SAIGON, VIETNAM - 2004

Alan has been offered a job in Saigon. When he told us, we went "Errrrkk!!!". He asked us what it was like and, because it was too hard to explain, I promised to post this letter I wrote when we got back to HK after our 2004 visit.  Alan, this is for you:

HO CHI MIHN CITY - 2004

Within two minutes of arriving in Ho Chi Mihn City (formerly Saigon) I developed that sharp pinpoint headache I always get around toxic chemicals. An hour later the nose-bleeds started. By nightfall, I'd developed these strange purple blood-blisters over every inch of exposed skin. By the following morning my gums were swollen (I thoughtlessly used tapwater to clean my teeth.) and within two days they were huge, red and bleeding and my face had swollen into this huge red balloon. The glands in my neck then swelled as my system struggled heroically against the environment. But by then I was coughing up black, bloody, tarry phlegm and it was nice to have something other than a sudden onset of tuberculosis to blame the blood on. 

(2008 - It turned out to actually be TB; seems there'd been tuberculosis bacillia in the tap water. However, since I'd grown up next door to dad's TB hospital, my system knew these suckers well so went into overdrive and zapped them bigtime which meant, by the time we got back to HK and I had tests done, it was all over!) (Gosh, I just adore my immune system!) 

(F.Y.I. If you stay at this hotel, clean your teeth with bottled water!)

Then, each night when we'd shower, the water swirling down the drain would be black, oily and rainbow-slicked, and we hadn't even been swimming in petrol. This was just from the grime of the streets and air and we didn't even stray out of the richer suburbs.

I think you can get the picture here. The place is toxic. I don't know what Vietnam is using to fuel it's Asian economic miracle but it's going to kill them. Certainly almost killed me.

Keith fared better and worse than me in the health department. He merely, um, joined the South East Asia Weight Loss Program. Oh, that and a little of the tarry coughing. My stomach remained cast iron and normally I would have had gloating rights only Keith said my cluster of disgusting symptoms far outweighed his. This, of course, could be debated only the topic is too revolting to talk about.

(2008 - Keith looking decidedly queasy.)

As for the rest, the Vietnamese people who crossed our path were, to a wo/man, unspeakable.  Apart from a brief half hour as the sun sets - when everyone brings plastic chairs out onto the pavement to quietly enjoy the passing parade and golden light and they become all soft and smiling and likable - they are savage, nasty, cut-throat, thieving, lying, cheating bastards. It was as if every single person we came across decided to teach us a different way people can screw over other people. It was an eye-opener and an education, but one I could have done without. We worked out later that, in the five days, we'd lost over VND$1.5 million in their various conniving swindling game-playing and we counted ourselves lucky to have not lost more.

There is no tradition of service in Vietnam and we were instructed by various people and guidebooks to act very pleased if, say, a waiter ever brought us our order quickly and correctly. There was no need to act anything because no one ever did. (Apart from a single place but I'm saving that for last). The gem of bad service was the young waiter who was in the middle of taking our order when he saw a pretty girl walk by outside and just dashed off. We could see all through the window. It took 20 minutes for her to agree to meet with him, and all the while we just sat there stunned, unable to believe it had just happened. 

No, wait! Better one than that! The waiter who sold my lighter to the Beijing Bully-Boy sitting at the next table! Beijing Bully, see, offered this guy US$20. to go out and buy him a lighter so he took the money, crossed to our table, cheerfully picked up my lighter and gave it to him. Flabbergasting!  Naturally, I went over to Beijing Bully-Boy and took it back. He naturally objected. I told him it was mine and to sort it out with the waiter because it wasn't my problem. The waiter saw the B.B.B. look around for him and promptly disappeared out the front door. We left immediately too because it looked like it was about to turn nasty.

Visually? Not good. Ex-Saigon region is generally is ugly. Visible brown smog covers everything, Saigon River is brown and polluted, stinking with raw floating sewerage, and the Mighty Mekong is mere mudflats. The landscape too is ugly since they missed out on the last two monsoons so everything is parched and brown and instead of lush green it looks like the Australian outback in that's it's all floating red dust eddies but the Outback eddies are clean 

and these were full of swirling plastic bags and rubbish and general filth.

What else? Oh, the traffic! Terrifying! There's a population of 7 million (4 million illegals) and I swear each of them owns a Vespa. Motorbikes everywhere and not a single road rule. Chaos reigns. But we quickly learned that the traffic is a paper tiger. You want to cross a road you just step determinably into the street and cross fast, looking neither left nor right. Everyone will avoid you. Takes courage, sure, but you spy a silk shop across the road and you're willing risk everything.

