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.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

John: For the first time on our voyage, we're splitting up for a good part of the week we are spending in a port. Vicki is leading a Semester-at-Sea trip to Hanoi in the middle three days while John and the kids are staying here in Ho chi Minh City.  Or Saigon, which is what people still call it except when they're being official about it. Being in Saigon and Hanoi is remarkable enough to us, who still have vivid memories of the time when Vietnam figured in the news as a place of seemingly-constant and intractable warfare. That we are here as students and tourists  amazes, even though we know that this is not at all unusual now; Vietnam has opened itself up to the world in the last twenty years, and it has become a regular stop for the hectic Asian swing of Semester at Sea; a good number of the faculty and administrative staff have been here a couple of times before. Still, of all the places we are visiting, the very fact of being here boggles the imagination most.

So, what's it like? Modern Saigon was largely laid out by the French, and it still shows in the broad boulevards, wide sidewalks, roundabouts, and a number of nineteenth-century monumental buildings that would look at home in Paris. And that makes it very navigable in some ways; the central part of the city, where most of the landmark buildings are, is fairly easily to negotiate, though the city sprawls out in all directions for miles. There's construction everywhere, as modern hotels and office buildings replace older structures; there's a lot of outside money coming into the city as multinational corporations set up shop. There are plenty of symbols here that remind you that the Communists won and are in power here--flags, posters, party buildings, guards in uniform--but there's also a lot of capital coming in from outside and local entrepreneurship; most businesses, a guide told us, are privately owned, but I'm not quite sure that that means the same thing here as in the US. In fact, I really have no idea about how all this works and where the lines of pressure are between the government, business, citizens, etc. Much less do I know how the division between North and South works; this place feels very Westernized in some ways, surely because the decades of French and American influence, but the North has got to be different.

Most of all, Saigon is very busy and active, a fast-moving place. The streets are thronged with motorbikes, the drivers of which seem to be trying to make some kind of massive illustration of quantum mechanics; surely they have some direction, but it feels pretty random. Which makes crossing the street a thrill, and not in the good sense; there are not a lot of traffic lights, and marked crosswalks are treated casually by the motorbikers. You sort of plunge in and expect them to be able to navigate around you, but it's scary.

On the first day, we took a city orientation tour that introduced us to some of the major landmarks in town, like the Notre Dame Cathedral and, interestingly, the Post Office, which has both an enormous painting of Ho Chi Minh and a counter for the US Postal Service. The most interesting of these sites, surely, was the building now known as Reunification Hall. Before the north defeated the south in 1975, it was the presidential palace. It's a beautiful example of modern architecture, but its modernity owes a lot to the instability of the South Vietnamese regime: it was built i 1962 to replace the previous palace, which was bombed by the South Vietnamese air force in its attempt to kill President Diem.  Who survived the attack but didn't live to see this building completed, since he was assassinated for good the next year.

Reunification Hall, the former Presidential Palace for the South Vietnamese President. Tanks famously crashed through this fence in 1975, ending the war.

Perhaps the highlight of the day was going to a restaurant that is staffed by former orphans and street children; the goal is to teach them both English and how to run a restaurant.  They fell in love with Maeve, and basically took her over, passing her from person to person. 

Maeve makes some new friends.

They gave her a manicure, and then finally let us have her back so that we could leave. And the food was good, too.

More posts to come. 

Saigon

Tired after a day in Saigon.

Singapore

John: We had only one day in Singapore, not nearly enough to do more than scratch the surface. Which is sort of liberating in a way; when you know in advance that you can't get all that far, you might as well pick something that looks like fun and just enjoy. So we decided to go to the zoo, which is widely billed as the finest in Asia, and one of the best in the world. After some frustration trying to figure out the mass-transit system (the system itself is very efficient; the ticket offices much less so), we finally made it out there via a combination of metro and bus, helped enormously by a local gentleman who showed us how to get from one to the other--we'd still be looking for the bus stop if were left on our own. 

The Singapore Zoo lives up to its billing--it's great! The animals are close, and in large habitats stocked with natural flora. Highlights included lemurs, gibbons, orangutans, white rhinos, and pygmy hippos. For my money, the real standout was a trio of white tigers:

Aidan and a white tiger over his shoulder, as if it happens every day.

The white tigers are not a separate species; they're a sport of nature, all descended from a unique white tiger born in 1951. They're beautiful, and they roam very close to the spectators. Usually when I've seen tigers in zoos, they're resting or just sleeping, but two of the three tigers in this group were exploring their lair energetically, and you could really get a sense of their size, beauty, and strength

It's too bad we can't be here at night; the Zoo has a night safari, where you travel through the Zoo in the dark on trams; since you can't see the low walls and moats that separate you from the animals, it's apparently a little scary to be that close, and many of the animals are more active at night as well. From the point of view of parents, perhaps the Singapore Zoo's signal innovation is that it rents Flexible Flyer wagons out so that you can wheel kids from place to place. This was a big hit, and spared lots of the kinds of cranky walking that ultimately leads to carrying, something that was particularly likely to happen in the hot and humid temperatures here. We'll have to put this idea in the suggestion box at other zoos.

