We got up very early on Wednesday morning for our flight to Ho Chi Minh city, the city formerly known as Saigon. Earliest time for tallis and tefillin was 5:15 am and soon after, we were in the taxi on our way to the airport.
When we arrived, again there were throngs of people in front of the check in counters with absolutely no semblance of any straight lines. People yelling, shoving and jockeying for position.
While we were waiting, we took the opportunity to call some of our kids and use up the remaining minutes on our Thai simcard. While talking to our youngest grandchild, Abby, she asked whether we could bring her home an elephant from Thailand, having seen the pictures that we had sent of our day with the elephants. Well, given that there is a weight limitation on all these internal flights, It is going to be a tough order to fill.
About 40 minutes later we made it to the front of the line and from that point on, we breezed thru immigration and security to reach our gate for our Air Asia flight to Vietnam. Air Asia is a very large and successful low cost carrier in this region and is the type of airline where you pay for everything extra. Drinks, extra luggage weight, reserved seats on the plane, etc.; we actually paid an extra few dollars to get bulk head...and it was worth it.
I am getting ahead of my writing by entering these details while seated on our morning flight....
Nachum and Sandy were supposed to arrive Tuesday night in Ho Chi Minh city and the car and driver that we arranged to take them to our hotel was hopefully waiting for them when they arrived....hope he was there....we are supposed to meet up with them when we arrive this morning.
Continuing after a very interesting day in Ho Chi Minh city (HCMC), here is how the rest of our day went...
We arrived 15 minutes early and breezed off the plane, and were first on line to go thru security ...that is when the fun started. The guy looked at our visa (you need a visa to enter Vietnam ) and said you go to that line and get the visa stamped. We were directed to a window with many people seated on chairs, the floor, anywhere they could, waiting....the girl took our visa, gave us another form to fill and told us to wait.
I asked her how long and she said ten minutes. As I watched many others approach the window over the next 30 minutes, she told everyone "ten minutes".....I soon realized that we might be in for a long wait. Knowing that our luggage was revolving on the baggage arrival belt and that Nachum and Sandy were waiting outside for us...and that we had no idea how long this would take ...did not give us a great feeling.
Well, after about 45 minutes our name was called, we located our luggage and we were reunited with Nachum and sandy and met our guide Vinh who was waiting for us with the driver and a very nice air conditioned van.
But part of our morning tour was now history.On our way to the Cu Chi Tunnels. Cu Chi is a village near HCMC which was a communist stronghold during the vietnam war. A bit of history....North Vietnam was communist and South Vietnam was a democracy. Hanoi was the capital of North Vietnam and HCMC (then called Saigon) was the capital of South Vietnam. The Americans came in to stop the threat of communism from overtaking south Vietnam. After a long and costly war (40000 Americans and over 2 million Vietnamese lost their lives in this war which lasted from 1965 till 1973), the Americans left and the entire country went communist.
During the war, the communists had strongholds even in South Vietnam. The villagers of the jungle area of Cu Chi decided to take on the Americans using guerrilla warfare. The entire area near CuChi has now been turned into a tourist attraction to show how the Vietcong won the war. It is a very interesting tour (though from a very communist perspective with quite a bit of gloating of 'we won the war...ha ha') and you got to see the amazing network of underground tunnels, the types of booby traps, and torture methods used by the guerrillas and how they managed to avoid detection.
When we ended this tour we made our way back to HCMC and got our first real experience of the number of motorcycles in Vietnam. There are 8 million people in HCMC and over 4 million motorcycles.
And there are almost no traffic lanes and no traffic signals. So everyone sort of goes where they want and amazingly there are very few accidents. You take your life into your hands crossing the street, and are told that the way to make it to the other side is to simply 'keep walking' as the motorcycle guys will time their progress by where they think you will be. If you stop, or slow down, you end up screwing up their timing and you could get killed.
We made our way to the Reunification Palace where the former president of south Vietnam lived. After the reunification of Vietnam into a communist country, the palace was turned into a museum. We visited the war rooms in the protected basement where everything is as it was in 1973.
It was now 4 pm and we were all exhausted. So we checked into our hotel, the Sofitel, which is a very beautiful upscale hotel in the centre of town, just two blocks from Chabad. As is becoming the norm for us on this trip, we got upgraded to a suite, owing to the fact that "sorry, sir, this is our high occupancy period and we have had to upgrade you to a suite". Nebich! A beautiful suite on the 19th floor...very bekovodik!!!
Nachum and Sandy went for a swim on the rooftop 18th floor and Fran and I unpacked and went for a walk to experience crossing the street, to try and see if we could avoid the motorcycles that were coming at us from every direction. Well, we survived b'h, tho we might have to bench Gomel.
We all then went to Chabad for dinner. As we had experienced in Thailand, the meal was very good and very cheap. We met the manager, a non chabadnik, who is a former IDF pilot who is donating two years to manage and work in the Chabad HCMC restaurant. While there we met a couple from Hashmonaim who recognized us from shul. We also met the two young Israeli girls, again non chabadniks who are donating some time post sherut leumi to act as teachers of the Chabad family's children.
We then went to Nam Silk, a tailor shop in downtown HCMC, that had been recommended to us by Evelyn Hannon, editor of a travel blog, Journeywoman.com, who told us that she had great success there. In less than an hour, Fran bought three dresses, four blouses, a skirt and Nachum and Sandy bought a man's suit, a skirt and a blouse, 2 shirts, and 2 scarves all made to measure. On Friday at 3 pm we will go there for a final fitting and before we leave on motzaei Shabbat, all the goods will hopefully be delivered to our hotel.
We returned to the hotel and exhausted we hit the sack ....tomorrow, we are off to an overnight tiyul thru the famous Mekong Delta.
More tomorrow....when it will be Good Morning Vietnam!
All the best
Fran and David
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