With final exams finished and ONLY one day till departure, there is a buzz amongst all us girls. Whether it is constant stress about what to pack, or figuring out which insurance to get, we are down to the wire and couldn’t be more excited!
For the past few months, we’ve had weekly meetings in preparation for this upcoming CBT Vietnam trip. We have been emailing back and forth with connections in Vietnam and are eager to finally meet everyone. Like all the trips before us, we hope to build strong relationships and bring back memories that will last a lifetime.
But am I getting ahead of myself? We haven’t even left yet! Right now, I need to focus on making sure I don’t forget anything and mentally preparing myself that I will be flying to Vietnam in one day!
See you soon Vietnam.
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Ho Chi Minh City – or Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, to give it its full Vietnamese title – is Vietnam’s centre of commerce and the country’s biggest city, though not its administrative capital – an honour that rests with Hanoi. As a result of the sweeping economic changes wrought by doi moi in 1986, this effervescent city, perched on the banks of the Saigon River and still known as Saigon to its eight million or so inhabitants, has changed its image from that of a war-torn city to one of a thriving metropolis, challenging Singapore, Bangkok and the other traditional Southeast Asian powerhouses. All the accoutrements of economic success – fine restaurants, flash hotels, glitzy bars and clubs, and shops selling imported luxury goods – are here, adding a glossy veneer to the city’s hotchpotch landscape of French stones of empire, venerable pagodas and austere, Soviet-style housing blocks.
Sadly, however, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is still full of people for whom economic progress has not yet translated into food, housing and jobs. Street children roam the tourist enclaves hawking books, postcards, lottery tickets and cigarette lighters; limbless mendicants haul themselves about on crude trolleys; and watchful pickpockets prowl crowded streets on the lookout for unguarded wallets. Though the number of beggars is gradually declining, tourists must quickly come to accept them as a hassle that goes with the territory. In addition, the arrival, en masse, of wealthy Westerners has lured many women into prostitution, for which the go-go bars of Dong Khoi became famous during the American War.
If Hanoi is a city of romance and mellow charms, then Ho Chi Minh City is its antithesis, a fury of sights and sounds, and the crucible in which Vietnam’s rallying fortunes are boiling. Few corners of the city afford respite from the cacophony of construction work casting up new office blocks and hotels with logic-defying speed. An increasing number of cars and minibuses jostle with an organic mass of state-of-the-art Honda SUVs, choking the tree-lined streets and boulevards. Amid this melee, the local people go about their daily life: smartly dressed schoolkids wander past streetside baguette-sellers; women shoppers ride motorbikes clad in gangster-style bandanas to protect their skin from the sun and dust; while teenagers in designer jeans chirrup into mobile phones. Much of the fun of being in Ho Chi Minh City derives from the simple pleasure of absorbing its flurry of activity – something best done from the seat of a cyclo or a roadside café. To blink is to miss some new and singular sight, be it a motorbike stacked high with piglets bound for the market, or a boy on a bicycle rapping out a staccato tattoo on pieces of bamboo to advertise noodles for sale.
HCMC is divided into 24 districts, though tourists rarely travel beyond districts One, Three and Five. In addition, an increasing number of expats reside in Phu My Hung, aka South Saigon, in district Seven – a squeaky-clean suburb that wouldn’t look out of place in Singapore, making quite a contrast to the rest of this seething metropolis. The city proper hugs the west bank of the Saigon River, and its central area, District One, nestles in the hinge formed by the confluence of the river with the Ben Nghe Channel; traditionally the French Quarter of the city, this area is still widely known as Saigon. Dong Khoiis its delicate backbone, and around the T-shape it forms with Le Duan Boulevardare located several of the city’s museums and colonial remnants. However, many of the city’s other sights are scattered further afield, so visitors have to effect a dot-to-dot of the sights that appeal most. These invariably include one or more of the museums that pander to the West’s fixation with the American War, the pick of the bunch being the War Remnants Museumand Ho Chi Minh City Museum.
