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| "Home, Seyha!" |
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| Busy Saturday at Beautiful Shoes |
I'll collect the shoes in a couple of weeks and send them to Seattle from Kuala Lumpur when I'm there in January. Alas, the only reliable method of shipping from Cambodia is DHL or FedEx. I've learned never to take working postal system for granted. (More on that shortly...)
Because Rose's flight home would leave Ho Chi Minh City on Christmas morning, we went there by bus on 21 December. We'd both spent time in other parts of Vietnam before but never in the former Saigon. With a population around 7.4 million, HCMC is vastly larger than Phnom Penh (2.2 million), and it has a very different feel. Just as the six-hour bus trip between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore is a journey between two worlds, so it is with these two Indochine capital cities.
Rose felt like a bit of a splurge after discovering that she could make the whole trip on accumulated airline miles, so she booked us a room in the Majestic Hotel, which has been overlooking the Saigon River since 1925.
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| Truly majestic then. |
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| Slightly less majestic now, but still pretty darned grand. |
We couldn't help but compare and contrast the Majestic Saigon with Penang's grande dame, the E&O. Although the rooms in the Vietnamese hotel have been thoroughly modernised, the staff has the same delightful combination of formality and warmth. The petite woman wearing the burgundy velveteen ao dai to Rose's left as she was checking in is Fleur -- she's in her 60s, I would guess. She showed us to our room and remembered both our names. I saw her again when I checked out (Rose having left for the airport hours earlier). "You and Rose aren't travelling together today?" she asked. 180 rooms in that hotel -- that woman has a sharp mind and a kind heart.
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| A tad above my usual lodging standards... |
The Majestic sits at the end of Dong Khoi Street, which has become the haute couteur avenue. There are still souvenir and gift shops selling cheap lacquer and "silk", but they're sandwiched between the Hermes, Dior, and Armani boutiques.
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| None of the European designers can touch the elegance of the ao dai, if you ask me, and I'm glad to see some Vietnamese women still agree. |
Rose and I spent three days roaming about District 1, which is the Manhattan of HCMC and is where most of the tourists end up. I'm not silly enough to think it's representative of the city as a whole, but I did feel quite far away from Phnom Penh.
The streets tend to be much cleaner, moto drivers are all helmeted, and -- at least during the daytime hours -- the traffic is much more orderly and law-abiding. There are traffic signals at many intersections, and both drivers and pedestrians tend to obey them. Especially after Hanoi, where one confronts an unbroken and non-stop sea of motos at every street crossing, street scenes like this were a delightful surprise.
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| Could be Switzerland! Well, not quite, but it's close, no? |
Then, around 4.00pm, it all goes to hell in a handbasket -- the entire population of the city goes mobile at once. We saw multiple accidents, and at times the gridlocked traffic was so thick we couldn't even squeeze between the motos to cross. What had been a 15-minute walk during the daylight became a 40-minute cab ride home after dark. I don't know what time the traffic eases again, but it's certainly not before 9.00 or 10.00pm. I think I prefer Phnom Penh's moderately steady chaos to HCMC's Jekyll-Hyde qualities.
Although neither of us had any sites on our 'don't miss' lists, we did wander through the Notre Dame Cathedral (1895) and -- even better, I thought -- the classically grand central Post Office, which is just across the square from it. While Phnom Penh has a similarly grand French colonial relic, it is pretty much just that -- a relic. You can rent postal boxes there, which reportedly increases your chances of receiving any mail, but sending letters or parcels via Cambodian post is both expensive and unreliable. Rose and I posted some cards from the HCMC post office; the stamps are lovely, and I actually have rather high hopes that they'll reach their intended recipients, and before, say, July.
The smallish beings in the photo below are not Santa's elves, appearances notwithstanding. They were schoolchildren on a field trip to the Post Office, and their lessons included letter-writing, envelope-addressing, stamp-purchasing and -affixing, and finally, an orderly procession to the post box.
