the city which never stops honking - Vietnam II

Yep it's the most beautiful building in town and no you can't go inside, The People's Committee Building, Ho Chi Minh City

We spent two night in HCMC in the end - we only meant to stay for one but there was a bit of a stuff up by the hotel with an earlier flight booked so we couldn't go to the beach at Mui Ne in the end. The first night we stayed in a mini-hotel in the Dong Khai area then the second night in the heart of backpacker country on the other side of the CBD. We wandered around during the day, and didn't get pickpocketed the entire time, even in the notorious market which appeared to sell pretty much anything you would ever want to buy that was under the size of a puter monitor. The Man In The Comfy Chair was particularly taken with the little Vietnamese drip coffee thingbos - sort of like a one cup filter coffee, made from steel or aluminium they sit on top of your cup (or frequently glass) and the coffee that results is apparently strong and excellent. Just don't ask for a white coffee - you'll get condensed milk already in the cup, urgh.

I kept getting the impression that the Vietnamese are a people living amongst their own ruins. Not in the sense that their current civilisation is crumbling, but the fact that you turn a corner and there's a temple and it might have only been there five years (I was surprised by very aged buildings which were built in the late 90s or even more recently) or it might pre-date Uncle Ho or even the French. And then there's the constant building going on - often it was hard to tell if they were putting something up or tearing it down. After a while I gave up trying to guess. It reminded me of what someone told me was the "purpose" of men (as distinct from women) in my early years at varsity - Build and Destroy.

It was strange being around so much history. There were public advertisements on billboards all over the place with obviously handpainted pictures featuring happy workers, soldiers, mothers, all doing something to further the republic no doubt. The wording was always in Vietnamese, so I have no idea what they were actually talking about. We had arrived not long after the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Socialist Party so there were tons of red flags with yellow stars and banners proclaiming this (or at least I think they were - anything that refered to 3.2 I assumed related). Being a country in which so much has happened there seemed to be anniversaries to commemorate something every few days - quite a change from little ol' new New Zealand.

Almost as ubiquitous as the communist style painted billboards were the public service announcements regarding AIDS. Reasonably graphic pictures, handpainted again, showed skulls and needles to get the message across. They didn't seem to refer to any safe sex message, but again I couldn't read the words so don't know. Certainly didn't see any pictures of condoms though.

I'm not sure how much of a threat AIDS is to the Vietnamese but expiring from traffic fume overload has got to be a major source of health problems - many people riding about town on their motorcycles or bicycles wore little masks hooked over their ears to cover their mouths and I was very tempted to get one. At first we thought it might be the Bird Flu thing, but once we'd been on the streets for five minutes we understood - petrol is of variable octane and clearly mufflers were not of the highest quality - all those people, all those motorbikes, create a hell of a lot of bad smelly air. Pity 0800 SMOKEY isn't a free call from Vietnam.

tbc...