Snacks & Hammocks: Welcome to Vietnam

Today we bid goodbye, Cambodia:

I was not sad to leave the dust and ever-present trash.

And said, Hello Saigon City, Vietnam:

This trash receptacle delighted me to the utmost, because a) it illustrates that trash receptacles EXIST in Vietnam, and b) someone took the time and energy to design this one to be especially pleasing. 

 

The beginning of this day and the end of this day have been incorrigibly noisy. Lay-DEE Elise and I woke this morning in the dusty hot city of Phnom Penh to the celebratory sounds of a wedding next door. At 5am. A wedding. Weddings in Cambodia are multi-day affairs set up under frilly pink tents with the women in their sparkly best and disconcertingly thick make-up, with music resounding across the streets. Guests come not for the ceremony (involving sundry rituals like holding swords and tying strings) but in-and-out for the next few days, mostly to eat and leave.

After our festive awakening, we rolled ourselves through the wet piles of anonymous trash in the market and found our bus, which would heft us through the unnecessary intensity of city riding and into the Vietnam city of Saigon. This bus was an "express luxury bus" and left only 12 minutes late, included a decidedly pleasant lack of endless spitting and smoking by the Bus Men, and provided us with little moist towelettes and a box each of baked goods. Simple happy pleasures.

Leaving Phnom Penh, we passed the Raksmay Drink Shop and Wall Paper Decoration (odd business combination, la?), the Do Do Internet, and the Willi Shop. On the 6 hour ride I read my guidebook about Vietnam History: the Le dynasty, the Tran dynasty, and then the Yawn, Dose, and Sleep dynasties. Then, reading about the American War in Vietnam I was appalled, saddened....and also amazed that I, as an American, could even come to Vietnam now, considering the horrors the US ravaged there. And everyone I've met so far, in this first day, has asked with curiosity where I'm from and then were all totally friendly.

Yes here we are, in Vietnam, in the city of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), the biggest city in southern Vietnam. And Lay-DEE Elise and I are wide-eyed, screeing, sighing happily, and pointing like small children. There are plantings here, in the margins of the roads: coiffed flowering trees, mowed greens. That people would take the time, the energy and resources, and organize themselves to create some beauty makes me feel more refreshed and lightened than I ever thought I could feel from something so simple. But after Cambodia, oh my: the contrast is astonishing. This city is inviting, chic, tidy. We passed through a market and I remarked to Elise, "let's just celebrate we're not walking through wads of trash right now." 

It is clean here, even in this sprawling traffic-choked city. Contrast this with Bangkok, similarly huge in Thailand, which was shrouded under visible smog. I stood outside the bus, like seeing color TV after black-and-white, and just looked at the air and sunlight. The whole lot was crisp. If I, for some inexplicable reason, began missing Cambodia, I could stand behind a bus exhaust pipe and feel back there again. Air cannot seem crisp until you've seen it dull and thick.

Our bus ride continued through the Mekong River Delta, a river as important as the Nile in southeast Asia. 55 million people make their livelihoods from her. Rice glowed green here; convincing me 'might still glow in the dark. In Vietnam the rice fields were cultivated with tractors, not bullocks.

The border crossing was uneventful, although we did have to put all our luggage through a scanner in the customs building. Although Mr. Scanner didn't even seem to be paying attention to his machine. The Welcome to Vietnam sign of fading paint and half-covered by exuberant vines confirmed we were done and gone from Cambodia. More promising than the Welcome Sign was driving past the legions of snack stands set up next to hammocks strung under roofs. Hammocks instead of chairs! I can't wait to tire myself from bicycling and avail myself of these.

..............

And the end of this day as I said was also noisy: I sit near the front desk of our hotel in Saigon writing this. Across the street is a blasting dark club; when the hotel door opens the music from the club floods in a deafening wave. This city is pulsating with blinking lights, pumping music, schmancy shopping, people dressed intimidatingly sharp, and palm-dripping traffic.

This also is in contrast to the city we just left, the capitol of Cambodia, with dusty people wearing pajamas tiredly pedaling creaking bicycles. There was, of course, commerce and growth and cell-phone billboards happening in Phnom Penh too, but not at all to this extent. I'm in Saigon, Vietnam but this could be Toronto. Except for all the motor bikes.

Swarms of them. Like wasps. Buzzing, diving, zooming. As a bicycler on these city roads I am at an absolute minority. Motor bikes zoom at me from the left, right, straight forwards wrong way in the lane. You cannot wait for a space in them to cross a street or turn left. You'd wait forever. They take up 3 lanes of traffic on the big roads. All you can do is take a deep breath and willingly release yourself into the swarm. The trick is to go steadily so the buggers can dodge and bend around you as you plunge forward.

At least they're not trucks.

I am eager to explore Vietnam!