For some visitors, the war is their primary frame of reference and such historical hot spots as the Reunification Palacerank highly on their itineraries. Yet the city pre-dates American involvement by several centuries, and not all of its sights revolve around planes, tanks and rusting ordnance. Ostentatious reminders of French rule abound, among them such memorable buildings as Notre Dame Cathedraland the grandiose Hotel de Ville– but even these look spanking-new when compared to gloriously musty edifices like Quan Am Pagodaand the Jade Emperor Pagoda, just a couple of the many captivating places of worship across the city. And if the chaos becomes too much, you can escape to the relative calm of theBotanical Gardens– also home to the city’s History Museum.
It’s one of Ho Chi Minh City’s many charms that once you’ve exhausted, or been exhausted by, all it has to offer, paddy fields, beaches and wide-open countryside are not far away. The most popular trip out of the city is to the Cu Chi tunnels, where villagers dug themselves out of the range of American shelling. The tunnels are often twinned with a tour around the fanciful Great Temple of the indigenous Cao Dai religion at Tay Ninh. A brief taster of the Mekong Delta atMy Thoor a dip in the South China Sea at Ho Cocare also eminently possible in a long day’s excursion.
The best time to visit tropical Ho Chi Minh City is in the dry season, which runs from December through to April. During the wet season, May to November, there are frequent tropical storms, though these won’t disrupt your travels too much. Average temperatures, year-round, hover between 26°C and 29°C; March, April and May are the hottest months.
Brief history
Knowledge of Ho Chi Minh City’s early history is sketchy at best. Between the first and sixth centuries, the territory on which it lies fell under the nominal rule of the Funan Empire to the west. Funan was subsequently absorbed by the Kambuja peoples of the pre-Angkor Chen La Empire, but it is unlikely that these imperial machinations had much bearing upon the sleepy fishing backwater that would later develop into Ho Chi Minh City.
Khmer fishermen eked out a living here, building their huts on the stable ground just north of the delta wetlands, which made it ideal for human settlement. Originally named Prei Nokor, it flourished as an entrepô for Cambodian boats pushing down the Mekong River, and by the seventeenth century it boasted a garrison and a mercantile community that embraced Malay, Indian and Chinese traders.
Such a dynamic settlement was bound to draw attention from the north. By the eighteenth century, the Viets had subdued the kingdom of Champa, and this area was swallowed up by Hué’s Nguyen Dynasty. With new ownership came a new name, Saigon, thought to be derived from the Vietnamese word for the kapok tree. Upon the outbreak of the Tay Son Rebellion, in 1772, Nguyen Anh bricked the whole settlement into a walled fortress, the eight-sided Gia Dinh Citadel. The army that put down the Tay Son brothers included an assisting French military force, who grappled for several decades to undermine Vietnamese control in the region and develop a trading post in Asia. Finally, in 1861, they seized Saigon, using Emperor Tu Duc’s persecution of French missionaries as a pretext. The 1862 Treaty of Saigon declared the city the capital of French Cochinchina.
Colonial-era Saigon
Ho Chi Minh City owes much of its form and character to the French colonists: channels were filled in, marshlands drained and steam tramways set to work along its regimental grid of tamarind-shaded boulevards, which by the 1930s sported names like Boulevard de la Somme and Rue Rousseau. Flashy examples of European architecture were erected, cafés and boutiques sprang up to cater for its new, Vermouth-sipping, baguette-munching citizens and the city was imbued with such an all-round Gallic air that Somerset Maugham, visiting in the 1930s, found it reminiscent of “a little provincial town in the south of France, a blithe and smiling little place”. The French colons (colonials) bankrolled improvements to Saigon with the vast profits they were able to cream from exporting Vietnam’s rubber and rice out of the city’s rapidly expanding seaport.
