Follow the Ho Chi Minh trail...

In the swarming streets of Ho Chi Minh City we sought comfort in a cold beer as the brooding sky threatened to unload a downpour of Biblical proportions. A mobile food stall passed, a wheeled steel cabinet behind a bicycle, bearing strings of wrinkled dried squid that hung from a vertical display rack. We watched rapt as the Vietnamese guys we’d been talking to at the next table ordered a couple. The vendor grilled the squid over a burner in the top of the trailer then passed the hot, dry flesh through a mangle attached to the side before serving the crisped up cephalopods in a cardboard tray with chilli sauce. We couldn’t resist. ‘Smells like dog food’ Fi said, but it tasted sensational, warm, chewy, salty and spicy. Hot mangled squid - our new favourite streetfood.

Shortly afterwards our Vietnamese friends paid, stood up and sped off somewhat wobbily into the traffic on their motorbike. Tabs are easily settled here, they simply leave your empty beer bottles under your table till you settle up and a quick recount establishes what you owe. There were 10 bottles beneath theirs that explained their riding style if not their drunk-riding sensibilities.

Most of the small, family run hotels we’ve stayed at close and shutter up their front doors ridiculously early, sometimes as prematurely as 10pm, forcing you to wake up the dozing night porter to get in. The heavens had by this point followed through on their promise of a spectacular deluge and the word torrential would be an understatement. Having arrived hastily in Ho Chi Minh I hadn’t really taken note of the name of our hotel, as we’d popped into a few along the same strip to check prices. Foolish I know. Which is how, after Fi had gone back earlier and I’d gone to check email at a nearby Internet Café, I came to be standing soaked to the skin in a thunderous rainstorm outside a series of identically shuttered and bolted hotel frontages.

‘Hello, looking for lady?’ lisped one of two decidedly damp and androgynous ‘women’ who’d pulled up on a motorbike. ‘No thanks’ I replied, unsure whether they would actually have been able to technically deliver on their offer even if I had been interested. Penniless and dripping wet I even pondered my options and the likelihood of being able to check into another hotel, though I suspect Fi might have been more than a little worried if I’d failed to return. In the end I was forced to bang on the shutters one at a time, waking all the night porters until I found a lobby I recognised. One rudely awoken and understandably irate shopkeeper, a mouthful of what I took to be justified abuse in Vietnamese and two drowsy night porters later I made it in. ‘Where’ve you been?’ asked Fi worriedly, ‘Don’t ask’ I replied moistly.

The next day I went for a massage at the Institute for the Blind, where visually challenged masseurs provide hour-long sessions for a quid. Off to use the loo beforehand I walked through the steam room into the toilet block where three shower cubicles lined the far wall. The hiss of water from the middle one showed it was occupied, though the chubby Vietnamese guy in a towel on all fours peering through a crack in the shower door also made that clear. Two other men, naked bar their towels, stood around awaiting a go. They all turned to look at me so I turned and left. Great. The Ho Chi Minh Gay Sauna Scene – what the blind masseurs can’t see the queer clientele gets away with. The massage I then had was muscle-meltingly good though, thankfully devoid of any offer of a ‘happy finish’. Although I did erroneously describe it to people later as ‘penetrative’ which in light of the shower scene above might be construed as a poor choice of words.

In the afternoon we went to the moving ‘War Remnants Museum’. Its an immensely powerful series of photo exhibitions highlighting the grim futility and brutal fatalities of the war. The first ‘media war’ the conflict spanned the transition from black and white stills reportage through to colour film footage and hundreds of journalists were killed trying to expose the miserable failure and wanton destruction of the war effort on the ground. Many of the images were iconic and instantly familiar such as the award-winning picture of the naked girl badly burnt by napalm running agonisingly towards the camera. Others, such as an American GI holding up the shredded remains of a Vietcong guerrilla, scarcely recognisable as human, were visceral and haunting.

Perhaps most depressing was the documentation of the insidious legacy of tragic, appalling birth defects from Agent Orange and dioxin poisoning. The result of a despicable strategy which essentially constituted waging war on the Vietnamese environment and ecology as well on its largely innocent population and an elusive and ambiguous ‘enemy’, that was almost indistinguishable from the people themselves (sound familiar?). Add to this the high incidence of cancers and the ongoing carnage and amputees as a result of still uncleared mine-fields and the repercussions of the war linger on three decades later. With around 3M Vietnamese and 50,000+ US Troops dead it all seemed an insane and repugnant waste of human life. Outside the museum hawkers were touting copies of Robert McNamara’s (US Secretary of State for Defence during Vietnam) book about the conflict: ‘In Retrospect; The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam’. I wondered whether the monkey in the White House and his neo-con henchman had ever read it.