The Heat is on in Saigon (and Cambodia)

This was the stop on the itinerary about which I most excited and apprehensive. My plan was to spend three days (2 nights) in Cambodia and the last two days in Saigon (yes, its okay to call it Saigon again – throughout the trip I never heard a local call it anything else).  I’ve been counting the days until I’d see Angkor Watt, but also quite nervous about Phnom Penh, as I knew that the remnants of the Khmer Rouge would probably leave me torn apart.  I was nervous about being American in Vietnam.  For my two days in Saigon, I was planning on visiting the Cu Chi tunnels as well as the War Remnants Museum, previously named The Museum of American Atrocities.  I was prepared for an uncomfortable few days. 

Cambodia did upset me. Tuol Sleng (also called the Genocide Museum) was possibly the most gruesome and upsetting thing I’ve ever seen.  It’s a terrible feeling to glance down to see human bone decaying in the ground upon which I stood – to see scraps of clothing embedded in the dirt like I saw at the Killing Fields. I had originally decided that I would mention them only briefly (simply too gruesome) but the thing about it is that the bones sticking out of the thick dirt once belonged to someone’s child/father/wife… I have to write about it because it would be immoral I feel, to ignore those tragedies, despite that I feel queasy even writing this now. Of course that may also have to do with the fact that we’re headed through a stormy Pacific right now.
   
The past few days have been a lesson on war.  I’m a relatively practical person – I’ve always seen war as a necessary evil.  The lessons of Cambodia and Vietnam are conflicting.  In Cambodia I felt offended that anyone could value human life so very little.  It is easy to ignore today’s genocides from the safety of our homes. It is difficult to fathom so many people dying and what that does to a society.
In Vietnam, I learned that war (for lack of a more eloquent term) sucks.  It is just really, really terrible, for all involved.  Prior to SAS, I wondered how I would feel about the world upon my return.  I have learned that we all want the same things: food, shelter, fulfillment, and love.  There are millions of people who have none of these things – I’ve seen too many orphaned children without even shoes they can call their own.  There is a phrase that merchants in Southeast Asia use with English speaking customers.  They show two shirts, two purses – anything, and tell us, “you see, same same, but different.”  I really like that phrase.  It does apply to fake versus real north face backpacks, but it also applies to a larger truth.  It sounds straight out of kindergarten, but what this voyage has shown me is that we are all “same same, but different.”

Day 1: We departed Saigon port and headed to the airport at 11am for our flight to Phnom Penh.  From there, we headed directly to the National Museum with our guide who told us to call him by his last name, Kim, as his first name was too complicated for westerners to pronounce.  The national museum was filled with artifacts thousands of years old.  It would have been better had the descriptions been in a language other than Khmer.  We then took a riverboat ride down the Mekong, during which I spoke with our guide about local politics and his family.  When the ride ended, we headed to the highlight of the day, Palm Tree Orphanage. 

A bit of background on the orphanage: Palm Tree Orphanage was founded by two SAS alum, one of which has the well-known last name of Kellogg.  It provides food, beds, mentors, and schooling to its 96 inhabitants.  These kids were incredible.  As we walked into their home, they descended upon us.  One of the girls, a twelve-year old named Sampors (I had her write it down so I could spell it correctly), immediately ran up and grabbed my hand.  She let go perhaps twice for the entire hour that I was there.  She’s still learning English, so it was sometimes difficult for us to communicate. Still, playing and laughing with her gave us an immediate bond.  She couldn’t play instruments, but still dragged me up to the music room to pretend to play one of the old keyboards that didn’t actually work. 

Although these children are orphans, they are not expecting to be adopted. The goal of the orphanage is to create healthy, educated adults in Cambodia.  In fact, there is an American law that prevents adopting from Cambodia. I don’t know why that is and I am rather offended by its existence.  In many ways, Cambodia felt like a miniature India. They need our help. 
That night we had dinner, and finally arrived to our hotel around 10pm.