We went next to Chinatown. (Warning: brief history lesson to follow.) Singapore was sort of invented by a guy named Stamford Raffles, who was an employee of the British East India Company, charged to find a place that could serve as a trading spot for the British in this region (in particular, a place strategically located to counter the Dutch, who had a lot of influence in nearby Indonesia.) This island, off the southern tip of what is now Malaysia, was perfectly positioned, with a big harbor and a wide river, and not much developed or populated (there were, though, apparently a lot of tigers; the three in the zoo are the only tigers on the island now). So (making a long story short) Raffles made a deal with the local sultan and the Company took over the place, and then started moving in a labor force of Chinese, Malays, Indians, and British administrators. Raffles sat down with a map and laid out the city's neighborhoods by function and ethnicity: warehouses and export businesses in this place, Chinese over here, Indians over there, colonials housed down here. And while Raffles wouldn't recognize a lot of modern Singapore, the plan he drew up is still more or less how Singapore is laid out; there's Chinatown, Little India, an area of older colonial buildings, and the big business district, now dominated by one skyscraper after another. We picked Chinatown not quite at random; there were some temples that we wanted to see there, and we figured that the food would be good, too, but we could just as easily have spent time in other parts of the city and gotten a very different kind of experience.

The first temple we saw in Chinatown was actually a Hindu temple, built originally in 1827. It's very ornately decorated:

Interestingly, there's a modern building nearby that seems to be emulating the shape of the temple's facade:

While we were there, a thunderstorm struck, so we took cover in the nearby Maxwell Food Market. It's a covered area filled with what are known here as hawker stalls--small shops selling Singaporean fast food. We had mango and kiwi smoothies:

And then the local specialty, chicken with rice, which really depends on the variety of the hot sauces that you have with it.  Delicious--and cheap, about the equivalent of $3.50US.

The final sight was the Buddha's Tooth temple, which is amazing. I don't think that there's an actual Buddha's Tooth there, though.

Finally, some wandering around the streets of Chinatown. This is one of the few places left in Singapore with old buildings; the government has torn down many blocks of older buildings to make way for modern construction. These shophouses, with shops on the ground floor and housing above, date from the early colonial period, and are still in use as shops for clothes, toys, electronics; not sure if anyone still lives upstairs, though. Then back to the cruise center to dispense our remaining Singapore dollars (they've thoughtfully provided shops designed for that very purpose), then back on the ship, trying to beat the on-ship time of 8:30; there's always a frenzy of people getting through immigration and security at the last moment, since the penalties for being on the ship late are pretty $evere. We pulled out around 11:00 pm, on our way to Ho Chi Minh City, a/k/a Saigon, where we arrive on Sunday.

It would have been great to spend more time in Singapore. Unlike many places we've been, though, a lot of Singapore is very familiar--many modern buildings, with ethnic enclaves with older structures, freeways, tourists. It's a very cosmopolitan place, with people from all over the world working or visiting here. The international brands are also ubiquitous; within ten minutes of getting off the ship this morning, a fair number of students had outfitted themselves with Starbucks frappaccinos (thereby ending a long drought), and the Zoo has not one, but two Ben and Jerry's shops (we checked one of them out). The place feels sort of like a cleaner, more humid Los Angeles. 

Clothes, nets

Maeve: I've grown out of my clothes, so Mommy is buying me more as we go. Here is one of my new shirts from India:

John: Many people on the ship have commented in the last couple of weeks about how much Maeve has grown since our voyage began. And they're right; she has, as she says, grown out of at least half of the clothes we brought with us. (And, too, traveling in various rainforests, cities, and rivers has been hard on all of our clothes.) We ended up donating a lot of Maeve's old clothes to an orphanage in Kochi, and have been buying new things for her as we go. India has a long tradition of making beautiful textiles, and clothes here are often gorgeous and inexpensive. 

Aidan: In India I saw Chinese fishing nets. Unfortunately, I did not see any fish in them when they pulled them up from the water. It looks ilk the world's biggest see-saw with a prize at the end if you do it right. 

