3am is not a great time to be waking up on a train.
At least the station wasn’t very crowded, although the train seemed to have arrived early because there was an Intrepid bus coming to get us, but we waited maybe 15 minutes for it to come along. At the hotel we only had a luggage room booked but they happened to have one with two beds in it; a queen size and a king single. So it seemed fair that we take the narrower bed, and Adam and Catherine (who are siblings) should have the wider one. Tuan had his own room which apparently smelled strongly of smoke.
Then we all went back to sleep, and woke up at about 8am in my case and 9am in everyone else’s. The standard joke was: ‘I had the worts dream that we were on this train somewhere, and for no reason everything was new..’ In room 303 we had a balcony so I sat myself down out there and read a book for a while, then took some pictures of people doing all kinds of business and leisure on the footpath. Something that I didn’t see or understand happened, and then two young men rapidly picked and moved four motorbikes from the footpath back into the shop, and five minutes later moved them out again, while the shop owner stood against the door frame, smoking, and impassive.
I did go down and walk around the block looking for a bakery, but I could only find motorbike shops on both sides of the street where our hotel was, and around the block only laundries or shorts shops and various species of other inedible items, and cyclo drivers that follow you for about two hundred metres suggesting places you might like to go, but don’t.
With a sense of foreboding I had to go upstairs and deliver the bad news: ‘If anyone wants to buy a motorbike or scooter, I’m sorry, but there are no motorbike shops anywhere in this street.’ Soon enough everyone came to feel that they were halfway awake, and we split up to go and find breakfast. On Tuan’s recommedation we walked ourselves about 10 minutes across the city to a street called Pham Ngu Lao, where there were, as promised, lots of restaurants and tour-booking places and other things that backpackers might be interested in. One fabulous omelette and coffee later, we were feeling 100% better about things and about the world, and returned to the hotel where we were allocated Room 601.
Which smelled badly of paint.
Just the same we had a shower and tidied ourselves up and set about checking email etc. while waiting for our cyclo tour of Saigon at 2pm, when it proved to be a nice temperature for sitting still in the wheeley-chair instead of even contemplating walking around. It was definitely too warm for contemplating walking around. We rode first down our street (Ly Tu Trong) and then took a right past the Ben Thanh market, which is a large white building housing a permanent daily market. There is a large roundabout there with a statue, around which we rolled before exiting down Le Loi, which takes you past the Saigon Centre (a shopping and office building), as well as the Opera House and a large billboard ad for toothpaste which is built in three dimensions so that the toothpaste as actually being squeezed out of the tube. And some hotels which had no significance at the time but which I discovered (from Alice) later were places where Journalists and other foreign Americans used to hang out during the Viet Nam police action.
Motorcycles swarmed left and right.
We plodded along to the Notre Dame cathedral and the Central Post Office, across the road from each other and examples of good things the French did in Viet Nam. Notre Dame is similar to the one in Paris but far less ornate in the intricacy of carvings and reliefs on the outside walls. We didn’t go inside so I can’t tell you if the inside compares to the real deal. The Post Office is a post office but still quite nice while it’s at it, nice windows, nice lighting and a big picture of Uncle Ho. That sort of thing.
Around a couple more blocks we wheeled on past the Reunification Palace and then around the corner to the War Remnants museum. It was 3pm and we had an hour to look around the place. I had been warned that some of the pictures were reasonably graphic – e.g. results of agent orange, results of land mines and aerial bombings – and indeed they were, but then some of the things that happened were quite unpleasant, so I guess that’s just how it is. They also had the grace to include a rather nice photo exhibition of pictures loosely under the category ‘Viet Nam war’, and also under the category ‘Viet Nam’, and then finally a small exhibition covering protests against the Viet Nam war in many countries including Russia and even Argentina. There were even some old framed newspaper stories about US pilots who refused to fly more missions and suchlike. But they didn’t miss the chance to parade to evils of the South Vietnamese government that ‘existed’ until 1975.
Then we trundled on back to the hotel, paid the cyclo riders and went upstairs to kick around for a short while before dinner @ 6.30pm. As the sun went down I couldn’t resist going to photo some photos of the absurdly manic roundabout just up Ly Tu Trong. The statue in the middle is not actually of Ly Tu Trong (his is in Hanoi next to the West Lake); I forget whose it is but there is a photo in a later day’s collection than this which includes the name.
Since our tour the Ben Thanh market had been transformed slightly; on a short but wide street they had set up rows of marquee tents, under which food-related commerce ensured. In one of the establishments I had a beer and a fried rice with egg, which I greatly enjoyed, while Alice waited around for her roof tile to warm up. When it warmed up she cooked beef on it, rolled it in rice paper with some various greens, and enjoyed it greatly.
The inside and permanent part of the markets had closed, but outside there were still many kinds of stalls in operation so we had a look through those and then wandered down Le Loi where we discovered a gallery exhibiting old propaganda posters, framed in small and large formats. Some of them – I’m thinking particularly one labelled ‘Nixon will pay with blood for our blood’ – wouldn’t look great on the walls, but some of them were absolutely brilliant as artworks; you can see why they would have been effective propaganda.
And then we returned to our chamber of paint fumes, to dream surprisingly non-electric dreams.