Day 2:  Just a warning – I’ve tried to limit my description of this day so that it isn’t too graphic, but I’m about to talk about a lot of events that were tragically ignored by the western world.  We woke up at 6am to arrive at 7:20am at the Tuol Sleng, also known as The Genocide Museum.  Tuol Sleng was first a high school, but when the Khmer Rouge took over, they chose it to be their new prison.  Prior to seeing the Killing Fields, it was the most upsetting thing I’ve ever seen. Tuol Sleng is comprised of three buildings, each with three stories. Each room (still) contains a metal bed and generally some torture devices. In some rooms the floors are still bloodstained. . The thing about it is that this is Cambodia, and so nothing is well funded. Parts of the buildings are falling apart but nothing is off limits. Tourists are free to wander, so many times I found myself alone in a room where hundreds probably died. From 1971-1975 (when the Khmer Rouge regime held the most power), 14,000 people died at Tuol Sleng simply for being educated.  The entire place felt dead and it made me feel ghostly too.  People, no different from Americans, were massacred for being educated – 3-4 million, at least, over a 4 year span.  No one stepped in.  No one stopped this massacre until the Vietnamese found it for their economic benefit. There got to a point at Tuol Sleng when I had to finally break down.  Seeing what people are capable of doing to one another was simply too much.  I can’t imagine how our guide, Kim, felt. He and his sister were orphaned by the regime.  (His father was a professor.)  On our way out of the museum, we were stopped by a beggar, who was the first acid victim that I’d seen. Acid throwing is a huge problem in Cambodia.  Skyy Fitzgerald, a documentary filmmaker who is a partial voyager on Semester at Sea, was actually banned from reentering Cambodia after making a film about this problem.
 
Side note: After more than THIRTY YEARS, the man in charge of Tuol Sleng and responsible for the merciless deaths of 14,000 people is finally standing trial. There was an article in the NYT a few days ago. It hit home a lot closer than it used to.

Next up on our morning of tragedy was a stop at Cambodia’s infamous Killing Fields.  These began simply as places to dump bodies (think concentration camp mass graves) but ended up being another site for holding and killings too.  Due to the amount of people that were being sent to die there, they had to build cells so that they had a place for people to wait before their execution.  I really hate to type this (I’m feeling slightly ill) and I know that its tough to read, but I cannot with good conscience talk about Cambodia and not talk about the atrocities.  This day will stay with me for a long time.  I have walked on this land.  I have glanced down to see human bones beneath my feet.  I have seen the bloodstained scraps of clothing, still trapped in this forsaken ground.  I have seen the tower of sculls, divided by sex and age.  I can’t erase these images from my mind, and I can’t talk about Cambodia without mentioning them. 

Having said all of this, the country is moving forward.  The people are proud of their new direction, despite that Cambodia is still one of the most corrupt and impoverished countries in the world.  One slightly troubling detail – their current Prime Minister was part of the Khmer Rouge regime.  They have elections, but there is large speculation that they are not fairly counted. 
After lunch, we went to the Royal Palace, which is similar to the Grand Palace in Thailand and not worth discussing in great detail.  It was just another giant palace full of jewels that would be better used to feed the starving population.  From here, we left for the to the airport. On the way, Kim thanked us for being coming, and told us how much it meant to Cambodians to have tourists.  He told us how much our presence and money meant to Cambodia. His two children go to private school for 50 dollars a year. He struggles to pay it. When we got close to the airport, he sang a song for us in Khmer.  This is a man who has literally been through hell – he told us stories of walking for days to stay out of the way in the early 70s (these are his earliest memories – he spent years 1-5 with family in the countryside of Cambodia).  He showed us the size of his fist, explaining his ration for a week’s worth of rice.  Kim showed no anger towards those who had done him so much harm.  He just does what he has to in order to survive and support his children and sister.  We adored him and made it our goal to tip his kids into another year of private school.

