It's very easy to slip into a village Hong Kong mindset, existing solely in the confines of the territory and failing to take advantage of your proximity to visit other parts of the region. Although I've jumped on a plane and popped to a few places, I've been fairly slack overall, though always plugging the excuse that there's no great hurry and I've been round much of the region in the past. Vietnam, however, was always on my list of "must see" places and recently a gang of us headed to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon) to take it all in.
My interest and knowledge of the country was hardly sophisticated - `Platoon', `Apocalypse Now', `Forrest Gump'. We've all seen the films, heard the soundtracks, know the basic premise of David versus Goliath. And they probably weren't even filmed there anyway (wasn't part of `Full Metal Jacket' filmed on the Isle of Dogs or somewhere like that?). And much as the current conflict in Iraq will take on folklore status for future generations rather than just another current affair news story to skip over, Vietnam always sounded like somewhere fascinating and exotic when I was growing up.
Over the years I've been to a few cities in the Far East and to be honest Ho Chi and its outskirts had many familiar traits: the heat, the smells, the colours, the excessive traffic and lack of traffic sense, the luscious green terrain away from the city, the visible disparity between the rich and the poor, the organised chaos, the friendliness, the signs of modernisation next to years of deprivation. There's talk amongst those in the know that Vietnam is on the road to being the next big thing; a country rich in resources and untapped potential, about to join the WTO etc etc, a place into which the smart investment funds are starting to trickle money. Maybe Vietnam will turn out to be so. Maybe not any time soon, I wouldn't have thought. It doesn't seem to be in any hurry to do so. In fact, the hotel we stayed in took over seven years to build because the developer kept running out of money. Apparently there are all sorts of rules and laws restricting foreign ownership, while the government doesn't seem that keen to speed up any major overhaul of infrastructure or promote a transformation. Generally speaking, nobody seemed to be in any rush to do anything - a sort of contentment with what they already have.
Still, there was a charming feel about the city. We had mammoth eating sessions (Vietnam is renowned for French-influenced cuisine and it's been a long time since I've ate so much seafood) and the shopping expeditions saw us sift through your standard Asian market bric-a-brac, such as snake wine and stuffed turtles. On top of that, though, we took a trip into the history of the region, heading for a half-day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. Located in a jungle, burnt out and stripped down US tanks were scattered around the area, reminders of a time when people from the West were less welcome. The underground maze of man-made tunnels themselves, located an hour outside the city, were originally designed to hide and house whole villages away from the unwelcome French. Men, women, kids, the lot. When the Americans invaded and tried their luck in the 1960s, they too failed to master the underground passageways or the surrounding area, booby trapped to the heavens in unforgiving terrain. So the chance to scuttle through a small 30-metre stretch of the 200km cobweb of tunnels was too good an offer to miss out on, though the GIs of yesteryear may have had a better chance back then had they too had a guide with a torch and the tunnel been widened as it has in more recent years to cater for larger and more welcome of their visiting countrymen. Still, scrambling around on all fours in sweaty, cramped, near-pitch-black conditions did give me a sense of how hideous and uncomfortable an existence it must have been for those forced to survive underground. Imagine someone chasing you down there with a machine gun aimed at your rear. It's moments like that when you take a step back and you realise how lucky you are to have been born at a certain time, in a certain place, under certain circumstances. Indeed, people live through such hardships every day and every where, but it's a different kind of `living' to what a lot of us will always take for granted.
After our tunnel moment, we also had the opportunity to test out some of the military arsenal, possibly left behind after the war, possibly just provided for tourist entertainment. On a firing range, for $1 a bullet, you could let rip with an AK47, M16 or a machine gun. Now, I've always had issues with the use and proliferation of guns in the US, the praise the lord and pass the ammo sensibilities. Gun crime and (lack of) legislation of weapons in the US, to me, is shocking. And I thought `Bowling For Columbine' was a fine documentary. But I must say pumping those bullets from the AK47 into those targets a hundred odd yards away was scarily pleasurable. So too was the M16. And by the time I got onto the `twenty bullets in less than six seconds' worth of machine gun the filthy pleasure had me gripped. If I ever moved back to the States there's no chance I would join the National Rifle Association and everything it stands for. But after $60-worth of bullets, to my own horror, I'd actually quite enjoyed the orgy. Of course, being Asia, there's always derivations of a theme - weirder and wilder ways of doing things. I've been told you can go to Cambodia and for the princely sum of $20 you get to use a rocket launcher...on a chicken. If that's not to your tastes, you could always splash out a little more - $100 for a cow... For some reason, I don't think the freedoms fought for in this part of the world were intended for this.
