Saigon for kids

ohn:  With Vicki gone to Hanoi for a couple of days--she left at 4 am on our second morning here in Saigon--the agenda turned to chlldren-friendly activities. Of which there are a fair number in Saigon, fortunately. We had read that Vietnamese people love children, and that seems to be true; Aidan and Maeve get a good deal of attention when we are out and about, and it seems like we cannot go into a store for more than a minute before they have candy in their hands (one place, surprisingly, had Lindt truffles--how about some for me?). At the same time, I've also been a little terrified to see children standing in the front of a motorbike hurtling into the traffic--the anxiety over children's safety that is so much a part of our experience with carseats and bicycle helmets is completely absent here.

First stop, the Saigon Zoo. It's fine, though even if we had not been so impressed with the Singapore Zoo just a few days ago, I think we'd sense its limits quickly (though I appreciate its cheapness--admission was about 40 cents apiece, and Maeve was free). It's an old-fashioned zoo, originally laid out by the French in the nineteenth century, with most of the animals in fairly spartan enclosures. I don't get the sense that they're neglected, and they have space, but the environments don't make much effort to replicate their natural habitats. The grounds, though, are nice, functioning as a quiet botanical garden, with specimen trees from all over Asia.

Aidan and Maeve mostly enjoyed the children's playground, which had kiddie rides, a bouncy castle, and one of those enclosures filled with plastic balls:

So yes, we have travelled about 18,000 miles by now to play in plastic balls.

The next, Tuesday, was a case of plans frustrated leading to something surprising and amazing that we could never have anticipated. The plan was to go to a children's amusement park located on the outskirts of Saigon that we had read good things about in the Lonely Planet guide. Our friends Victor, Elizabeth, and their son Josiah were going, too, so we hired a cab and squeezed in. But when we got there, the amusement park was closed; I'm not sure, but it seems as though someone was telling our driver that all of the parks in town were closed on Tuesday. The driver suggested that he take us to another place, the Suoi Tien amusement park, which he said was much better. (All of this sounds a good deal more transparent and fast than it was in reality, since our driver spoke almost precisely no English, and we no precisely no Vietnamese. What he died was write "Soui Tien" on a piece of paper, drew a map, and pantomimed that it would be a place the children would like.) We went all in, and he took us to the Soui Tien park, about an hour's drive outside of town.

Here, in no particular order, are things that are at the Soui Tien amusement park, which is probably about the size of Disneyland:

• a giant roller coaster

• a Ferris wheel

• enormous statues of dragons

• a gorgeous, and active Buddhist temple

• a snow palace (more on this below)

• bumper boats

• Hindu statuary

• a place where you can dip your feet in the water and have fish eat the dead skin off

• a paint ball center

• a water park with slides

• an artificial lake filled with real crocodiles.

And lots more stuff, too. Soui Tien is a Buddhist amusement  park, a genre that none of us had ever imagined before. It's kind of great, but of course deeply weird to our eyes. Since it was a weekday, it was not crowded at all--apparently it is very busy on the weekend. But this is clearly not a place designed for the likes of us--unlike central Saigon, which has a lot of foreign tourists and expatriates, this place is designed for local interests and tastes. The juxtaposition of a Buddhist temple, one in use, with people praying and lighting incense, with amusement park rides, stands selling t-shirts and ice cream, etc., is more strange than anything I could ever come up with on my own. 

Inside one of the many Buddhist temples at the Suoi Tien Amusement Park

Maeve at the entrance to the Suoi Tien amusement park. She was amused quickly.

Surely the moment of greatest surprise, hilarity, and absurdity was the snow palace. We had gotten a tram to take us around, since it was hot and we figured that with limited time, we wouldn't get to see much otherwise. When the tram driver stopped there and gestured that we might like to go in, we figured that it might be interesting.  What would it be? A winter-themed funhouse? a "matterhorn" style ride? We were led to a place where we were given orange coats, white boots, and cloth gloves, and then taken to the heart of the thing--an enormous room, maybe 50' by 50' that was filled with several inches of snow.  Essentially, we were in a giant freezer compartment, minus the frozen food. They had built up a hill, decorated it with plastic snowmen and penguins, and provided tubes for sliding purposes:

Aidan playing in the snow in Saigon. Note the plastic snowmen.

This may be the single strangest thing we have see on this entire trip. But of course it makes sense: Vietnam is tropical, and never sees snow--what could be more fun for Vietnamese children than to get to play in the snow for once? I can't say, though, that this is anything we would ever have expected to see.

Today (Wednesday) we went to the Jade Emperor pagoda, a Taoist temple located north of downtown. It's a cute little temple, with a nice quiet courtyard that is a good respite from the busy commercial neighborhood around it, and a charming statue of the happy Jade Emperor, a key Taoist deity. It was built in 1909 by Cantonese immigrants

The key feature of the temple, though, and the drawing card for us, were the turtles. Turtles are considered to bring good luck in Vietnamese culture, and this temple gives you the chance to "liberate" turtles into a turtle pond. You buy the turtles from a seller at the gate and set it free, after having painted your name on it:

Aidan named our turtle "Castor." We released him into the turtle pond, where we hope that he is set to enjoy a happy life, tended by the temple monks.