That night, we flew from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, home of the pride of Cambodia, Angkor Watt.  We were there long enough to take a few pictures and watch a bit of sunset.  That night, our dinner was at a cultural show, which was really just an overpriced tourist destination.  They tried to charge us 3.25 USD for a Diet Coke.  At this point in my travelling, I’ve learned to know that is total crap and that there’s generally a better option within 100 feet. I grabbed a friend, left the cultural show, walked across the street to find Lucky Grocery Store (a chain in Cambodia), and buy Diet Cokes for 50 cents each.  It was also the first time in the trip when I’ve found real American (straight from New Jersey and not yet expired) Skittles.  It was quite exciting.

Day 3: We woke up at 5am to see at Angkor Watt at sunrise.  This was so incredible. We sat quietly, watching the lily pads open and the sun slowly rise from behind the 12th century temple.  After sunrise we went back to the hotel for breakfast before heading back to the Angkor Watt complex. I was unaware of how large Angkor Watt really is. Ninety percent is still buried and it is the world’s largest temple. In the afternoon we visited Bayon, which is famous for the faces carved in to the large stones.  I bought a t-shirt for a dollar just to get a map of the complex. They say that to go through Angkor Watt fully, one needs about a week. We had a day and a half.  That night, we flew back to Vietnam, smelly and with much on our tired minds.

We arrived in Vietnam at 7:30 and I was still in need of a dress. With friends Betsy and Amy, we took a cab from the airport to a market so we could eat real Vietnamese food and I could get a dress made before the stores closed at 8pm.  That night was my first experience with pha (I believe that’s how its spelled – pronounced fa), which is Vietnamese soup. It contains beef, noodles, peppers, leaves of some sort and I have no idea what else. It was delicious and really, really spicy. We were all a step past glistening as we finished our meal.

Day 4: I had been nervous for this day for a while now. I had an all day trip that took me to the Cao Dai temples and the Cu Chi tunnels. The large majority of Vietnam is Buddhist, so those who do practice Cao Daism are only about 3% of the population. It’s a somewhat strange religion – they have three patron saints: a Chinese man I’ve never heard of, a Vietnamese man I’ve never heard of, and Victor Hugo.  I don’t get it. The temples we saw were basically the Vatican of their religion.  I found it disappointing because there were more tourists than followers of the religion.

After lunch, we headed to what I was most nervous to see, the Cu Chi Tunnels. 
The tour of the Tunnels started out with a video meant to explain the use of the tunnels and some tactics that made the Vietnamese victorious. As an American, I found myself feeling very uncomfortable. They talk about the pride one woman felt as she won an award for “Best Killer of the Americans.”  I squirmed on my seat.  We journeyed further into the jungle where our guide (dressed as a Vietcong) showed us traps they’d set up to kill U.S. soldiers. They included trap doors that fell into poisoned spikes of various sizes and types. “This is how we killed the Americans,” he told us excitedly.

We arrived at a tree with a guard beside it. He shuffled some leaves to display the tiny doorway and showed us how to enter and cover our trail with leaves.  He asked if anyone wanted to try.  I hopped into the cement and mud packed hole and closed the entrance behind me before turning on my headlamp.  I peered down this thin tunnel and quickly realized I was alone in a place had served as a hiding place before and after the Vietcong attacked.  I was unnerved and immediately pushed myself out.  I could tell we were headed to the shooting range when I heard the distinctive sound of an AK-47.  One of the tourist activities at the Cu Chi Tunnels is to shoot an AK-47 or a few other guns they have to offer.  I chose not to shoot one. They were charging 10 dollars a bullet and it felt entirely inappropriate considering my location.  On our way out, we were guided through a 20-meter portion of the tunnel.  I made it to the halfway staircase before it was my time to get out of there.  These were the largest tunnels and still they were tiny.  I was crouched over entirely to move through them.  Deeper into the tunnels, it gets so thin that one must belly-crawl.  I couldn’t have handled that.  It amazes me to think that children grew up in the tunnels.  There was no sewer system, so the Vietcong had to wait until nightfall to get out and use the bathroom. It was a world of darkness that lasted for years.  I am optimistically 5’8” and struggled to get through any part of the tunnel.  The American soldiers had no chance of infiltrating this system.  Seeing these up close magnified the tragedy of Vietnam. 

