April 21-22, 2024
$1 US = 25,000 Vietnamese Dong
One of the things you have to keep track of onboard is preventative health. Most I did prior to leaving last April and will be slightly overdue upon my return in September, but dental cleanings are something I have learned not to let lapse. John researched best places in Asia for dental cleanings – and Vietnam came up high on the list. We booked ourselves in after checking reviews and we could not have been happier. Excellent service, extremely clean and modern. And the cost? 500,000 dong (about $20 US).
With our cleaning done, we walked down to the beach to spend most of the rest of our time in the small city.
The next day we docked in “Ho Chi Minh City” – actually, we docked in Phu My – between 1 1/2- 2 hours from Ho Chi Minh City (this is a repeated issue throughout Asia – we dock really far away by time from the main city. Although maybe only 30-40 miles, due to roads and traffic time to the city is often over 1 1/2 hours by car or train and then have only 7-9 hours in the port in question).
Alan hired a car for 6 of us to get into Ho Chi Minh to see the main historic landmarks. The two things we saw in the city proper were the War Remnants Museum where the history of The Vietnam War are displayed through the locals lens instead of that of the US. War brings out sadism in all its terrible forms, often taken out on prisoners of war.
Our other main attraction in the city was the Independence Palace (the Vietnamese President’s residence before the fall of Saigon). A pretty building with an extremely poor layout (you walk through with the fixer-upper show commentary in the back of your mind).
The best thing about the Palace was its grounds – where we enjoyed beer at a cafe (I wasn’t the one to pay – but I think it was 300,000 dong ($12) for 8 large beers).
Ho Chi Minh is home to a “Notre Dame Cathedral” – currently under reconstruction. So our driver took us back to Phu My to look at the recently completed (2022) St. Andrew’s Church.
History lesson:
The Vietnam War was one of those military “engagements” that never made any sense to me.
The area we know as the country of Vietnam was home to among the most ancient of human cultures – dating back to 25000 BC, with rice cultivation beginning around 4000BC. By 600 BC, the rice fields were irrigated by elaborate systems of canals. As the Zhou Dynasty collapsed in China, the red river delta became the home of many Chinese refugees, though over the next several hundred years there was frequent conflict between China and Vietnam. Buddhism arrived in 300 BC and became the prominent religion. The Portuguese arrived in 1517 and established trading posts, but the region frequently provided proxy war territory for European powers, as the French pushed for influence and land from the early 1700’s. At the end of the Sino-French War in 1885, France took control and named the area French Indochina. Their hold was never great, and after WWII Vietnamese groups pushed for independence, with the first battles in 1954, forcing the French to withdraw. Attempts by European powers to settle the issue failed, with the Viet Cong taking over northern Vietnam and the Republic in the south. The US sent its first troops of 3500 men in March 1960 to “support the government of Vietnam” and numbers continued to increase as the US waged a proxy war with Russia. In the end, after almost exactly 13 years (March 29, 1973), with the loss of over 58,000 US troops, and over 3 MILLION Vietnamese (over half civilians), the US forces withdrew.
Vietnam has embraced the market driven communist system favored by China, and has thrived over the last twenty years. Relations between the US and Vietnam are on fairly friendly terms, and although they have not forgotten those 13 years, the Vietnamese have moved past our history and welcomed us as honored guests.