On a human level, however, French rule was invariably harsh; dissent crystallized in the form of strikes through the 1920s and 1930s, but the nationalist movement hadn’t gathered any real head of steam before World War II’s tendrils spread to Southeast Asia. At its close, the Potsdam Conference of 1945 set the British Army the task of disarming Japanese troops in southern Vietnam. Arriving in Saigon two months later, they promptly returned power to the French and so began thirty years of war. Saigon saw little action during the anti-French war, which was fought mostly in the countryside and resulted in the French capitulation at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Saigon in the American War
Designated the capital of the Republic of South Vietnam by President Diem in 1955, Saigon was soon both the nerve centre of the American war effort, and its R&R capital, with a slough of sleazy bars along Dong Khoi (known then as Tu Do) catering to GIs on leave from duty. Despite the Communist bomb attacks and demonstrations by students and monks that periodically disturbed the peace, these were good times for Saigon, whose entrepreneurs prospered on the back of the tens of thousands of Americans posted here. The gravy train ran out of steam with the withdrawal of American troops in 1973, and two years later the Ho Chi Minh Campaign rolled into the city and through the gates of the presidential palace and the Communists were in control. Within a year, Saigon had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
Post-reunification Saigon
The war years extracted a heavy toll: American carpet-bombing of the Vietnamese countryside forced millions of refugees into the relative safety of the city, and ill-advised, post-reunification policies triggered a social and economic stagnation whose ramifications still echo like ripples on a lake. Persecution of southerners with links to the Americans saw many thousands sent to re-education camps. Millions more fled the country by boat.
Only in 1986, when the economic liberalization, doi moi, was established, and a market economy reintroduced, did the fortunes of the city show signs of taking an upturn. Today, more than two decades later, the city’s resurgence is well advanced and its inhabitants are eyeing the future with unprecedented optimism.
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Touring the orchards, paddy fields and swamplands of the Mekong Delta, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve stepped into the pages of a geography textbook. A comma-shaped flatland stretching from Ho Chi Minh’s city limits southwest to the Gulf of Thailand, the delta is Vietnam’s rice bowl, an agricultural miracle that pumps out more than a third of the country’s annual food crop from just ten percent of its total land mass. Rice may be the delta’s staple crop, but coconut palms, fruit orchards and sugar-cane groves also thrive in its nutrient-rich soil, and the sight of conical-hatted farmers tending their land is one of Vietnam’s most enduring images. To the Vietnamese, the region is known as Cuu Long, “Nine Dragons”, a reference to the nine tributaries of the Mekong River, which dovetail across plains fashioned by millennia of flood-borne alluvial sediment.
Surprisingly, agriculture gripped the delta only relatively recently. Under Cambodian sway until the close of the seventeenth century, the region was sparsely inhabited by the Khmer krom, or “downstream Khmer”, whose settlements were framed by swathes of marshland. The eighteenth century saw the Viet Nguyen lords steadily broaden their sphere of influence to encompass the delta, though by the 1860s France had taken over the reins of government. Sensing the huge profits to be gleaned from such fertile land, French colons spurred Vietnamese peasants to tame and till tracts of the boggy delta; the peasants, realizing their colonial governors would pay well for rice harvests, were quick to comply. Ironically, the same landscape that had served the French so well also provided valuable cover for the Viet Minh resistance fighters who sought to overthrow them; later it did the same for the Viet Cong, who had well-hidden cells here – inciting the Americans to strafe the area with bombs and defoliants.
A visit to the Mekong Delta is so memorable because of the region’s diversity. Everyday scenes include children riding on the backs of water buffalo or cycling to school through country lanes clad in white ao dai; rice workers stooping in a sea of emerald; market vendors grinning behind stacks of fruit; bright yellow incense sticks drying at the roadside; flocks of storks circling over a sanctuary at dusk; Khmer monks walking mindfully in the shadow of pastel pagodas; locals scampering over monkey bridges or rowing boats on the delta’s maze of channels.
