Day 2 we decided to hit the road, and still being newbies in the country, we decided to take a one-day tour set up by our guest house. We are headed north into the jungle to see some temples, and some more historic sites around the War of American Aggression.
Sitting in the front of a medium-sized bus, one gets an entirely different view of the chaos that is Ho Chi Minh CIty traffic. Our bus driver yields his horn as a weapon, his thumbs having worn a permanent groove in the centre of the steering wheel. There's an admirable flow to the traffic, everyone just seems to find a way through, avoiding each other by inches, while never giving anyone else and inch, and never looking like the terrifying near misses were anything but planned.
It seems both chaotic and ordered, safe and horribly dangerous, yet (according to our driver) only 30 people a day are killed in traffic in Vietnam, and he is quick to note alcohol is the primary cause of most deaths. back-of-the-envelope stats suggest it is 3x more dangerous driving a car in the USA than it is riding a motor scooter in Vietnam. Except maybe for your lungs.
As we head north out of Ho Chi Minh City, we continue to "leave town" for a long, long time.The City stretches endlessly into the rural north, and is growing spectacularly. There were 400,000 people in Saigon at the end of the American War, and by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, taking its financial support with it, the city had swelled to about 4 Million. current estimates put the population at 11 Million, a with growth forecast to 16 Million in the decades to come.
The results of this remarkable growth, and the 7 million motorbikes that keep the City buzzing? Horrendous air quality. It becomes more apparent as we the "suburbs" spread out and the view horizon expands. The high humidity and particulates assure we could never see more than 1km in the distance until we were more than 100km north of the City, amongst the rubber plantations and rice paddies.
At the end of the road, after skirting along the Cambodian border for several kilometres, we dropped by the Great Temple of the Cao Dai, the global headquarters of the religion that is based on Daoism, but tries to marry the Buddhist traditions with that of the western mono-theist faiths. Their three "Saints" (who were all dead in the ground long before the founding of this particular faith - so their conversion was definitively post-mortem) are the great Vietnamese poet and philosopher Nguyen Binh Khiem, Chinese revolutionary and Vancouver gardener of note Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and French author Victor Hugo.
Would I make something like that up?
Regardless, the temple grounds were beautiful, and we attended noon prayers with the other tourist gawkers.
After this, we once again dropped in to the history of the American War and visited the Cu Chi area, which was the centre of the guerrilla war effort that connected communist Cambodia with the South Vietnam capital of Saigon - the south end of the Ho Chi Minh Road. This is where the use of tunnels, traps, and dogged perseverance wore down the American-led efforts in Vietnam.
The highlight of the area for tourists is the complex system of tunnels and bunkers, which were basically invisible on the surface, but from which a decade-long guerrilla war was successfully fought against the might of the most powerful military force ever assembled. More bombs were dropped by the USA in this area during early 1970's carpet bombing than in all of world war two, and the craters still remain. but so does the tunnel complex, which once stretched hundreds of kilometers. There is about 100m accessible at Cu Chi, they were even "expended" a bit to increase the height for the comfort (?) of tourists - from 80cm to 120cm high. The immediate claustrophobia kept us from exploring the full length.
So after touring some spider holes, we head back to town to once again enjoy the traveling carnival show of rush hour traffic and eat various grilled foods, some with tentacles, washed down with 50-cent beers. As our lungs blacken, we are starting to get the feel of the place.
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