Saigon: The Official Report

Thursday Feb 3rd., 2011, 10:00 am, Phonm Phenh, Cambodia

Breakfast as usual.  Two eggs (fried), toast, bacon, sausage and a potato cake.  Strong coffee and juice.  When we bought our tickets to Saigon we decided to take the scenic boat voyage alond the Mekong River.  We were told it would be a four hour passage with a short bus ride to our final destination.  I paid for the tickets and we prepared for the trip the following day.


Friday Feb 4th., 2011, 11:30am.  Phonm Phenh, Cambodia

Arrived at the docks, left our bags with the caretaker and were escorted to a beautiful riverfront cafe for fresh shrimp spring rolls and juice.  Sad to be leaving Cambodia but the show must go on.

Friday Feb 4th., 2011, 12:00pm.  Phonm Phenh, Cambodia

Rushed onto the boat only to discover moments before taking off that our backpacks were exactly where we left them with the caretaker.  Back off the boat to get them ourselves.


Friday Feb 4th., 2011, 12:10-5:30pm.  Tonle Sap River heading towards the Mekong, Cambodia


Arrive in Chau Doc, Vietnam and are herded off the boat to get our Visa's stamped, welcomed to Socialist Vietnam and loaded into a fourteen passenger Toyota Van.  There are twenty-one of us with luggage.  We are all starving from the boat ride, in need of a bathroom (toilet paper not included when you find one) and a little tired.  Beautiful countryside with stilted homes made of tin or wood, fishing boats everywhere, children bathing and playing along the riverside, plenty of lush green rice fields and ox hard at work.  But I was talking about the van.

Friday Feb 4th., 2011, 5:45pm. Chau Doc, Vietnam

The road from Chau Doc to Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh as it is presently called) is a six hour journey through continuous bustling city streets.  At times paved but for the most part not.  There are four people in my row made for two and my knees are at my chest because under my feet is the mammoth bag of Linda Batista.  Our driver has chosen a soothing speed of 90 kilometer per hour (roughly 62 mph) to navigate us through the sea of motobikes, vendors, children and potholes.  Not to mention traditional bicycles, goats and ox.  Ok, I'll mention it.  We should have cracked an axel at least a dozen times.  You got to hand it to Toyota, they build a hell of a vehicle.  Despite everything I manage to fall asleep for brief moments only to be torn awake by the sound of my neck cracking as the van takes complete flight going over a bump, (or maybe it was a child, it's was dark and we were all to tired to care). 

Friday Feb 4th., 2011, 10:30pm.  Who Knows, Vietnam

Stop for food and a restroom.  What the fuck!  Did Linda use the last of my toilet paper? I quietly grab a dress out of her bag and head for the nearest hole in the ground.  Almost to hungry to eat but manage some pork and noodles in broth.  If I still drank I would have ordered a beer.  Instead I had two.  It's been eleven and a half hours since we left our hostel and we have no idea where we are or when this will end.  Our driver communicates only through the use of his horn and he has been talking to every driver and pedestrian since we left.  To us he has said nothing.  I'm coming back with a fog horn so I can reply in a language they all understand.


Friday Feb 4th., 2011, 11:30pm.  A corner in Saigon.  Population: 5.38 million

Arrive in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh, whatever the fuck you want to call it).  We have no idea where in this massive city we are and have not secured a hostel for the evening but we are glad to be out of that sardine box with a Toyota emblem on it and have both sandals planted firmly on the ground.  Still no sight of toilet paper but there is plenty of trash in the street that will work just fine.  I'm always touting the benefits of recycling right?  I suck down two cigarettes in rapid succession and lift our packs out of the van.  Linda's is covered in sandal prints.  Oh well.

Inventory:  Linda - One God awful 70 liter pack overstuffed weighing at least 49 lbs.  Two shoulder bags.   Me - One 40 liter pack weighing 29 lbs. (yes I weighed it before I left).  One day pack and one laptop.  Six bags between two people.

Friday Feb 4th., 201,1 4:30pm. Somewhere on the Mekong River before the Vietnam border

Notice my clever use of time reversal?  Just checking.

The Lonely Planet Shoestring Guide to South East Asia was revised in 2010.  If you flip to page 905 where it talks about Saigon there is a heading entitled Dangers and Annoyances.  As the sun was losing ground over the Mekong River and the Chinese New Year was reaching a feverish pitch, my feet were dangling over the back of the boat and I was thumbing through all the sights and activities we would soon be experiencing.  But this is what I read:

"The city has the most determined thieves in the country.  Drive-by 'cowboys'  on motobikes can steal bags off your arm and be gone before you ever notice."

Friday Feb 4th., 2011, 11:30pm.  Somewhere on a corner in Saigon, Vietnam

Being a communist country (or socialist as they prefer) even the great Saigon begins to shut down around 10:30pm.  There were no taxis, no Tuk-Tuks begging for our business or motobikes waiting to take us on a hair-raising ride where luck plays a very large part in our survival.  We were stranded, temporarily at least.

