HCMC

HCMC.  Holy Congested Motorcycle Chaos!  Yes.  Ho Chi Mihn City, also known as Saigon, and home to the most motorcycles I've ever seen.  I thought Hanoi was bad, but I realized it's just because the streets in the Old Quarter are so narrow.  The streets here in Saigon are as wide as any others I've seen and still they're crowded.  It's okay though, because during rush hour when the roads look more like a swarm of buzzing bees with helmets, they just use the sidewalk.  Darren and I went on the Lonely Planet walking tour and we finished up right around rush hour.  We figured walking would be faster than taking a taxi because the traffic was so heavy, but then a piece of that traffic was honking behind me, and another piece was rushing past me.  You're not safe anywhere!

We made it out alive however and managed to see quite a bit.  The walking tour includes a lot of Saigon's various historical sights and museums.  We didn't get the earliest start and we didn't make it to all of them but the city definitely does have a lot to offer.  The most memorable for us, which I think is the same for most people, was the War Remnants Museum.  It's more of a photo gallery than a museum but I found that that made it that much more moving.  The exhibition on the ground floor, put together by Tim Page (as I understood from the guidebook) is incredible.  Not to say that the rest of the exhibit isn't incredible, but that first floor really shook me.  I took a photograph of the first photograph that struck me (in the Picassa album), but the rest were so horrific I couldn't bring myself to take pictures of those as well.  It's such a sombre and shocking experience; not because it was the most gruesome war in the history of the world, but because of how well documented it was (publicly).  There was this one image of a soldier holding the destroyed remains (including an arm, head and a bit of everything in between) which was devastating, and another of women and children's bodies laying on the ground with the caption, "Women and children who tried to get away."

Some say that the exhibit is one sided (but really, why shouldn't it be?).  I would beg to differ.  Maybe it depicts more of the Vietnamese casualties than the American or French, but what side these people belonged to doesn't really seem to be the point.  The exhibit certainly doesn't hold back in blaming the US or other armies in it's captions and introductions and the display of propaganda is plentiful; but, if you go through the exhibit (as I did) reading little of the words and just taking in the photographs themselves, what you really see, are people.  People and bombs and destruction and grief and death.  The war wasn't just the Vietnamese against the US or the French, but it was often the Vietnamese against the Vietnamese.  What the exhibit really highlighted for me was simply the pains of war.

During the entire viewing of the exhibit all I could feel was sadness, and all I could think of was the impact of each and every one of those photos and of the role of the photographer.  Some of the photographs were of the photographers and the last images of them before they were killed.  The photographers who survived wrote descriptions for the images in the museum.  I don't normally like statements or descriptions (hence why I rarely take the time to read them), and most of the time I don't even like/read titles.  With a lot of the pictures you didn't need a description or title to understand; however, there were a few pictures I couldn't help but want to know more about.  There was one image of a girl in the midst of total destruction, mouth wide open, with a look of terror on her face.  According to the write-up she was running away from an attack, running as her home was in flames, screaming 'Mommy!  Mommy!'  The picture alone was heart breaking, there was so much anguish in her face, but that description (which I did no justice to) nearly brought me to tears.  There was another of children crying and running naked down the street, with soldiers in the background, and a small mother-daughter portrait added in the corner.  The write-up explained who the central figure (a young girl) was and that she was struck by a napalm bomb.  There were others, even more horrific and violent and disturbing.

The museum also had an exhibit commemorating Hanoi's 1000 year anniversary.  They had images of the old and the new.  Hanoi during the war and Hanoi today.  It was hopeful, seeing pictures of despair juxtaposed with pictures of new life.  There was one image in particular that I remember, it was of a little girl.  It was simple.  Just a little girl, standing on a boat beside a basket of shellfish, but she had the biggest brightest eyes and the happiest smile.  It was beautiful.

If you ever get the chance.  Go see it.  Between the heart breaking photos inside, and all the tanks, bomb shells and war machines outside, it really is a unique experience.  I've never seen anything like it before in my life (maybe I'm a little sheltered) and it really is an eye opener.

(Side note:  In it's brief description of Vietnam's extensive history the guidebook suggests that if the US had bothered to pay any attention to that history a lot of lives could have been saved.  At one point some of the Vietnamese even took up the slogan "Independence or Death".  No matter how few people they had, or how few resources, the Vietnamese have always refused to surrender.)