That night, on an entirely different note, I met up with Betsy and Amy to go out to dinner and maybe see a movie.  We discovered the really nice part of Saigon where there was a movie theater on the 12th floor of a mall.  On the 11th was a bowling alley and an arcade.  I watched Vietnamese people play DDR (Dance Dance Revolution).  It was sufficiently intimidating. We ended up not seeing a movie and instead eating KFC for the first time in the trip, despite that we’ve seen it in every single country. (More prevalent than McDonalds – who knew?) After taking pictures in an Asian photo booth, we left to go back to the ship.

Day 5: The next day I explored Saigon with Jeff and Matt.  The morning was spent walking to downtown and stopping at various sites.  We took pictures of propaganda posters (the amount of hammer and sickle flags is staggering) and found both the Reunification Palace and the U.S. Embassy, which is still the same building from the photograph of soldiers departing by helicopter from the roof.  After lunch at what was probably one of the hippest restaurants for young and wealthier Vietnamese (this was accidental, but quite cool), we went to the War Remnants museum. 
The Museum was surprisingly cheap – less than a dollar entrance fee.  The first exhibition had been funded partially by the citizens of Kentucky and was about foreign journalists who had died in Vietnam.  We then proceeded to a room on the numbers wounded and killed under the “South Vietnamese Puppet Government.”  The term “democracy” was entirely absent from the museum.  Outside, they had US tanks, helicopters and launchers to photograph and touch.  I then walked towards the central building, where it became more gruesome again – remember, this used to be called the “Museum of American Atrocities.”
Inside, there is a wall of photographs specifically of Vietnamese women and children running away of Americans with guns.  There is a photograph of an American soldier smiling holding the (very few) remains of a Vietnamese person (unclear if this was male or female).  There are photographs of fields of dead Vietnamese and of burned babies crying.  On the next wall, there was a large exhibition on Agent Orange.  I had noticed throughout Vietnam the large number of malformed individuals.  It struck me now that this was because of American actions.  The wall showed pictures of people born with no ears, a single arm, or babies with nothing but a chest and head.  I was lost in photos when my friend Kelly nudged me and said, “You aren’t going to believe this…” She pulled out her camera and began to tell me about her morning.  The night before she had met a Clemson graduate who was in Vietnam volunteering at an orphanage.  Because she goes to Clemson too, he invited her to come see his work.  She arrived that morning to a Buddhist temple where monks had created a space to house a few infants.  They were in metal cribs and at least four of them had the same expanded skulls that we saw on the walls in front of us.  She was clueless this morning as to why those children had been born that way, and suddenly realized that it was because of us.  Agent Orange was definitely not covered in my high school education on Vietnam. I arrived at this museum entirely unprepared.

In the last building was a recreation of the infamous Tiger Cages, complete with wax Vietnamese figures trapped by the Americans. 

I take all of this with a large grain of salt. I know that it is obviously a very skewed view and that this museum does not reflect the feeling of the Vietnamese people, who were some of the nicest, most giving and helpful people I’ve yet to meet.  They want to move forward.  They genuinely like American visitors.  If anything, it is their government that holds them back.  It’s time for Ho Chi Minh City to officially be back to Saigon.  The war is over, despite that its remnants remain ever-present in Vietnamese society. 
I left Jeff and Matt in the Ben Throng Market, nearby where I’d had a dress made the first day. I shopped a bit as I waited for my dress to be delivered to the tailors.  I arrived back on the ship at 7pm, and was in bed by 10.  It had been a physically and mentally exhausting five days.