Well I’ve been ca phe sua nong-free for about 3 days now and it has not been fun. I have definitely had symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. I’ve had a terrible headache and I’ve been irritable and tired. Our office manager Thuy keeps telling me that I don’t “look well.” Today I’m feeling a little better so I hope that means I’m coming out of it.
I don’t know if I am extra-sensitive to caffeine or what, but I get super-wired when I drink coffee, etc., and feel terrible when I stop. My former co-workers at MMM will laugh, because I was always “quitting” drinking caffeine, then I’d have a busy week and be back on it, then off of it again, etc.
So I’m sure I’ll be back on it sometime soon but for now I’m going to limit myself to green tea (tra xanh). I’ve been self-medicating my ca phe sua nong withdrawal with green tea, Panadol, and coke-fueled all-nighters in Vietnamese strip clubs. Not really - just green tea and Panadol.
I am well aware that I may be eating a lot of crow once Ole Miss’ season gets underway this Saturday against Memphis, but for now I can’t help but gloat over this:
The name of my school in Vietnamese is Truong Dai Hoc Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi Nhan Van, which means University of Social Sciences and Humanities. (It is one of the six divisional schools comprising Ho Chi Minh University.)
Somehow TDHKHXHNV just doesn’t roll off of the tongue like UGA or USC or whatever. I told my class that I was going to get t-shirts printed up with TDHKHXHNV on the front and I may actually do it. You can probably get t-shirts printed up here for $1 a piece or something. I haven’t looked into it.
I am trying to get some business cards printed up because the Vietnamese are big on exchanging business cards. I asked one of the workers in our office who typically orders the business cards how much they would cost - thinking it would be $20 or $30. She said they would be 30,000 dong, which is less than $2.
[This post will not be much use to those of you living in HCMC, as I am afraid I uong'ed too many bia last night and forgot to get the name of the place or a business card. I'll go back and get the info and post it soon.]
My friend Trong from work invited me to go with him to meet some friends of his for drinks last night. We rode a long way outside of my normal stomping grounds to a little bar/restaurant near Ton San Nhat International Airport. We sat at a very high rooftop patio that overlooked the airport runways and every ten minutes or so a huge plane would land (we were apparently overlooking the landing runway as I did not see any planes take off).
It was actually pretty neat - we were so close to the runway that the planes would come down very close over our heads. Every time a plane would land, everyone on the roof (all Vietnamese except for me) would stop their conversations, etc., and turn to watch the plane land.
I should have taken my camera but did not. I’ll go back soon and will take some photos. (The above shot is just one I pulled off of Flickr.)
One of Trong’s friends is this named Pha. (When I went to the pagoda a couple of weeks ago it was with Trong and Pha’s family.) Anyway, there is a total of 8 children in Pha’s family - 5 boys and 3 girls. I’ve met about 5 of the 8, plus Pha’s mother.
To tell you how far out we were from downtown Saigon, usually when I get into a taxi and tell them di duong Me Linh (di meaning go, duong meaning street, and Me Linh being the name of Tim’s street - I’m housesitting for Tim again right now while he’s in Bangkok on business), they ask what quan, or district, I am talking about. I guess there are multiple Me Linh streets in the various districts. Anyway, last night when I got into the taxi out near the airport and told the driver “di duong Me Linh”, he asked “In Saigon?” And it was a 90,000 dong cab ride (about $5.60), which is by far the most expensive cab ride I’ve had in Vietnam.
So the above is the new “motorcycle” - I would call it a moped - that I am getting ready to buy - the Honda Wave S. I am buying one used from my coworker Nhung’s fiance, Thai. Thai bought it new in February 2007 for around $1200, and wants to sell it to me for around $1,000. I’m going to try to talk him down to $900 or so since it’s got six months and about 6,000 kilometers on it already. I’ll post a photo of the actual moped once I buy it, but I looked at it last night and it looks to be in very good shape.
Two important questions:
1. Can I drive it?
2. Am I going to get creamed?
Notwithstanding my earlier experience with Tim’s Vespa, I think I can drive it. This one has an electric starter so you just turn the key. It also does not have a clutch. It is a manual transmission, but you just change gears with a foot shifter - no clutching involved. I’ve drive four-wheelers, etc., with this same setup, so I think I’ll be able to drive it. As Tim says, if 80-year-old grandmothers and 14-year-olds are out there driving around, surely I can figure it out.
As far as getting creamed, I will admit that the traffic here is insane and looks to be dangerous. The more I watch traffic here, it reminds me of a school of fish. The bigger the vehicle, the more right of way it is given. The mopeds travel together in clusters like schools of fish, and dart in and out of the larger vehicles. Also, if a cluster of mopeds waits too long for a gap in an oncoming line of cars, suddenly they will all just go ahead and pull out - forcing the oncoming vehicle to slow down for them. In America, it would be instant death, but somehow it works here. They honk their horns a lot - but it’s not out of anger, it’s to let the other drivers know they’re there. It seriously works like a form of sonar. They’re all the time letting each other know where the the other mopeds are around them and they all react accordingly. It’s actually pretty amazing to watch once you’ve overcome the white-knuckle fear you experience during your first few trips on the back of a xe om.
