Sorry for you sensitive eyes out there, but that title was totally necessary, because everyone giggled any time ANYONE said “dong” or “cu chi”. Seriously, Vietnamese currency is the dong. I swear every country’s currency either starts with D or R. Dollars, dong, ringitts, riel, rupees, rand, reais, renminbi (colloquially yuan, though). It’s just silly. Be a little more creative, people!
PS- I forgot to post Malaysia first, so it's out of order. Deal.
Beyond stupid double entendres, Vietnam/Cambodia was at times VERY intense. The two most moving things were seeing the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh (Cambodia) and the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. I do not, nor will I ever, understand how a human being can be so torturously cruel to another human being. The tortures prisoners endured and the conditions in which they were held are deplorable, and I truly do not understand how people could do things like round up 60 children, toss them up in the air, and catch them on their bayonet on the way back down. THAT HAPPENED. The Khmer Rouge didn’t just take a bunch of Cambodians out back and fire away. They cruelly, methodically tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians in the name of “revolution”. Against what? NOTHING. I don’t think I will ever forget the feeling of standing in a field where 30 years later, in the rainy season, clothes and teeth from the mass graves still rise to the surface. I saw people’s clothing buried in the dirt, people that were beaten, maimed and even decapitated, then thrown into a giant hole in the ground. I still cry every time I think about standing there amidst that kind of evil.
The War Remnants Museum, while very biased, was not biased enough to discount its truths. A simple room, the museum holds war-era weaponry and shows off tanks and fighter jets on its front lawn, but the real power of the museum lies in its photographs. I can’t imagine the pain of being the photojournalist who took these pictures. There are pictures of Vietnamese prisoners of war, families (pregnant women, infants, grandparents) needlessly killed off in town raids, people affected by Agent Orange and napalm, and American soldiers torturing Vietnamese. The hardest thing for me to see was the Agent Orange wall. Agent Orange, which releases a pollutant called dioxin, is now recognized as one of the most hazardous defoliants on earth. The wall showed pictures of Vietnamese people affected by Agent Orange, from a 30-year old woman who stands only 2.5 feet tall, to a child born in 1998, still debilitatingly mangled despite being born 30 years after the war. Women whose husbands have been exposed have had miscarriages due to the potency of dioxins in affecting the reproductive system.
Tonight (back on the ship) we had a discussion led by faculty and lifelong learners who had lived through the war. Almost all were against it, some were very active protestors, some were conscientious objectors, and one professor who served got up to speak and choked up before he could get out even a full sentence. I thought India would be the tough country, the country that was most difficult to see and the most transforming. India was outstripped by Vietnam and Cambodia. I have teared up almost every day in the countries, and tonight at the talk. I think a little bit of it might be collective guilt for everything that’s happened to Vietnam, but as was brought up, it is especially difficult because the Vietnamese people are kind, friendly, and show no anger or resentment when they hear that I am an American. It is difficult because when I see pictures of children and adults affected by Agent Orange and napalm bombs, I know that we did that. It is difficult because standing on ground where thousands of people were brutally murdered in the name of revolution makes me lose a little of my faith in the human race. I have gotten a good look at human cruelty in the last week, and the interspersion of that with the striking beauty of thousand-year-old temples and the graciousness of the Vietnamese and Cambodian people has been the most emotionally affective part of this voyage.
One of the best things about Vietnam was the timing. Going right before the presidential election, right before we decided on who would be the person to deal with our Vietnam Redux situation in Iraq, made Barack Obama’s victory today all the more emotional. I have NEVER cared this much about a presidential election, or a concessions speech, or a “yay-I’m-the-president-elect” speech. I cried. I seem to be doing a lot of that lately, not out of sadness but out of strong emotion, whether it is horror or joy. John McCain’s concession speech made me like him more, and Barack Obama’s speech was FANTASTIC. He is going to make an amazing president, I can feel it. This is such a huge historical event for our country, and the fact that his personality and charisma far outshines his skin color, and that he has never played “the race card”, makes me like him all the more. BARACK OBAMA! WOO! There was a massive celebration in our mostly-Democrat population. People were cheering and jumping up and down, especially when Barack shouted out to “those in the far unknown corners of the world,” which is, in fact, exactly where we are, being somewhere in between Vietnam & Hong Kong. My morning class was cancelled so we could watch the votes roll in on MSNBC streaming video in the Union. It was amazing! I love that the place where I grew up is so very, very blue. Props, Northeast.
