Headstones Tour 2009 - Part 3 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Now the Headstone, Monument and Memorial tour through Asia heads to Vietnam. We are excited to see Vietnamese monuments, headstones and memorials and view custom Vietnamese headstones and monuments. Ho Chi Minh City is the largest Metro area in Vietnam. There are about 9 million people in this rapidly growing city and projections are that by 2020 there will be 20 million people living there. The economy is boiling and some people refer to Vietnam as the “New China”. Wages are lower than those in China and investors from around the world are setting up factories and other businesses throughout this area.

One of the interesting things about Vietnam is that 1 US dollar was worth 17,435 Dong. We thought we were rich in Manila but imagine $100 USD’s are equal to 1,743,500 dong. It gets hard to carry enough money to get around for one day. We were getting used to the currency exchange elsewhere but try converting with 5 decimal places to account for. The neat thing is that US dollars can be used for almost anything and prices are usually shown in USD’s inside the city.

We spent our first night in District 1, the city center, also called Old Saigon and the majority of our evening was in the famous Saigon Saigon Bar on top of the Caravelle Hotel. On our way to now see custom Vietnamese headstones and monuments. With a panoramic view of the city and several Saigon beers we enjoyed the atmosphere and relaxed a bit after our seventh day in our third country. The temperature rarely goes below 72 degrees and hardly above 93 degrees but there is an average humidity of 75% which can get a Seattle guy perspiring mightily. I knew almost immediately that Saigon beer was going to be one of my staples for the next few days.

We arrived on March 1st which is near the end of one of the two seasons in Vietnam. The “dry” season is from December to April and then the rest of the year residents experience the “monsoon” season where it rains hard virtually every day. Luckily we only had one serious rain while we were exploring but annually Vietnam averages over 70 inches per year while rainy Seattle gets only around 31 inches.

Early on our first morning we met our driver and our tour guide who had decided what attractions he was going to show us for the next two days. After we told him that certainly we wanted to see some of the tourist sights around the city but we also wanted to visit as many cemeteries as possible. He was stumped at first but by the next morning he had found several for us to see. Obviously graveyards are not on the tour guide lists in Vietnam.

We had been told that we would need special permission to visit the cemeteries in Vietnam however we never could find out where we could go to get the government approvals. So after some discussion we decided to just drive in and play dumb. As usual we were rewarded for our explorer skills and had no problems.

Our first tourist stop was at the Ho Chi Minh City Hall. Our guide admonished us, “No photos of the city hall can be taken from closer than one block away”. He said we were safe if we stayed in front of “Uncle Ho’s” statue to take our photos. Now it was starting to get interesting! What a glorious colonial building and we were wondering why we couldn’t get any closer but decided not to push our luck. The monument to Ho Chi Minh was very well done and we saw many excellent sculptures of him throughout the city.

Our next stop was the “Reunification Palace” where the President of South Vietnam lived and conducted business between his democratic government and the US Armed Forces. We took a tour and heard stories about the last days before the US exited the country. A lot of memorabilia and for three guys who spent time in the service during that period it was an inside look at the place that made our history real during those last turbulent days of the war.

We took some photos of the Viet Cong tanks that crushed the gates and took over the palace to end the war. While we were at it there were four former NVA soldiers (3 men & 1 woman) who told our tour guide they wanted to take photos with us. It was an interesting time for all of us to be together and smiling after so many years on opposite sides. Our guide took the photo and told us later he thought the South Vietnamese people were much nicer than the North Vietnamese people but now all Vietnamese have vowed to put the past behind them and work together to help their country prosper.

From there it was on to the Notre Dame Cathedral, the main post office and the Lacquer Factory. The Lacquer factory had many beautiful items-on sale and “special prices for tourists” but alas we had no room for this artwork made from egg shells, lacquer and gold leaf.

After lunch we travelled to the Chinese Market. It was quite an experience winding through the narrow walkways in a huge marketplace with all the stalls arranged by products. There were hats, shoes, food, herbs, toys, cooking utensils and many more items that are for sale, mostly by Chinese merchants.

We learned that most all the shark fins and bird nests sold here for soups around the world are fakes made from reconstituted cow skin and molded into shark fins and bird nests. We also heard that Vietnam has some of the finest coffee in the world but be careful because they can fool you with dark roasted and ground corn, seasoned with a few tablespoons of coffee at the top of the bag.

Next we headed for the Vietnam “Hero’s Cemetery”. This was an interesting place dominated by large stone statues similar to what you might see in Russia. A heroic sized soldier over 60 ft. tall displaying a large shroud-like drape around his neck was in the center between two large sculptures of devoted comrades honoring this place. These statues were poorly carved without much inspirational value.

Our guide told us that this cemetery was only for North Vietnamese Army soldiers and that there was no specific cemetery for the dead from their defeated South Vietnamese counterparts. Most of those (over 300,000 they suspect) are buried in unmarked graves or in mass graves. In this case the government has systematically erased all traces of the opposition forces. What an amazing collection of custom Vietnamese headstones and monuments!