So why, you must be asking yourself, based on our experiences, would anyone ever want to go to Ex-Saigon? That's because I haven't yet mentioned the food. To give Vietnam it's due it's food is wonderful!!! Their curries are sublime and everything else is so wonderful and moreish and we found a different buffet each night so we could hoe into everything and anything and nothing disappointed us. Ah, I'm drooling just thinking of their limes and their lemongrass toppings and those wonderful not-hot spices in their sauces. And they have escargo the size of Keith's fist that are yummmmmm! And their fish! And their duck! And those curries! And their rice dumplings! And they had soursop icecream which I haven't eaten since I was a child and made me want to weep from happiness and nostalgia. And, and, and ... so so muchthat's beyond-desirable. Yup, the food alone is almost enough to make up for the awfulness of the people and environment and make the place a desirable destination. But not quite.

It's the silks that make the whole place worthwhile. Gosh, the Vietnamese do this well. If I'd only had, say, another maybe VND$1.5 million available, I'd have spent it all on those fabulous fabrics. I can't stress this enough; Vietnamese silks are glorious. I wanted to buy every scrap of every material they'd ever produced. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. I even, for a brief heady thankfully-transient moment, wanted to live in Ex-Saigon so I could spend the rest of my life buying silks and designing clothes to show off the skill and artistry of the Vietnamese weavers art, it was that wonderful.

But wait, are these genuinely enough to make you wish to visit? The rest of the world has Vietnamese restaurants and they export their silks too so a person has no need to go there at all. So, is there anything about Saigon that makes it a place worthy of visiting?

Mmmmm! What's good? Very nice French colonial architecture, beautifully maintained. Glorious public buildings. Churches. Fabulous public art. Wide tree-lined avenues. Lovely interesting colonial architecture around some of the backstreets and the arty-homosexual-set have only just started to move in to do up places so you'd still be able to get something very nice to do up yourself; that's if you wanted to live there to design clothes and play with the fabrics and all the rest. And the schoolgirls look so sweet in their white silk ao dai (traditional two-piece costume) and you just so respect them that they're able to look so fresh and clean in such filth. (They too all ride Vespas) 

Nice coffee shops too with genuinely good coffee, if you can ever get a waiter to serve you.

Is that it?

No, there's still a huge reason to go to Ex-Saigon: The Bellevue Terrace Bar, 8th floor, Majestic Hotel on the banks of the Saigon River. 

Here they're in a time-loop and you're back in 1930s Indochine (without the horse-whipping of natives), with French-trained waiters who know their food and wine and everything is delicious and the service is to-die-for, with everything so clean, light and beautiful, and all sorts of precious oriental antiques and beautiful oriental furniture. 

Go there on a Sunday night - preferably when there's a full moon - when they have their glorious pseudo-Mexican band playing salsa, and drink their wonderful chablis in the moonlight, while 8 floors below the Saigon River pretends not to be a stinking filthy cesspool and the passing riverboats don't look like the deathtraps they are, and the passing parade of 7 million Vespas below look like fairy lights.

It's times like these that make Ex-Saigon a place worthy of visiting.  But then again ...

So, Alan, now that you know all this, do you still want to take the job?

I have other letters written about this visit, but I'll have to hunt for them. And if and when I find them, I'll post them here as well.   I'll even add photos, if I find any.

Here. Found another letter:

I'm trying to think of stories of things that happened in Vietnam which will give you a feel for the place. Lots of stuff happened, sure, but unfortunately most of those stories are too sour to be remembered. A few small examples to show you what I mean:

1) The young beggar girl who followed us for three hours, alternatively whining and shouting at us, pushing us and pulling at us, complaining that we hadn't given her enough money. Then, at the end, after she'd p*ssed us off beyond our endurance and Keith threatened to hit her unless she went, screaming at us for wasting her time.

2) The Yuppie-Mum: actually that's a story worth telling: There's this clearly middle-class Vietnamese mother, see, with three young children under seven. All were very well dressed and mum was driving a Volvo - looked like they were the family of a dentist or something - and the mum was buying from this trendy French storefront ice-cream parlour. As we approached, the three children saw us and immediately took on sad-sack beggar faces and began to rub their tummies and whine, beggar-like, at us. "Dollars. You give dollars. We hungry. Hungry." Unexpectedly cross because we'd just got rid of Beggar-Girl, I "heyed" the mother to look what her children were up to. She turned, saw and immediately adopted the same voice and face and words, only she couldn't rub her tummy because she was holding four very expensive gourmet ice-creams. I felt a surge of blind rage and snapped "Don't any of you people know the meaning of self-respect." and stomped on.