Okay, since that “feelings” bit was so long, I’ll try and keep the “what I did” bit short. Probably won’t happen though, by now you know how I like to go on. Day 1: We didn’t even get in to Vietnam until after noon, because floating down the Mekong takes a long time. Once we arrived, I didn’t have time to do anything, so I just bided my time until meeting my Cambodia group and heading to the airport. One very short (50 minute) flight later, we were in Phnom Penh. We were supposed to go to an orphanage founded by SAS alums, but thanks to said late arrival, we had no time and just went straight to dinner. Dinner was a tasty seven course affair with your average asian dishes- soup, noodles, rice, and a Khmer special called amok, which is this curried, SUPER soft and tender fish business. After fresh fruit for dessert (Cambodia papaya is fairly magical), we went back to our sweet hotel, and Steph and I got massages. A one hour Thai massage for $14=awesome. She stepped on my back and twisted me around and cracked all my bones. It was pretty sweet.
Day 2: Killing Fields. As mentioned, it was really sad. One thing that was a little symbol of hope: at the stupa where all the exhumed skulls were, there were piles upon piles of tiny stacked Japanese paper cranes hanging on the door. Japanese legend says that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes and make a wish, your wish will come true. Because of Hiroshima and Sadako Sasaki the cranes have become a symbol for world peace. We also went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng used to be a high school until the Khmer Rouge turned it into an interrogation and torture camp. Like the War Remnants museum, there were pictures on the walls of prisoners, beaten and tortured. After our morning of mourning, we went to the Royal Palace and tried to think about the beautiful architecture and pretty colors without getting distracted by either a) the depression that set in after morning or b) the staggering heat that was literally worse than the Amazon. I, wanting to be all respectful, had worn a button-up oxford, and was absolutely DYING. You know when you have a shirt that you don’t wear much and can’t remember why, so you wear it again, and only then do you remember? YEAH. That’s why. Because it is hot as ANYTHING and NOT breathable. After the Royal Palace, we ate lunch at another generally asian restaurant, spring rolls and morning glory (best green vegetable ever, I kid you not) and crossed the heart-poundingly crowded street and went to a market. Now, we didn’t think of this when we couldn’t find the market’s entrance, but we sure realized it when we came out: the whole thing was EXACTLY SYMMETRICAL. This thing looks the same from every possible angle. We left out one side, then kept running around and around it looking for the area where our bus was. We were late, ducking and weaving through cyclos and cars hoping that our bus had not left for the airport. It hadn’t, we found it, and got on.
The flight to Siem Reap was seriously the shortest flight I have ever been on. It was literally only 35 minutes long. Despite this, we still got a snack. I have determined that US airlines have the worst service in the world (I can say that un-hyperbolically now, because I actually know). All the planes I’ve been on in Brazil, India, Vietnam and Cambodia have served GOOD food, taken off on time, and not been delayed. Props, world. Our first Siem Reap stop was Angkor Thom, a sweet temple where we watched the sun set with a billion other tourists. The steps were really steep going up and down the temple, less than the width of my foot. After sunset we went to a restaurant with a FANTASTIC buffet and watched a really cool dance show, a style called apsara. Our hotel, the Borei Angkor, was amaaaaaaaazing. It was all silk curtains and hardwood floors and mahogany paneling everywhere, plus a sweet bathroom with slate tiles, a big porcelain clawfoot tub, and shampoo/conditioner in stone bottles. Craziness. It was Halloween, but as we were waking up at 4:30 to see Angkor Wat, we just decided to hit up the nearby night market and go to bed. The night market was cool and very well set up. My friend Liz got a crazy pedicure type deal where you stick your feet in a pool of fish and the fish come eat all the dead skin off your feet! It was absolutely ridiculous watching fish eat my friend’s feet.
