Tried to write a bit of places that i had been to,though at times it has been a while since that trip.
The same is said of a trip i took a while back, to the city we knew before as Saigon but now named as Ho chin Minh City.
Honestly i was a bit disappointed of the place, maybe i expected too much being a city of such anguish history.
So i was half expecting a sense of melancholy within the air.
What was my impression? It was just another bustling place, people all rushing around, traffic buzzing and the market just selling the usual trinkets.
The only saving grace about the place was the trip we took to the Cu Ci tunnels area, infamous during the Vietnam war as a place where the VC( read..Vietcong) hid themselves in an endless array of tunnels with all the amenities as hospital, dining room, meeting room part of the tunnels community infrastructure!!!
Listening to the tour guide, you cant help grimacing and imagining the horrors of the Vietnam war, how the simple ingenuity of the "primitive" folks can outwit a superpower as the Americans.
You cant help a feeling of irony as the tour guide related stories of how "they" cheat and outmanoeuvre the enemies (the Americans) and some American tourists just listening to this story with very grave faces indeed.Wonder what's in their mind,definitely not Rambo and his brandishing gun.
Saigon was renamed Ho Chin Minh after Uncle HO, apparently all Vietnamese now refer him as that , the architect and master strategist of the communist North during those tragic Vietnamese War years. You can see his monument and images everywhere .
It was certainly hard to imagine that it was only 30 odd years ago that the war ended and certainly there will still be significant number of living folks still remembering that war well.
The country has really been transformed and one can sense the energy of dynamic commercialism in the city as people all busy with their hand phone conversations and always in a hurry.
Maybe i should not be in a hurry as well if i were to savour the place more,i should have visited their war museum and other places of interest.
Nonetheless the 3 hours visit to the Cu Ci tunnels has given me ample impression on the travesties and the immoralities of that war, a war that has displaced many Vietnamese and i believed few millions died as well during that war.
Incidentally i have been to Hanoi, the city in the North few years back, i enjoyed that place still sustaining an aura of authenticity and a scene that will always be forever etched in my mind was a buffalo being tied up and carried on a motorcycle!!!!
That's the Vietnam that i envisaged, a country who will always have the ingenuity and smartness to cope with anything!
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