OK! Most of the Vietnam stories I could tell you are in that vein and who wants to remember those!

But the nice stuff in Vietnam I've already told you: food, silks, epic bronze statues, terrific old buildings, wonderful avenues, schoolgirls' white silk uniforms, faux-Mexican salsa bands, the Bellevue Bar on the 8th floor of Hotel Majestic. So what else can I talk about? Let me think?

Ah, the "Sri Rama Hindu Temple and Motorbike Repair Shop"! We couldn't believe the sign so snuck in to take a look. We got caught but the priests/mechanics were lovely and showed us around their three hundred year old temple and their thirty year old repair shop and, most wonderfully, their inner sanctum which consisted of a Wall of Heroes - people they've admired over the last three hundred years - a collection of gloriously bad portraits of various people. 

The only faces we recognised were Gandhi and Nehru but a lot of the others - especially the more recent ones - appeared to be Muslim. This would have been worrying except these Hindu-guru-motorbike-wallahs were so cheerful and full of good will and seemed to have nothing to hide. And there was no portrait of Osama Bin Laden which would have been a dead giveaway of how far Vietnamese Hindus have parted from their homeland brethren. We took lots of photos I'll probably end up showing you. That's a happy memory. 

(2008 - There's a follow up to this story, but some other time.)

Anything else? Ah, Fanny's Ice-Cream Parlour and Restaurant. Took photos of that too. It's the most beautifully restored inner-city three-storey block of restaurant/stores/ apartments/artist studios etc. It's over a century old and it's perfectly done-up, keeping all the best of the old stuff and blending it in with a post-modern kinda-wacky aethetic. It was this building that made me yearn to live in Saigon and find my own interesting city block to do up just like this one. 

I crept around trying to check it out and again got caught ... by this lovely French lady who seemed to have done it herself and who may or may not have been Fanny. She spoke no English but we understood each other very well and she showed me around and pointed out things I may not have noticed. And that's when I discovered that "Wow! Fantastic! You are so clever!" is pure meta-language and thus universally understood. Another happy memory.

What else? Delta Goodram on just about every video we passed. I mean, what's that about? This is just a little Australian pop singer who got cancer last year. How does that translate into superstar status in a completely foreign country. Odd!

Oh, and that wonderful cobalt-blue goldfish painted on that six thousand year old bowl. But I've already told you about that.

What else? The store called (omitted the name)? Nah! That's not a happy memory, but I'll tell you anyway. Read in the local newspaper all about this amazing store and amazing woman who ran it - "So creative and talented, darling!" - so went to a lot of trouble to find the place and turns out to be just a store run by a dicky little Frenchwoman who shops at Stanley Markets in Hong Kong and has a good press agent. Gosh, I was cross. All her stock was stuff you see everywhere here: Shenzhen-fakes of Alan Chan and Vivienne Tam's wonderful designs, yet she'd had the nerve to put her name on everything and claims to have designed it all. And she was such an arrogant little piglet I yearned to expose her fraud to the world. But no! Sour memory so let's forget it!

What else? Ah, the rules of the hotel we were staying at! I found those such a scream I sent them to Rayna so she could laugh too. Stuff like "Guests are forbidden to bring radioactive materials into their rooms." and "If there is an explosion in your room please inform hotel staff." It was sooo off-the-planet it kept Keith and myself in stitches for ages. Gosh, what must it be like to live in a place like Saigon when you have to develop rules like these?

Anything else? Oh, that massage given by a middle-aged Vietnamese woman called Annie who works out of the spa at The Hotel Grand! I've never come across anyone with more magical hands. Totally unforgettable angelic bliss for a whole hour. I kept thinking "If word ever gets out that a Vietnamese woman's touch feels like this, none of we-women-of-the-rest-of-the-world will ever be able to get ourselves a man!"  And then, just to test if all Vietnamese women felt like this, I went back the next day for another massage, and this time I selected someone else - they all line up and you choose them like in a brothel or something - and Annie looked so hurt. And the new lady I chose was totally lousy so that dispelled my theory.  However, when I wanted to go back the next day as well, so I could again choose Annie and make it alright with her, Keith had just discovered we'd had over a million dong scammed off us, so wouldn't let me "waste money this way!", so Annie had to remain hurt.  Another sour memory?

Anything more I can tell you about Vietnam that isn't sour and nasty? Nope, I think that's exhausted the topic. So there you have it, Our Vietnam sans the viciousness.

Hope you enjoyed our trip!