Vivid Saigon Theater
A Visit to Boomtown and Neighboring Locales
In a stroke of either good or bad luck, the hotel we booked in Saigon is right in the middle of a street that’s almost beyond description. It’s muggy here at night like New York City in August and this block is teeming with people. Restaurants with kitchens and tables entirely on the sidewalk are BBQing octopus on hibachis next to pork, beef and ostrich kebabs —the next grill over cooks chicken’s feet that look like alien hands. Teenybopper American 90's hits are booming out of loudspeakers up and down the street. It’s a sea of neon. Motorbike traffic is insane. Hotties are out in full force but there are plenty of other distractions around. Tattoos cover people’s arms, legs, occasionally their faces. There’s a hunchback waiter serving beers at a makeshift street bar. A 5-year-old boy rocking a bleach blond mohawk waves at passersby next to his mother who’s busy serving pho noodle soup out of a tiny stall to expat African hipsters. A seventy-something-year-old woman with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth jumps on a motorbike, revs the engine hard and guns it down the block. A guy carrying a three-foot-tall stack of pirated DVDs is working his way through the dense crowd past a shop owner selling locally bottled rice whiskey — each bottle has a great big cobra floating inside.
We turn the corner and all eyes are on an eight-year-old boy juggling fire. He juggles three sticks, each with a flaming chunk of cork dipped in gasoline attached to one end — his precision is perfect, he never misses a move and the fire never touches his body. After a while he lets two of the sticks flicker out, keeps the third one burning, guzzles some gasoline out of a water bottle and blows a fireball. Pausing, he sticks the last burning cork skewer in his open mouth — fire dances around his outstretched tongue. Then he puts the fire out by closing his mouth, which settles into a smile.
This is just the street our hotel is on. The city goes on and on. Saigon is teeming with ten million people, the largest urban area in a nation that has a population larger than any country in Europe. The city is booming, skyscrapers are going up everywhere — the tallest one is taller than the Empire State Building. There are literally almost as many motorbikes as there are people in this city and it’s the worst traffic I’ve ever seen in my life — we see families of five on a motorbike and women nursing their babies in traffic on the backs of motorbikes while Dad does the driving up front. Saigon is bulging at the seams, the streets are vivid human theater and this city will probably only keep getting bigger.
In the 1950's and 60's the Viet Cong built an underground network of tunnels behind enemy lines that leads right up to Saigon. The tunnels stretched 100 miles and were built by hand without the aid of modern tunneling equipment — it’s one of the most incredible human engineering feats of modern history and was absolutely crucial to their success winning in the war. At the height of the war the tunnels housed 10,000 soldiers, complete with cramped kitchens, complex ventilation systems and makeshift hospitals. One section of the tunnels ran directly underneath and into an American military base. Parts are still intact, and if you pay a guide enough money they’ll take you down the rabbit hole.
Our guide happens to be a soldier who fought for the VC, living and fighting in the tunnels for six years. Robust at 67, he has the gunshot wounds to back up his story. The tunnels are pitch dark, a bit wider than my shoulders and just tall enough to kneel in. I’m shimmying on my hands and knees when the tunnel descends a level — some sections have three stories stacked on top of each other. Entrances and ventilation holes are almost impossible to spot from above ground. The sound of real live submachine gun fire in the distance lends some alarming ambiance — perversely, the cache of AK-47s left behind after the war has been repurposed for tourists to fire.
We move on from Saigon to the Mekong River Delta. My father reminds me it was the site of some of the most brutal fighting during the war — now the marsh lands and the jungle have regrown and it’s one of the most beautiful regions in Southeast Asia. We hire a small boat and a driver and roll down the river, through canals and rivulets lined with quaint villages, past areas that have been taken over by coconut trees, bamboo forests, jungle foliage and silence.
Floating fruit markets on masses of small boats open up for business by the side of the river as we pass by. A father and his baby son sit quietly on a bamboo bridge leaning over the canal. Handmade wooden boats have big eyes painted just below the bow to lend vision to each trip down the river. A young girl bicycles down a dirt path in between villages a few feet from the edge of the canal with a puppy in her bicycle’s front basket. We walk the dirt paths for a bit — village homes are simple, roosters roam here and there, lotus flowers grow wild in small ponds, small vegetable gardens play the role of a fence between homes, occasionally a mass of bougainvillea hangs down the side of a house.
The next day our hotel owner and his uncle are making the six hour motorbike ride to the place we want to go next. We hitch a ride on the backs of their motorbikes. A couple hours in we stop at a small town on the Mekong for a coffee break and Laura and I take a walk to stretch our legs. We’re passing the doorway of a local temple when two elderly gentlemen adamantly wave us in — nobody’s here right now except them. The more adamant of the two sports a grey goatee stretching down to his midsection like Confucius. He speaks no English and Laura doesn’t understand his dialect of Vietnamese, but his body language is clear enough — he grabs my hand and leads us to the high alter, demanding that we pray to our ancestors. Why not? We pray. But this isn’t his real motivation. Satisfied with the gravity of our prayer, Confucius leads us away and pulls out a bottle of rice whiskey and a shot glass, inviting us to both pound one back. Now I understand what’s happening: these devout souls want drinking buddies. There’s not really much dilemma here. We drink, then he knocks one back and pours a shot for his buddy. It isn’t quite noon yet and they’re three sheets to the wind.
The drive continues. The open road feels good. We’re fly down highways, through small towns, bumpy back roads and rice farming villages, past local farmers with massive loads of bamboo poles strapped double wide to the sides of their bikes, pickup trucks overloaded with squealing pigs, kids on bicycles in school uniforms, and a set of lovers riding together on their motorbike, her arms wrapped tightly around his body. Just another regular day in the countryside for people who aren’t a long way from home.