I am going to be extremely conservative on mine and I am also going to wear a helmet. Right now, an incredibly small number of Vietnamese wear helmets. But starting on September 2nd, Vietnamese law requires all government workers - policemen, soldiers, agency workers, etc. - to start wearing helmets or be fined. Then in December that law goes into effect for all Vietnamese. I told Tim we should have gotten set up in the helmet business a year or so ago because effective December 2007 the whole country is going to be buying helmets for the first time.
So the bottom line is I am not overly worried about it. Hell, I drove in Atlanta traffic for six years - I should be able to handle this.
Okay, here, finally is my post about my trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels on Sunday.
I booked my 1/2-day trip with Kim Cafe - which is the same travel agency I booked my three-day trip to the Mekong Delta with back in 2001. The bus ride from Saigon to Cu Chi - about 70 kilometers - and the tour guide for the entire half day cost only $4 USD. Admission to the Cu Chi Tunnels was another 70,000 dong (about $4.38 USD). I paid another $5 USD extra to take a boat back to Saigon instead of riding back on the bus (video below) - so the cost of the whole trip for me was $13.38 USD. Oh, and I paid about $6.25 to fire two rounds out of an AK-47 (video below) and three rounds out of an M-16.
According to our guide, the Cu Chi Tunnels were a network of tunnels approximately 250 kilometers long - about 155 miles long - that were dug by hand by the villagers in and around Cu Chi and used extensively by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. Cu Chi was important because it was right at the end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail - the major supply line from north Vietnam into the south - and was also the main base of operations for the Viet Cong as they harassed the U.S. and south Vietnam forces around Saigon.
The tunnels were very narrow - just large enough to accommodate the Vietnamese, who are typically a lot smaller-framed than Americans. Here’s a camouflaged entrance to one of the tunnels. (The top - which is to the upper left of the photo - just below the black shoe - has obviously been lifted off - when it was in place an covered with leaves and dirt, you couldn’t even tell it was there.)
Here is a shot looking straight down into the tunnel - kind of scary:
Here is a rather blurry photo of me coming out of the tunnel - quickly! I dropped all of the way into this tunnel and underground - the entrance was so tight that my shoulders scraped against the sides of the entrance. Once I got underground, I immediately got incredibly claustrophobic and seriously wanted out of there immediately. Had kind of a momentary freak out. You can’t tell it from the back of my head in this photo but I was very happy to be out of that hole and I declined to go into any more tunnels the rest of the day:
Amazingly, the tunnels were built directly under three major American military bases commonly referred to as the Iron Triangle. The U.S. and south Vietnamese forces operating out of those bases were constantly on search-and-destroy missions for the Viet Cong forces and for years had no idea that the Viet Cong they were looking for were literally right beneath their feet. Some of the tunnels exited directly into the American military bases - thus enabling the Viet Cong to steal weapons and supplies from the bases.
Here are two photos of a map of the area and a close-up shot of that map. The black lines within the red area on the map are the bulk of the tunnels. The American military bases are dark blue:
Entire villages of people lived underground for years in the Cu Chi tunnels. The first level, a few meters beneath the ground, was made up of the main living quarters. (You can see the various levels in the photo of the diorama, above.) The Viet Cong had all kinds of ingenious methods for remaining undetected. For instance, the smoke from their cooking fires would be diffused through a series of rooms such that when it finally exited at ground level it was so thin that it wasn’t even visible to the human eye.
The second level, four to six meters deep, consisted of meeting areas where the Viet Cong would meet to communicate with each other. This second level was deep enough that soldiers on the surface could not hear anyone speaking.
The third and final level, eight to ten meters beneath the surface, was made up of the escape tunnels, all of which ultimately connected to the nearby Saigon River. The tunnels actually terminated below the surface level of the river so that the escaping Viet Cong could simply swim out into and down the river underwater without being detected. As they were escaping, the Viet Cong would open up big baskets of cobras and scorpions, which would then storm through the tunnels and be waiting for the south Vietnamese “tunnel rats” who were crawling through the tunnels looking for the Viet Cong.
[Update: I heard from the father of a friend of mine who actually worked in one of the three military bases above the Cu Chi tunnels - the 25th Infantry Division - that it wasn't just south Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers who were "tunnel rats" - American soldiers were also tunnel rats and the other American soldiers considered them true heroes for risking their lives going into those tunnels.]
Our guide said that some escaping Vietnam would never surface in the river - instead staying under water and breathing through a reed, sometimes for the entire next day. (The Viet Cong were basically nocturnal. They would sleep in the tunnels during the day and only come out at night.)