Backwaters

John:  Our last major excursion out of Kochi was to an area known here as the backwaters--an enormous system of lakes, rivers, streams and canals that are a much-beloved natural feature of the Indian state of Kerala, where Kochi is located. Indian tourists, and some foreigners, flock here for the chance to spend a few days or even a week or two living on one of houseboats that cruise these waters, going from village to village and and eating fish fresh out of the water (the ships generally come with a cook/pilot):

A houseboat on the backwaters. These are now all for tourists; they get quite elaborate, with multiple bedrooms, kitchens, and air conditioning.

We went to Alleppy and got a mini-cruise of a couple of hours on a passenger boat; a longer trip that would go to more remote parts of the backwaters would get even more scenic and rural, we imagine. Even so, I can't say that this is a the kind of vacation that appeals all that much to us; I think we'd get bored quickly. But for people who live in a  crowded city like Mumbai or New Dehli, a week in a houseboat cruising the quiet backwaters of Kerala might be just the ticket.

On the way to Alleppy, our bus passed an elephant walking along the side of the road, about which Aidan has more to say:

Aidan's account of the elephant

Aidan: This is an elephant that I saw in India. I was scared but I touched the elephant. Wow! Elephants are fuzzy. The elephant was walking down the road to a temple.

Meeting the elephant, who was, we were told,
probably on the way to a temple

---

John: We have been told many times by both Americans and Indians themselves that the state of Kerala is very different from many other parts of India, particularly the crowded northern cities. Kerala is tropical, green and lush, and while hardly underpopulated, is less crowded and hectic than many other places in India. Kerala also has a strong social safety net, which has led to it's having near-first-world rates of literacy, life expectancy, and infant survival rates. There are a lot fewer beggars on the streets than in other places. Part of the explanation for this is that there has long been an active Communist party here that pushes the political system in the state to the left--we drove by an open-air meeting of the party, with hundreds of people in attendance, on our way back from Chendramangalam village on our first day, in fact. The Communist party undertook a land-reform movement here in the 1950s that redistributed land and wealth in a way that has prevented some of the incredible inequalities of means that characterize much of the rest of the country from taking hold. And the fact that they've had to alternate power with more conservative centrist parties ever since--and thus compete for votes--has kept them from turning authoritarian, as has been the way so often in Communist regimes. You see a fair number of Communist flags and posters--it's been a long time since I saw a heroic image of Lenin, but I saw one here. At the same time, Kerala's way of life is fairly traditional; most of the state's income comes from fishing, agriculture, and tourism, and about 80 percent of marriages here are still arranged--something that is no longer the case in many of the bigger cities. Kerala has not participated much in India's high-tech revolution, which has shielded it a bit from the swings of the global marketplace, but unemployment is apparently very high. So it's not a utopia, but it has been an excellent place to get a short glimpse of India for first-time visitors like ourselves, and we have come to like it well enough to muse on finding a way to spend more time here. Maybe a Fulbright someday….

Getting around

John


None of the cities we have visited--Manaus, Accra, Cape Town or Kochi--have much in the way of a public transportation system, except in some places for busses, which are usually in my experience inscrutable except to people who have lived their entire lives in a place. (And I have rarely managed to figure out much of a bus system even in places where I have lived). Anyway, this puts us at the mercy of cab drivers to get around, and we've had a crash course in the mores of cabs and local transportation. Except for Brazil, cab drivers in these places basically refuse to run the meter for foreigners like us, even if they have one. So you haggle before you get in, as you tend to haggle over everything. We have gotten fairly good at this, I think, from experience.

In Kochi, there are some cabs. But by far the most common form of ground transportation is the auto-rickshaw, known as the "tuk-tuk."

An auto-rickshaw, or tuk-tuk, in Mattanchery.

Getting anywhere in Kochi costs on the order of 20 to 40 rupees--40 to 80 cents. In such a context, it seems almost comical to haggle over, literally, pennies. The other day, we were part of a large group that divided itself between a couple of tuk-tuks to go to a restaurant that was only a few blocks away, and we were waiting for one to come along, when Vicki approached a cab driver who was taking a rest in the shade. She asked him how much it would cost to get there in the cab, and he asked, how much do you want to pay? 20 rupees, she replied (an opening gambit). Surprisingly, he immediately said sure, and we hopped in. A couple of minutes later, he handed us a 100-rupee note, and asked us to give him this, folded around the 20 rupee fee, in such a way that the tuk-tuk drivers could see it and think that this is what we were paying. He didn't want them to get mad at him for undercutting their rates. Vicki made a big show of paying him an exorbitant 100 rupees--$2.

Tuk-tuks are not exactly the safest form of transportation, and we're conscious of the fact that while, at home, we don't dare go down the block without putting on seat belts and getting the kids into their car seats, here we're tossing them into these rattling contraptions that have no safety equipment whatsoever.  But walking down the crowded streets is not particularly safe, either--there is no such thing as a sidewalk here. And it's fun!  Fingers crossed.