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| I hope their children and grandchildren will be doing the same thing, in the same place. |
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| Not your typical SE Asian headgear... |
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| I thought I'd found a reprieve from the overtly military paintings and sculptures. |
Very near the National Art Gallery is the Ben Thanh covered market, which is not all that dissimilar to Phnom Penh's markets -- filled with all manner of things for tourists and locals alike. The clock in the tower works! I don't think we have any working clock towers in PP.
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| Cyclo driver snoozing in the shade |
Not far from here is one of the city's many parks. This one is long and narrow, running between two boulevards. In the early mornings, locals come to this park, and some do tai chi, while others, especially older ladies, use the fixed pieces of exercise equipment -- stationary bicycles and hinged, swinging Nordic ski machines. In PP, people gather at a few open spaces for morning and evening group exercise, but we don't have these lovely, leafy parks, and the Saigonese of all ages appear to relish theirs.
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| Running and cycling tracks, equipment along the edge of the grass behind |
Even the medians and borders on the main streets are botanical artworks.
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| The city must employ hordes of public gardeners! |
We noticed many signs -- obviously bilingual -- encouraging people to call the authorities at a given number if they noted any signs of drug use in the district. My impression from earlier visits to Vietnam is that the government is taking an active approach to battling social ills. How effectively they're doing it is anyone's guess, but at least they're acknowledging that HIV/AIDS is a serious public health concern that can be addressed through better public awareness and prevention.
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| They're not about to put an image of a condom on a public sign-board, but at least you get the idea of protection. |
Contrast that with the health crisis du jour in Cambodia, in which 160 (at last count) residents of Battambang province have mysteriously contracted HIV, and the best guess at the moment is that an unlicensed doctor infected them all with re-used and unsanitised needles. And what did the Prime Minister say? Impossible! Some of them are infants and others octogenarians -- any fool can see that they can't get AIDS! That a nation's leader in 2014 should believe HIV limited to sexual transmission is... well, tragic.
We also visited the Reunification Palace, which had been the South Vietnam Presidential Palace before 1975. It's an intriguing building -- the exterior cladding following a bamboo design, the interior being very open and airy, and all very 1960s. A Huey helicopter -- perhaps not the same one that evacuated President Thieu when the Americans pulled out of Saigon, but identical to it -- is still moored on the rooftop.
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| The President's map room still has the bank of rotary phones, colour-coded in pastels. |
Rose "evacuated" Saigon on a 4.00 flight on Christmas morning, and I boarded the Phoung Heng bus four hours later for my trip back to Phnom Penh. She's returned to a suburb of Seattle, her bee-keeping and chicken-raising, and her final semester of law school. I've returned to the life of an expat in Cambodia. In many regards -- certainly in terms of honey, eggs and law degrees -- her life is the more productive. My miniscule victories, such as reading a children's book in Khmer and cobbling together a dinner's worth of ingredients from the wet market, or restocking my freezer with a new batch of home-made raw food for the cats, seem absurdly inconsequential in comparison.
As my bus travelled through the southern Vietnam countryside, I noticed what seemed to me an odd bit of signage at the crosswalks: A man in a western suit and fedora carries a walking stick and appears to have a knapsack on his shoulders; his female companion carries a shoulder bag and wears a short dress. Why are these figures not wearing loose trousers and conical hats, or even an ao dai? There is no text on the sign, which suggests to me that it may be warning Vietnamese drivers to beware of clueless foreigners who may be in the roadways. There are similar signs in Maine warning of moose crossing.
And there it is. Sometimes living in the Phenomenal Penguin is a bit like being a moose on the Maine Turnpike. You're just not in your comfort zone. You can't always make out why all those humans in their cars do what they do, or why they do it. They make strange noises. You are -- and always will be -- very much a foreigner (much more so than you might be in, say, Kuala Lumpur or London) crossing the road.
