reunification Palace (Presidential residence during the South Vietnamese government and now ceremonial grounds/”We Kicked Their Ass” monument) and the War Remnants Museum (Propaganda Gallery).
- It’s easy to forget about the war and this being a communist country. Until you visit either of these venues.
- Reunification palace: The South Vietnamese Air Force Pilot who became a double agent and bombed South Vietnam’s “White House” with its own ordinance is considered a national hero by the Communist Regime. There’s a nice little gallery outside the bunker on the basement level that explains the US agression towards Vietnam during its struggle for self-determination. I’m not sure how our tour guide feels about this, or how anybody does. His words: “A lot of what we learned as children in this country was very one-sided” plus nervous laugh as he continued the rest of his tour.
- War Remnants Museum: Graphic photos of Vietnamese people affected directly by violence or especially US military misconduct. Graphic photos of babies affected by Agent Orange defoliation accompanied by captions alleging US malice and hopes that Agent Orange would harm people as a chemical weapon. Quotes from the US Declaration of Independence.

Let me just say this about propaganda, Communism, and the unexpected need to punch somebody about 20 minutes into the afternoon’s festivities. I’m not a Communist and I’m not Vietnamese. But mostly I’m not a blind consumer of obviously subjective information being foisted on me as cold hard fact. It’s annoying to me to be a member of a society that is being vilified by the Vietnamese communist regime. They tortured, assassinated, corrupted and tainted members of their population while all the while waging an intense war on the free flow of information to their constituency. They still do. Not that Americans have the moral high ground in this kind of discussion, but seriously. Fuck the Vietnamese communist regime and their “museums” full of misinformation and blatant lies. By tomorrow this segment of my trip will have concluded and I will be able to focus completely on the positive, interesting aspects of the culture and environment here. Rant over. More tomorrow, when I’ve returned from crawling in another “museum” made out of old Viet Cong tunnels (literally).

On a lighter note: people are all about their scooters here. Another thing that Vietnamese women are all about is avoiding a sun-tan. Seriously – it’s a residual custom from the days when being high-class meant you didn’t have to work outside in the sun. A lot of the women here believe they will be unattractive if they aren’t as pale as possible and combining that with the ubiquitous use of scooters gets you…

VIETNAMESE NINJAS!

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We ended the day with a treat – Ann’s father met up with a close childhood friend who’s remained in Saigon and we were all invited for dinner. It was really cool to get a look at how “real Vietnamese people” live and eat, and especially to share a meal. We ate a bunch of fried clams and “finger-nail” clams, and heaps of rice vermicelli with nuoc mam (fish sauce) and fried pork spring rolls. These folks are fairly well off in this culture, with a government job and owning their own property (a five story townhouse that would make plan inspectors in Arlington County shit their pants). I didn’t understand a word of most of the conversation being exchanged but I got my phrase of the day “This is amazing!” in at a good moment and made some friends. The 333 Beer and home-made wine helped the headache temporarily. We also got to go up on the roof where they have a patio. It was neat to see all of their split-ductless HVAC units and solar hot-water system – I was so inspired I gave him my business card. The guidebook said this is an act of endearment among the Vietnamese and should be done whenever possible. He didn’t seem to give a shit, but thanks for playing Lonely Planet.

Tomorrow we will explore the tunnels (and anti-American fact displays) of Cu Chi in the morning, walk around some more in town and experience “the number one buffet in Saigon” according to multiple sources. I’m also going to start my Malaria meds, which I have been putting off because of fears about side effects. Here’s wishing I don’t experience dizziness, excessive depression and anxiety or central nervous system damage!

Flight details – got to DCA at 5:00am, flew at 7AM. Got to JFK at 8AM, flew at 11AM. Got to Tokyo at 230PM (15 hours later), flew at 7PM. Got to Saigon at 11PM (6 hours later).

Main Flight Notes:
- Invest in a good neck pillow. I didn’t sleep much on the plane, but when I did I didn’t wake up sore.
- Don’t fly american on international flights if you can avoid it.
El Al (when I went to Israel) – free drinks, unlimited food, full accomodation, stewardesses A+.
British Airways (when I went to Europe) – free drinks, unlimited food, unlimited blankets/pillows, 20+ movies, stewardesses B.
KLM (when I went to Africa) – free drinks, unlimited food, unlimited blankets/pillows, 50+ movies, stewardesses A.

American Airlines – Drinks $7. 2 meals during a 15 hour flight. No extra blankets (50 degrees in my row). 18 movies, 2 worth watching, stewardesses C-.
- In-flight movies
Invictus – B+ – feel good but predictable. Without Morgan Freeman, C.
The Book Of Eli – B – good environment/mood but sparse on plot, crappy/hurried resolution.
- Al Green while flying – A+

Tokyo Layover Notes:
- Plastic food recreations outside of each food place at the terminal to show you the menu = AWESOME.
- The ground crew outside our flight stood at attention, saluted us and bowed as the plane pulled out. In the US they just flick you off and smoke.

Saigon Arrival Notes:
- Walk off the plane at 11PM and this is instantly the most humid place I have ever been.
- Hot scene – kids making out on parked scooters lining to city parks we drove past heading downtown.
- Warnings from every member of Ann’s family starting as soon as we get off the plane and issuing into the next morning that indicate they all see me as a stupid and imminently vulenerable American cowboy.

So far, I see a lot of interesting similarities between Saigon and Nairobi. Both are developing and expanding with an influx of new business and stability, but Saigon’s 20 years ahead of Nairobi and has several advantages being in Asia. Take the signs off of buildings and they would look like similar scenes. I don’t have a clear concept yet but I think that Nairobi’s huge bottom class (4 million plus shanty-town/slum outside of the city) is NOT mirrored here. There is a large lower class but they all seem to have a place in the city’s life, or at least all have scooters. Granted, a lot of the people in that category in Nairobi were refugees and there isn’t any ethnic cleansing or displacement going on here. Long story short, Saigon is benefiting from a much higher upside than Nairobi. As nice as it gets, Nairobi will still be the economic center of East Africa…

Going out shortly for a tour of the local semi-indoor market with a friend of Ann’s father, then a guided tour of downtown Saigon. More tonight.