Today we left our hotel early and flew from Hue to Saigon. The official name of the city is Ho Chi Minh City, the name since unification in 1975, but the airport code is SGN. We’ve discovered that in the north almost everyone calls it HCM City; the older generation is more apt to call it Saigon while for the younger people, 20’s, 30’s 40’s, it’s definitely HCM. And sometimes people say Saigon because it’s shorter and easier than all the syllables of HCM. So really, I should say we are now in Ho Chi Minh City, a city with 24 numbered districts. The district numbers are frequently cited as in District X is where the government is headquartered and District Y is mostly residential with more cars than scooters. Over the years, communities were added to HCM City and given district numbers and some districts were re-combined or divided.
Our tour guide met us and our itinerary said we’d go to our hotel via the Cu Chi Tunnel. “Via” turned out to mean an hour and a half’s ride to the tunnel and after lunch and touring the complex, an hour and a half to the hotel. Our guide here, Huy, is very knowledgeable about the Vietnam War and gave us a comprehensive history lesson with precise dates on the way to the tunnel.
We had lunch at a lovely restaurant by the river with a pleasant breeze and watched the water hyacinths floating with the current. We felt like we were moving too!
This complex outside Saigon was where Vietnamese guerrilla fighters resisting the Americans lived, worked and holed up. They had bunkers for cooking, meetings, sewing uniforms, and making weapons. Underground is an extremely elaborate network of tunnels at three different depths–3 meters, 5-6 meters, and 9 meters with branches and arms, all designed to make it difficult for the enemy to find and attack them. We watched a video about life in the village before the war when the inhabitants cultivated fruit trees and tapped rubber trees, had a demonstration of how someone could easily get in and out of the tunnel without being detected, and were shown numerous examples of various traps designed to maim or kill unsuspecting soldiers.
And for those who were brave enough, it was possible to go down into one of the narrow dark tunnels and advance in it for some distance before surfacing. My spouse briefly went underground; I stayed topside. Today, this is a very peaceful spot, but the exhibits and the bunkers and tunnel remind one of how horrible and devastating war is no matter who is the enemy. In this case, we Americans were.
Our first glimpses of Saigon reveal it to be the most modern Vietnamese city we’ve yet seen. It stretches along a curve in the Saigon River and looks prosperous with skyscrapers, more businesses with English names, high end stores, even more motor scooters than Hanoi, and a bustling, urban sophistication. Here nearly all of the adults on scooters are wearing helmets (not so in the north), although I saw an occasional child riding with a parent and the adult had a helmet on, but not so the kid. Despite the humidity, those on scooters had long sleeves and some women were even wearing sweatshirts or jackets in addition to the very common face mask (for sun protection we were told).
But, these larger Vietnamese cities remain a study in contrasts; while there are beautiful shops and shiny new buildings, some life is still lived on the street, on the sidewalk. This was certainly true in Hanoi which had less evidence of the prosperity. Even here, I saw the low to the ground red or blue plastic chairs and tiny tables outside a storefront where residents could enjoy pho or noodles or coffee. While you could say that this is just their version of cafe society, and to some extent it is, it is more”down and dirty” that we would expect at home.
