Veering Through Vietnam

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Sai-going, Sai-going, Sai-gone!












Saigon, 4020 km from the start

I'm free!!!! I escaped from the hot and unpleasant confines of National Route 1A this morning and rode into surprisingly civilized and quiet Saigon, vastly relieved to be out of the traffic, diesel fumes and ear-splitting din of the highway.

I think I last wrote from Dalat. My second night in Dalat the hotel was full of local farmers in town for the market, and it was quite possibly the loudest hotel I have ever been in. Graydon's travel tip of the day: try to avoid hotels full of Vietnamese if you want to sleep, as your night will be punctuated by shouted conversations, screams, stomping footsteps, slamming doors and thorough-going clearing of the throat and nasal passages until after midnight, and then starting again at 5 am. I was an unhappy and groggy character that morning!

I rode for 110 km to Bao Loc that day. On the way out of town, a construction worker lobbed a stone at me from atop a three-storey building, then smiled broadly and waved at me. He seemed genuinely puzzled when I swore at him and chucked a rock back. The ride began with a wonderful downhill out of Dalat, and stayed in the highlands all day, giving a slightly cooler temperature and some decent views. Unfortunately Highway 20 proved to be just as busy as Highway 1A, and narrower, so not great cycling from a noise or safety standpoint. I passed a few waterfalls, but was put off going to see them by the Niagara-style cheesy tourist attractions clustered around, and by the 15 tour buses parked in the parking lots. Domestic tourists love Dalat and flock to have their photos taken with locals dressed as Native Americans, turtles, bears, Vietnamese emperors and just about anything else you can think of, while being bombarded with 120 decibels of appalling music and being importuned to buy atrocious souvenirs by hundreds of aggressive salespeople. I did sneak into one very pretty waterfall near the end of the day, when all the tourists had zoomed off to Saigon or Dalat. A little boy, annoyed that I didn't respond to the "Hello!! Hello!!" he was screaming into my face, pinched my arm, hard. I think he was genuinely puzzled when I pinched him back. He discovered that adults have much stronger fingers than children. I spent the night in Bao Loc, a major centre for tea and coffee production.

I rode into Cat Tien national park the next afternoon, after a long downhill back to the sweltering lowlands. Cat Tien is one of the premier national parks in the country and gained fame among nature lovers when a small population of Javanese rhinoceri were found there in 1999. I didn't see any rhinos or any large animals (there are supposed to be deer, leopards, gaur and civet cats), but the place was alive with birds. I recognized lots of them as familiar friends from riding through Malaysia, Thailand and Laos, but without a guidebook I couldn't put names to many of them. I was enchanted by the raucous flocks of parakeets and by the huge, solitary stork I saw sitting on a tree. It was wonderful to be out of earshot of the extreme loudness of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. I was somewhat surprised, wandering around the park HQ, to find the National Park Service operating a sawmill (aren't they supposed to be protecting the forests?) and a karaoke/massage parlour (likely a brothel). Not what you might expect to see in a national park at all. At least, though, they're trying to save the rhinos and preserve bits of rainforest not defoliated by the Americans, although they're allowing settlers from other bits of the country to set up farms in parts of the park which doesn't sound too promising for conservation.

Refreshed by a night of peace and quiet (there weren't enough Vietnamese tourists to operate the karaoke, I guess, or else the torrential tropical downpour killed the noise), I rode out onto Route 20 yesterday and ground out a long, hot day in hellish traffic and noise. The hilly terrain meant that trucks and buses were labouring, and they were emitting enough diesel smoke to give you instant lung cancer. Bored, I counted how many people shouted "hello" to me during an hour; it was well over 60, meaning that if that's average (and I think it was below average), I have had at least 20,000 people shout "hello!!" at me during this trip. I used to think it was a greeting. Then I changed my classification to that of a challenge or a demand. Then I realized that it was the equivalent of zoo-goers shouting at the monkey in the cage, trying to get the monkey to acknowledge their presence. "Yo! Monkey! Look here! Hello, monkey!! Dammit, monkey, look at me!!! MONKEY!!!" The afternoon was spent riding through rubber plantations, which I usually don't like (they seem like sad, sterile replacements for the diversity of the tropical forest), but which at least had the virtue of having nobody living in them.

After a restful night in a surprisingly swish roadside hotel, I set off early this morning for the last 60 km. Traffic increased to a furious pace, but then, just as I was expecting truly hideous conditions into Saigon, the roads got wider, green spaces appeared and traffic lessened and became marginally more orderly. I rather liked riding in the streets of Saigon: fairly slow traffic, but no real traffic jams, streetlights that people obeyed, and a few parks and graceful colonial buildings to look at. I took the obligatory "I MADE IT!!" photo outside my guesthouse and set off to see some museums.

The Museum of Ho Chi Minh City was marginally interesting, and the Fine Arts Museum, aside from a few good Cham sculptures, was an eerie, forgotten, half-lit place where bad art went to moulder. The War Vestiges Museum, though, is an obligatory stop in Saigon, full of pictures and displays and leftovers from the wars with the French and the US. Some of the pictures of US soldiers torturing villagers, or of the aftermath of napalm or phosphorus attacks, not to mention the heart-wrenching shots of Agent Orange babies, were enough to make you sick to your stomach. As at the My Lai memorial, I really felt sad that as a species, we haven't inched forward since then, as recent revelations in Iraq have shown. An interesting tidbit was that Senator Bob Kerrey (distinct from his fellow Vietnam vet John Kerry), who was Democratic governor of Nebraska and served two terms in the US Senate, was the commander of a US Navy Seal team which landed in a small village and massacred 21 villagers, disembowelling a grandfather and three of his grandkids. It goes to show that war crimes do pay sometimes (take a step forward Ariel Sharon, Vladimir Putin, Andrew Jackson, Slobodan Milosevic and others too numerous to mention who were elected to high office despite, or even because of, ordering or participating in war crimes against civilians).

So in a fitting conclusion to the Vietnam trip, my planned RnR on the beaches of Phu Quoc Island has been scuttled by the fact that no seats at all are available to or from the island as it's now school holidays in Vietnam. Even the islands here are completely overrun by domestic tourists. I don't know what I'll do; I may take a bus to Mui Ne for a few days on the beach there.

Anyway, I'm glad the cycling is over. It's rare that I say things like that, and reflects what a great cycling destination central and southern Vietnam aren't. My next big bike trip should be the exact opposite of this one: Mongolia next summer with the XTreme Dorks. No traffic, endless skies, no food, little water, nomad tents dotting the grasslands and complete freedom. Can't wait!

Thanks for sticking with me through this trip, audience. Until next trip, I remain

Yours Nomadically

Graydon

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