Saturday Feb 5th., 2011, 12:01am.  Same crappy corner in Saigon, Vietnam

A taxi approached and stopped on the corner of Ly Tu Trong and Trung Dinh.  I know this corner in the middle of nowhere now.  I will never forget it.  The trash on the street.  The small plastic chairs where some locals were sitting playing dominoes.  A neon sign across the alley is blinking and casting a blue and red hue on the street.  There are a few rats scurrying down a gutter, (really more a hole in the sidewalk).  I will never forget that corner, nor will I ever forget the force with which my arm was pulled from my shoulder.  I will ever forget the scream that escaped from Linda's gut as she realized what was happening, or the way time froze and I  locked eyes with the locals on the corner, vacant stares that showed neither compassion or anger, only transparency and recognition of the what had just taken place.

The motobike slipped away into the night, somewhere in Saigon.  He had my laptop and my U.S. Passport.  There was nothing I could do but watch it hang in his hand as he rounded the corner and disappeared.  I was left stairing at a red and blue neon light that said 'Crazy Girls' in English.  I was left with a pit in my stomach.  Lost in a communist country with no passport.  It is Chinese New Year and the U.S. Embassy won't be open for another five days.  Welcome to Vietnam.

A NATION REBUILDING

I don't remember my history like I should.  Cambodia was a country bordering Vietnam while I learned about the first war America ever lost.  Little was said about the Khmer Rouge.  Pol Pot was granted maybe a few pages in my high school books, compared to Hitler, and then passed on.  I will read more about this atrocity and the people who have overcome mass oppression and genocide.  Books like They Killed my Father and The Killing Fields I hope will broaden my understanding.  

     When the word genocide is used the Western world conjures up images of Hitler and the second World War.  We think of a time now long gone, indeed seventy years have passed since the Third Reich came to power and began to carry out there vision of the supreme race.  Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot came to power in 1975 when I was two years old.  My father came home from the war to my mother and his children. Life slowly carried on.  For Cambodia the nightmare was just beginning.  Pol Pot created the Khmer Rouge, a self developed metamorphosis of the Marxist ideology now known as extreme Maosim.  Under his rule the banks were destroyed, capitalism and any form of free trade other than agriculture ceased to exist.  Any man, woman or child with education be it of the scholarly nature, science, medicine, law, religion or philosophy were sent to re-education camps.  There they were tortured for confessions and immediately put to death.  Wearing glasses or speaking a foreign language was cause enough for execution.  It was a cleansing of a country few had even heard of in the western world and on a scale never seen before appropriated upon its own people by its own people.  Cambodia was transformed into a mass slave labor camp.  Bewilderingly the UN allowed the Khmer Rouge to occupy a seat at the UN General Assembly until 1991.  This meant the murderers represented their victims for twelve years.  Pol Pot died under house arrest in relative luxury and was cremated upon his death.  

     Why do I take so many pictures of young children here?  Every day I eat a meal or have a coffee I am out numbered by Cambodia's youth begging for money or selling black market items to tourists.  The Lonely Planet book I payed $29 for is a mere $3 here.  They speak better English than there parents and hold a glimmer of innocence mixed with a street smarts unparalleled.  They beg and play in the streets unaware of what their parents have endured in the last few decades.  If they still have parents.  The best estimates are that 1.7 million men, women and children were executed.  At the Killing Fields I saw a tree where children were taken by the legs and bashed upon the trunk in order to save bullets.  At S.21 which at one time was a high-school, an exercise post was used to draw people up until they lost consciousness.  Then putrid water was doused on their bodies to awaken them and the lashes would begin.  They were led to a cell, shackled to metal beds, tortured and killed.  I could see the blood stains on the yellow and white checkered flooring.  Meticulous documentation was taken of every person wiped out and the photos line the rooms and haunt you while you try and take it all in.  I couldn't bring myself to take pictures of some of what I saw.  
      In spite of this, under the thumb of such recent history, the Cambodian people have made the best of recent years and seem to be adapting and finding progress.  I am nothing but a tourist but I have never seen such warm and friendly people.  It is not uncommon to be stopped in a plaza and asked, "Where are you from?  How old are you?  How much money do you make?"  I have found myself watching the shadows change while I engage in lazy conversation over nothing in particular.  I'd like to think I am slowly gaining the right to call myself a world traveler, but I have never experienced anything quite as remarkable, quite as beautiful as I've witnessed here.  


      In all my adventures there is one consistent.  People don't generally like Americans or trust them.  From Peru to Baja Mexico, Bolivia, Thailand, Argentina, Chile, or Cambodia we are not always the beloved people we think we are.  Our government is meddlesome and manipulative.  We support whatever regime will keep our prices low meanwhile preaching from the mount about freedom and democracy.  Disagree?  Let me ask you this.  Do you think we were unaware of the atrocity taking place in Cambodia?  Or was it simply not profitable enough to get involved?  I don't have the answers to these questions but when an American gets outside their bubble, when they abandon FOX News and the Washington Post there seems to be an immense amount of data that is general knowledge to the rest of the world and simultaneously lacking in our own papers.  Who freed the Cambodians of Pol Pot?  The Vietnamese.  Remind me but weren't we at war with them?  

      I love my country and I defend it the best I can as an individual.  At times I get angry with the anti-american rhetoric but I politely listen.  Listen.  Listen, listen and listen more.  I think we Americans could do a lot more listening and less speaking.  I don't want to be forced to wear this, do you?  But are we really so far away from it?  Ideology is a powerful and persuasive tool.  The farther away I get from the America I love, the more I see how brainwashed we are by corporate advertising, poor food production, political injustices, lobbying powers and a general idea that our ignorance, not our thought is our freedom.