Ho Chi Minh City

Day 17 – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

First, nothing says dehydration more than drinking 1.5 litre in less than an hour. Go me.

I started my quiet day by waking to a park with the intention of finding a congenial bench and reading a bit in the shade. (Today was almost sunny.) That’s the picture above.

Apparently, congeniality was what I exuded, because a charming Vietnamese lady came to ask me if we could talk so she could practice her English skills (does that ring a bell to anyone?) As it was difficult to refuse such a nice young-looking woman, I accepted, and three of her friends soon joined us to benefit from the talking session.

We talked for almost 2 hours before they had to go, regularly checked that they weren’t bothering me, and offered me a bit of lunch from a street cart because I said that I hadn’t tried one yet. It was a kind of salad, with what I guess from the size were quail eggs, rice paper, strange unidentified leaves (coriander, maybe?), peanut, dried shrimp, dried onion, orange juice, and spices! I gamely eat while we talked spices and food.

That’s when I started regretting not having water with me.

One Starbucks stop later, I enjoyed a second park, on my way to the War Remnant Museum.

It’s not an easy museum. Of course, the part about the “truths of history” is difficult to follow without thinking that it must be biased: the victors write history, after all. But how much is difficult to know. And at least it provides a timeline, from the French war to the American intervention.

The part about the Agent Orange is of course a lot harder, with pictures of the next generation of children born with deformities gruelling.

My favourite part was the exhibit of pictures from photojournalists, photos often recovered after the death of the photograph. It takes the visitor from black&white pictures to colour ones, shows scenes from both sides, as the exhibit includes journalists from both sides of the conflict, and though there are pictures of death and horrors, some were snapped at kinder moments.

The rest of the exhibits are weapons, a mock-up of cells and description of tortures methods under the French rule (yummy), and a documentary of efforts made to find unexploded ordinance, mines, and rehabilitate areas poisoned by the dioxin of the Agent Orange.

It leaves one with a difficult state of mind. But that might be the aforementioned dehydration, too.

So I came back to the hostel, buying a few litres of drinks on the way, and I have almost finished drinking it.

Tomorrow, I take a plane to Da Nang (after due calculation of the advantages of train -16h, € 50- versus plane -1:20h, € 73-), from which I can reach Hoi An, with a World Heritage old town, Hue, which used to be the capital of the country in the 19th century, and the Bach Ma National Park. There are also beaches.

The hostel I’m staying has capsule beds. It looks amazing, I’ll have to document the experience!