Weekend in Vietnam
Beng and I snuck out a couple of weekends ago for a few days in Ho Chi Minh City — what used to be Saigon — to take advantage of my Mabuhay Miles which were about to expire at the end of the month. I would’ve much preferred for us to go to Hanoi, which I had last visited 15 years ago on my first and only trip to Vietnam, but PAL doesn’t fly there, so we had to settle for HCMC, which I remembered as being as noisy and chaotic as Manila.
It still was, when we got there — the dust was flying everywhere, stirred up by roadwork and new construction — but one difference I immediately noticed was that the hordes of bicycles I’d had to wade through to cross the street had been replaced almost universally by motorcycles, hundreds of them streaming at you like a swarm of angry bees.
The first time she met Vietnamese traffic, Beng stood paralyzed at the sidewalk’s edge, utterly terrified by the prospect of having to plow through it like Moses in the Red Sea. She had good reason to be afraid: in Shanghai last December, she had made the unscheduled acquaintance of a motorcycle and its driver, who gave her a mouthful of choice Shanghainese to boot. There are hardly any stoplights in Saigon, and except for the most important corners, no one seemed to mind them much. “You just need to take a deep breath, take a step forward, and keep walking,” I told Beng as much as I was reminding myself. “Don’t worry, they’ll adjust to you and move around you. Don’t stop suddenly, because that will just force them to stop, too, and cause an accident!” Beng didn’t look convinced one bit, but I grabbed her hand and dragged her into the maelstrom. “I’m never coming back here!” she screamed above the tumult, although we had barely been an hour in the city.
Barely an hour, and we were already on our way to my not-too-secret objective, Le Cong Kieu Street — Saigon’s antiques row, home to a possible plethora of vintage fountain pens. Giving Beng another stamp on her passport was surely generous, but I had an ulterior motive in returning to Saigon. Fifteen years earlier, on a sidewalk leading up to the Opera House, I had chanced upon a vendor selling an assortment of used goods — including a fabulous pen I’d never seen before, a 1920s French-made “Kaolo” safety pen with its woodgrain barrel encased in chased aluminum, a rarity for its time. I swiped that pen for the vendor’s asking price of $20, and — seeing other pens in her trove — swore to return the next day, as it had gotten very dark, and I’d already had two men try to pick my pocket earlier. Of course, and alas, when I turned up again at that same spot, the seller was nowhere to be found.
So now I was back with a vengeance and a fistful of dollars, having been told by an equally footloose friend that bundles of pens were to be found in the shops of Le Cong Kieu and nearby Dong Khoi Street.
On top of our free tickets (loaded, however, with a litany of taxes and surcharges), Beng and I had made the serendipitous choice of being booked into a cozy, modern, but inexpensive hotel, the Lavender, which stood right next to HCMC’s own version of our Greenhills bazaar, Ben Thanh market, which was also just a couple of blocks away from Le Cong Kieu.
As it turned out, LCK and later Dong Khoi Street did contain a small hoard of pens, including two more Kaolos, but they were either too expensive, or I already had them, or they had some mortal flaw like a missing nib to make them worthwhile. I came away with a pretty wartime Pilot in marbled amethyst and a couple of Parker Vacumatics from the ’30s — and with the pens out of the way, we settled into serious tourism: eating, shopping, traveling by bus to some island on the Mekong River where they tried to sell you snakes and giant scorpions pickled in a jar.
A highlight was a walk to and through the War Remnants Museum in downtown HCMC, a storehouse of leftover armaments, ordnance, and barely diminished anguish. With its colorful shirts and silk scarves, the museum shop at the end of the tour lent an incongruously bright note to the surroundings, as did the chilled fruit drinks in the freezer, by then desperately needed to slake the thickening dryness in one’s throat.
Over the next couple of days, Beng’s attitude would improve along with her street-crossing expertise, encouraged by the plenitude of cheap tropical fruit turgid with syrupy goodness — atis, star apple, chico, macopa. The bowls of steaming pho — with strips of tender beef swimming in a bed of glassine noodles — were more than a fair reward for a day’s traipsing and street-crossing around the city. At night, the street in front of our hotel was transformed within minutes into a parked caravan of stalls hawking food on the one side and clothes and lanterns on the other.
For Filipino tourists, Vietnam — like Thailand, but much less-traveled — offers that most amenable of options: something familiar enough yet also strange enough, another version of our might-have-been, indeed a country with which we’ve shared the sad, scarring patrimony of war but which, like ours, surprises us with sudden bursts of beauty. Like I’d noticed on my first visit 15 years earlier, it was a place in a hurry to get over its past and to modernize and to sell itself, sometimes with bizarre effect (like T-shirts at the War Remnants Museum declaring “Good Morning, Vietnam!”).
Ho Chi Minh City wasn’t quite as sprawling and as mall-crazy as Manila yet, and parts of it looked like Cubao might have, pre-Gateway. Best of all for the casual visitor, it was still very affordable, with a full seafood dinner for two costing little more than P500, and a day trip to the Mekong Delta — complete with bus, lunch, boat rides, and bottled water — at just P800 per person.
When we heard other excited voices in Ben Thanh market speaking Tagalog, we understood not just what they were saying, but why they were there at all.
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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