Sunrise at Angkor Wat was pretty but cloudy. We ate breakfast at the hotel, then started our Temple Day. At Angkor Thom, we went to Bauphon, a really cool legends-of-the-hidden-temple looking thing with stone faces everywhere, plus an elephant temple. I rode an elephant! I sort of take issue with the way they are trained and treated, but Steph didn’t want to go by herself and it was an experience. My favorite part was the jungle temple called Ta Prohm. A guy built the temple for his mother the queen in the 11th century. It was abandoned in the 15th, and not rediscovered until the 19th century. After 400 years of complete abandonment, these giant symbiotic trees had wound their roots in and around the stone until the ruins and forest were one big tangle. It was really, incredibly amazing. We also went to Angkor Wat again in the afternoon, but this time we got to go inside and explore. It was amazing to stand on 1,000 year old stone and walk through truly ancient archways. After all those temples we got on the plane and headed back to Vietnam.
My first full day in Vietnam was spent hanging with my friends Carla and Mark, who I’m also going to China with (tomorrow!). We hit up the Ben Thanh Market, where I got many a Christmas gift, plus a little lacquered something for myself, a square painting of Paul Klimt’s “The Kiss”, one of my fave paintings. I went with them to their tailor and sighed despairingly as they tried on their custom-made suits (that I had no time for, thanks Cambodia). Carla found glasses (frames and prescription lenses) for $30. You can’t beat that. I almost got a pair (they could check your eyes and get you a prescription right there), but as I barely wear the glasses I have, I figured it wasn’t worth it. We went to the Vietnam History Museum, which was super boring except for the water puppet show, which was delightful in a campy sort of way. People stand in waist deep water behind a curtain and move these puppets through the water- usually fish and ducks and river-dwelling people and such. After all that, we dropped our stuff off at the ship and went back out for dinner at a super tasty grill-it-yourself restaurant not unlike Melting Pot (except waaaay cheaper at only $6). We had to go back to the tailor, and in the process, found a place that grills frogs. Oh yeah you know I ate frog. We actually got to hand pick our frog out of a tank, which was a little sad but not sad enough for me not to eat it! It was okay, I didn’t love the texture but it tasted great.
The last day I went to the Cu Chi tunnels with Eleanor, Katey, Carla and Mark. It was crazy to see all the guerilla tactics and booby traps the Viet Cong used in the war. We watched a mildly propagandalicious video about “the untouched beauty of the Cu Chi” (“Many flowers were grow, and many trees” etc.). Everybody except for me crawled in a tiny little sniper hole (I didn’t want to risk having my giant bum get stuck, thus giving me a Winnie-the-pooh-in –the-window situation that does not mesh well with crowds of foreign tourists and humiliation) in the ground that couldn’t have been much bigger than an 8.5x11 piece of paper. People would crouch in those holes for ages. We saw all the booby traps with bamboo and metal spikes and craziness. It’s no wonder Vietnam vets lobbied for PTSD, I can see how being afraid every step would blow you up or impale you might cause a little anxiety. After visiting the shooting range (where my friend shot an AK-47 that bowled her over because of the recoil), we actually went down in the tunnels. Despite being widened 40% for our pampered American butts, they were still just barely small enough to ball yourself up in, and they were muddy and very dark. I can’t imagine spending days upon days in the tunnels, snake-crawling on your belly through 250km of tunnel. There were storerooms, kitchens, even a honeymoon room. Ironically, the napalm bombs the Americans threw only served to harden the mostly-clay soil, making the tunnels stronger.
We drove back to HCMC and went to the aforementioned War Remnants Museum, then ate a tasty street dinner with Thai fried rice, curried wild boar with rice noodles, morning glory and a Vietnam special, the avocado milkshake. I must bring the wonder of this back to the States. Sweetened condensed milk + avocado = heaven. After a bit more DVD buying and some tasty flan, we took cyclos back to the ship and said goodbye to Vietnam. Motorcycle taxis are awesome. So is Vietnam. I wish we could’ve spent at least another week there.
We’ll be in HK tomorrow. From there I go to Beijing for 3 days (21 here I come), then Shanghai to meet the ship. The closer we get to heading home, the less I want to. Of course I will be very happy to be with my family and friends and have it be Christmas time, but I absolutely do not want this journey to end. A plus- my journey is certainly not ending, as yesterday I got accepted to the BU Paris Internship program for spring! I will be home for 30 days, and then leave for the city of lights until May! YAY!
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