On the 12th of November we made a short list of the remaining things we wanted to see in Saigon and took ourselves out walking to see them.
The fried egg lady, and her close associate the iced coffee lady, were conspicuously absent. Over at Pham Ngu Lao we found that one of the restaurants was offering fried eggs with baked beans and that was a very easy decision to make. The idea was that we would wake back towards the riverside to find one of the banks around there who would be able to cash our traveller’s cheques for Cambodia, and then we would North and go to see the Reunification Palace, then further North and East to the Jade Emperor Pagoda, which was near the Binh Soup Shop – a headquarters for VC and NVLA infiltration into Saigon – and finally given time we would walk back the slightly long way and see the Xa Loi pagoda.
After Thich Quang Duc died, he was wrapped in robes by monks and taken to the Xa Loi pagoda; we did have a look and see if we could see the famed intersection on the map but it too, was conspicuously absent. And it wouldn’t have been a very tasteful thing to go and see, I guess.
In other news today was a month until my birthday! Hooray!
From Pham Ngu Lao you take yourself back along to Le Lai and walk down that way toward the river, through some footpaths undergoing major reconstruction, and into several banks who either weren’t open between 12pm and 1pm, or weren’t able to change denominations of travellers cheques larger than $200 USD, or sometimes one and then the other. Or they wouldn’t change more than $500 per person per day. And both of the cheques we had ready to go had my signature on them. And Alice, accordingly, hadn’t bought her passport. It didn’t matter all that much, except for the time we wasted walking around, because $500 was enough for the local payment to Intrepid for our Cambodia trip, and that’s what we were trying to get organised.
Cash in hand (well, in money belt…) we walked back up Nguyen Due, past the monument of Ho Chi Minh holding a small girl, and then through some glitzy shopping type streets to the Reunification Palace and the shady park across the road from the same. It didn’t feel that hot but we did feel like we were really taking a beating, so we sat in the shade for 15 minutes drinking water, and bought some coconut-y jelly sweets from a lady wheeling stuff around in a glass case on the back of a bicycle. The Reunification Palace didn’t reopen until 1pm anyway, and a small line had formed in advance, so there was no rush whatsoever.
We were delighted to find that the Palace offers free guided English-language tours, and after reflecting on how much fun it would have been to bust a tank through the front gates and declare the war to be over, we joined the tour and were shown just about everything worthy of interest. The first was the reception room, where the South Vietnamese ‘government’ sat on the 17th of April 1975, waiting for thee tanks to come on through so that they could pretend to hand over power in a dignified fashion. However the Colonel who led the troops into the Palace cut the little speech short by saying that they could not cede what they did not have.
Ooohh… Burn on that old government…
That same room now houses a golden statue of Ho Chi Minh.
From there we looked at the offices and state reception rooms, and then went up onto the second floor where there was a small interior courtyard, a pool table, and a movie theatre, and also ballrooms and space for the President’s wife to hang out. These rooms could best be described as plush, but not ornate. Huge ceilings, nice carpets, lovely furniture and so forth, but more austere in the layout; none of the ridiculous opulence we saw in the Napoleon suite of rooms in the Louvre.
But what was really interesting was all the communications rooms and command rooms on the third floor, with their maps and official-looking desks and multiple telephones. Also hidden in one of the corners up there was a library, which is of course enclosed behind a velvet rope at the present moment. On the roof there was a helicopter landing pad, so that Ngo Dinh Diem could make a quick escape when necessary; a few times before 1963 he came under attack from his own armed forces, who were either trying to kill him because they didn’t like him very much, or even sometimes because they were trying to do something more systematic like staging a coup.
Then we went down the internal stairs to the basement, where there were much more sophisticated for-the-purpose map and communication rooms, some with up to five or six phones on one desk. Also downstairs were the bunkers and kitchens and other things necessary for hiding in your own palace from your own people, as well as an old Mercedes-Benz. Finally there was an exhibition room showing pictures from the reign of the South Vietnamese government, as well as pictures of the tanks bursting through the gates, Nguyen Van Thieu being dragged away in a suit, and other important historical moments like that.
Back on the street we walked a fair way north and what felt like further east, melting more and more in the heat and getting seriously hungry. We stopped at a cafe and had some fried rice, served with pickled vegetables and what looked a little bit like pork, which had a strong reviving effect, before continuing on to the intersection where we thought we would find the Jade Emperor pagoda. Instead we found a residential district with some shops here and there, and a main road running through it. After walking a little way each way from the intersection, we asked the nice people in Vietnam Airlines who eventually directed us to the correct street. Except for the throng of sales people around the gates, the Jade Emperor pagoda doesn’t immediately stand out as being where it is; but the reward for finding it is immense.
It’s not one of the museum-feeling places; it’s a real live temple, crowded with people lighting their sticks of incense and holding them in front of their heads, bowing and advancing slowly toward the main altar. There were also several small rooms off the sides of the main altar, all similarly frenetic. Up some narrow dark stairs there was even a rooftop balcony, with a stone pot full of smoking incense wedged into sand. Back inside the temple the collection of incense smoke was stifling, as the people’s hopes and prayers dispersed into the air.
Out front of the temple there is a turtle pond, and more stone incense holders, and a kind of furnace for setting the left over incense free. Many people come and go, and children giggle at the turtles, trying to climb the sides of the stone pond.
Somehow the walk back from the Pagoda, once we had abandoned all hope of reaching either the soup shop or the Xa Loi pagoda, didn’t take all that long. The afternoon was much cooler, and at 4.30pm the rush was just beginning to begin. We saw an odd thing; a whole city block of motorcycles, packed in tight and waiting in between two sets of traffic lights.
By the time we reached the Ben Thanh market, around about 5.30pm, the pineapple lady was gone, so we bought some pears from one of the several stalls. Having had such a large late lunch, that and several litres of water were enough for dinner.
Greg