There are over a dozen towns in the delta with facilities for tourists, though some are rarely visited as they are not on the way to anywhere. My Tho is well geared up for boat trips, and near enough to Ho Chi Minh City to be seen on a day-trip: it affords an appetizing glimpse of the delta’s northernmost tributary, the Tien Giang. From My Tho, laidback Ben Tre and the bounteous fruit orchards besieging it are only a hop and a skip away. Cao Lanh is strictly for bird enthusiasts, but Sa Dec, with its timeless river scenes and riotously colourful flower nurseries, has a more universal appeal, while just down the road, Vinh Long is another jumping-off point for boat trips.
Many visitors spend a day or two in Can Tho, the delta’s biggest settlement, to take advantage of its decent hotels and restaurants and to recharge batteries before venturing out to the floating markets nearby. From Can Tho, there’s something to be said for dropping down to the foot of the delta, where the swampland that surrounds Ca Mau can be explored by boat, and Mui Ca Mau signals journey’s end in Vietnam. Pulling up, en route, at the Khmer stronghold of Soc Trang is especially rewarding if your trip coincides with the colourful Oc Om Bok festival (Nov or Dec), during which the local Khmer community takes to the river to stage spectacular longboat races. Northwest of Can Tho meanwhile, and a stone’s throw from the Cambodian border, is the ebullient town of Chau Doc, south of which Sam Mountain provides a welcome undulation in the surrounding plains. The opening of the border here has brought a steady stream of travellers going on to Phnom Penh by boat, and several of them rest up a few days here before leaving the country.
Ha Tien, a remote border town surrounded by Khmer villages, is the best place to hop on a boat to Phu Quoc. The town has also become popular for its international border crossing, which allows beach bums to slide along the coast from Phu Quoc Island to Sihanoukville in Cambodia or vice versa.
Given its seasonal flooding, the best time to visit the delta is, predictably enough, in the dry season, which runs from December to May. Mekong Travel, Mekong Tuorist, Indochina Tours, Indochina Travel, Travel & Tourism, Vietnam 2014, vietnam beach holidays, Vietnam Holidays, Vietnam Tourism,
Well the CBT Vietnam team's event of the first screening of Kyle Sandilands' "When the Villagers Left" was a success, with over 120 in attendance! It was not without a lot of last minute calling, facebooking, tweeting, and texting though as earlier in the week we were concerned that we would not meet the goal we of 100 tickets.
I personally phoned, texted, emailed and mailed every person I could think of and invited them to the event. I felt like mission control, counting out loud every time we sold another ticket. 40 soon jumped to 50, then soared to 70. I checked the Eventbrite page more than I checked my email, Facebook and Instagram combined.
Everyone worked tirelessly on this event. Hedieh collected five amazing films to support Kyle's, Emily organized the venue rentals while Sabrina dealt with our suppliers and coordinated the liquor licence, and Maggie took on posting signs everywhere and anywhere building awareness for the event. Working as a team was incredible which bodes well in terms of the successes we will be able to reach when we travel to Vietnam.
This entire event never would have happened without our fearless leaders. Stephanie Wells and Chris Carnovale took charge of this event and guided us through every step. The success of this event directly reflects their leadership and efforts.
When the event day finally came around everything had come together We cheered when we sold over 100 tickets, (which was our goal) and Chris promptly said "lets make it 120". Alumni of the project came through and supported us with over 15 previous team members in attendance.
We were especially honoured to have Dr. Geoffrey Bird in attendance as he was one of the original founders of this project. Dr. Chris Bottrill, Dean of the Faculty of Global and Community Studies, as well as the project's Director was our MC for the night. In addition, 12 Dao community members who not call Surrey their home, came to the event in their traditional clothes.
All in all the event was a remarkable experience. It is one that I will never forget and I will be forever grateful to our friends, family, colleagues and supporters for showing up in hoards and backing the CBT Vietnam Project.
23 Days until departure. Not that we are counting or anything.