The Viet Cong were big on other types of traps in addition to the baskets of cobras and scorpions. Here is a video of our guide telling us about a punji stake pit the Viet Cong would use to catch and kill dogs the American and south Vietnam forces sent into the tunnels:
Here is a photo of a guy demonstrating a long line of different booby traps - with names like the “leg breaker” and the “armpit spike” - used by the Viet Cong in the tunnels:
Here is a photo of another type of booby trap called the “door trap”:
The Viet Cong knew that the invading forces generally wore helmets, flak jackets, and heavy boots - such that the only really unprotected areas were the legs and groin. So they would hang this hinged, swinging set of boards fixed with spikes from the ceiling inside a door of one of the meeting rooms, etc., in the tunnels. When the invading soldier would come through the door, the boards would release and swing down toward the soldier. The soldier would instinctively raise his weapon and strike the upper board with the butt or stock of his gun, which would stop the upper board but cause the lower, hinged board to swing upward and into the soldier with even more force - driving the spikes on the lower boards into the soldiers legs and groin. Those guys were not playing around.
On a lighter note, I finally found a Vietnamese girlfriend during my trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels:
I’ve got to get her to quit smoking, but other than that she’s awesome. Very laid back.
Here’s a shot of the sign leading to the shooting range where I shot the AK-47 and M-16:
The next time I go - like when I take someone who’s visiting me here - I am going to invest in a lot more ammunition and fire the AK-47 and M-16 on fully automatic. Everything is so cheap here that 100,000 dong for 5 shots seems like a lot of money, but really when are you going to be able to fire AK-47s and M-16s on fully automatic again? If you invest $62 USD or whatever for 50 shots, it’s not really going to kill you.
All in all, it was a very interesting trip. A little touristy, but about what you’d expect, really. Our guide was very good and knew a lot about the war and about the Cu Chi Tunnels in particular. I think the 1/2-day trip was about the right amount of time - I don’t see any need to do the full-day trip.
This video is of the daughter (con gai) of the maid at my guesthouse:
The woman in in the video is not the maid - she is Chi (Mrs.) Hung, who owns the guesthouse with her husband. I came in and Chi Hung and the maid - whose name I think is Hien but I’m not 100% sure as she speaks zero English - were sitting there with the maid’s three-year-old daughter, whose name I think is Ha (also not sure).
The daughter was so cute but was a little freaked out by me and wasn’t really too interested in talking to me. When I started shooting the above video of her, she started rubbing her eyes to cover her face and wouldn’t even look at me. Chi Hung was trying to get her to move her hands away from her face and look at me and finally the daughter had enough. I have no idea what she is saying to me, but I can only imagine it is the Vietnamese equivalent of “Get that camera out of my face!”
I’ve seen her a couple of times since. She is still not interested in talking to me, but still as cute as she can be.
On Sunday afternoon, I was walking around an area of town I wanted to check out - basically near the intersection of Hai Ba Trung and Dien Bien Phu streets - and the skies opened up on me:
I stood under the awning of a jewelry store for about 20 minutes before and the rain, thunder, and lightning just kept getting worse and worse. Finally, I flagged down a cab but I got soaked even just stepping from the awning to the cab.
The rain here is pretty intense - big huge rain drops and a lot of them. It’s funny because you’ll be walking along or cruising along on the back of a xe om or whatever and it will start raining a little bit - kind of a drizzle or even a pretty good rain but the Vietnamese will all just keep buzzing along. But as soon as the really big rain drops hit, the Vietnamese pull over all at once and put on their rain ponchos (you see plenty of them in the above video). Then they just carry on as if they were not in the middle of a torrential downpour.
Meanwhile, whitey hides under a jewelry store awning.
Yesterday (Monday), Tim and the rest of his staff and I went to lunch at a restaurant called Com Nieu Sai Gon. Tim’s office has a tradition where every time a new person starts - in this case me - they have to take the whole office out for lunch. Com Nieu Sai Gon is a nice place. It is known primarily for the fact that when the waiters bring your rice (com) out, they bring it out in clay pots, break the clay pots, and throw the rice inside (which is kind of cooked into the shape of a thick pancake) across the room. Here is a film of the waiters breaking pots and throwing rice around:
Here is a photo of our whole office at lunch:
From left to right, Trong (logistics), Ut (Tim’s maid), Thuy (office manager), Huong (accountant), Nhung (special projects), Tim (giam doc = big boss), me, Toan (logistics), and Vinh (sales manager).
Here’s another photo of the staff as we were leaving:
It was a fun lunch. The whole bill for nine people was less than $50 and we ordered a lot of food!
I still haven’t gotten around to putting up the long post about my trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. (I think I got distracted making and posting “Don’t Hate the Player; Hate the Game.”)
In the meantime, here are some compiled video clips from the boat ride back from Cu Chi to Saigon along the Saigon River:
[Update: There is a lot of wind noise on this video, so you may want to turn your volume down or off. It's also not very heavy on the action, but it starts way out in the country where there's not much to see and ends up pulling into the boat docks in downtown Saigon. So it just gives those of you who haven't been here an idea of what Vietnam looks like. There's also a kind of neat shot of a huge statue that faces the river in downtown Saigon. I heard the story about him when I was here in 2001, but I can't remember exactly. I think he is some sort of guardian of the city.]
