Thursday, October 13th 2011

Sooo today was by far the slowest day we’ve had in Vietnam. It might not make for the best blog entry of all time but we definitely needed a break.
We were supposed to leave for the Cu Chi tunnels this morning, but after a late night and two weeks of continuous travel I called the front desk at 7:30 in the morning and asked if we could postpone our trip a day.
We fell back asleep and were awoken around noon by driving rain that was being swept past our window by monsoon-like winds. We were on one of the top floors and it felt like the wall behind our beds was a centimeter thick – seems we heard every drop of rain that hit our building.
At 1:00 we wandered down looking for street food for breakfast – got a baguette, pho and some coffee. Wandered back up to the room.
We finally dragged ourselves out of the room at 2:00 and walked to the Reunification Palace. The reunification palace was originally designed for the French colonialists in the 1800’s. In 1954 when the French were driven from Vietnam the property was seized by the Vietnamese and renamed ‘Independence Hall’ in honor of their revolt against colonial rule. The building was almost completely destroyed when a rogue South Vietnamese pilot tried to kill the South Vietnamese president in the late 1950’s. It was rebuilt and served as the command center and presidential living space during the Vietnam War.
The building is a huge attraction because in the memory of many people it’s the spot where the Vietnam War ended, in dramatic fashion, when on April 30th, 1975 two North Vietnamese tanks burst through the outer fence. When the Viet Cong reached the South Vietnamese president the president said (and I paraphrase), ‘I am ready to hand over power.’ To which the VC tank officer replied, ‘You cannot hand over what you do not possess.’
Zinger!
The building was left basically as it was on April 30th 1975. Ho Chi Minh wanted it to become a permanent memorial to the naiveté of the southern Vietnamese forces. All the maps, the radio and communication equipment, the desks and the meetings rooms scattered with data were still there as they were forty years ago.
The building itself was interesting, but for me it was more fascinating to imagine the frenzied, late-night conversations that took place in the war rooms – South Vietnamese commanders frantically trying to stem the impetuous march of the VC towards Saigon, fleeing from the building as the guerillas were only blocks away.
If only these walls could talk…
After spending close to two hours in the building we went to a café for some well-deserved iced coffee. Then we walked to the US consulate (which is located next to the French consulate. Hmm…put the two countries that committed the worst atrocities in the last century right next to each other…kind of like making the unpopular kids sit together in the lunch room).
Afterwards we walked to the Caravelle Hotel which is pseudo-famous in Saigon because its where all the foreign news correspondents stayed during the Vietnam war. Again, it was interesting to think what the scene in the hotel must have been like during the war, especially during the last few days when many foreign correspondents and journalists had to be rushed out of the country via helicopter.
Sitting on the roof of the Caravelle we gazed into the nighttime horizon of Saigon. Saigon is so well developed that we could have just as easily been sitting at a rooftop bar in Manhattan; before us stretched high-end retail stores, modern skyscrapers, cranes arching into the sky, the endless fusillade of lights folding softly in the darkness of the distance, cars honking busily below. The bar itself was trendy and we were drinking American spirits listening to American music.
I don’t remember who said it, but if the war was fought so Vietnam could retain its communist / socialist bend…it looks like they failed. Saigon is as decidedly capitalist as any other I’ve traveled to. Granted I don’t know the inner workings of government / economy, but it has the same feeling as the capitalistic cities I’m accustomed to (Bucharest and Constanta in Romania, and Nessabaum in Bulgaria, for example, don’t have capitalistic feels to them).
Even though we had a relatively slow day we were still pretty exhausted. We walked back towards our hotel, got street noodles, got a drink at a bar with a great jam band and passed out.