Christmas in Saigon is warm. Hot, sometimes, and bustling to the point at which a bustling atmosphere bleeds over into a madhouse atmosphere. It had been almost a year since I was in Ho Chi Minh City, and I had almost forgotten how much time I spent there sitting on my bike or in a taxi, waiting for the endless current of vehicles to dissipate. In any case, aside from a few occasions when I got caught at the wrong place and wrong time, i.e. at the same place as a thousand other people, I successfully got around the city. Downtown streets are festooned with lights and decorations of all sorts. Back alleys, at least in certain neighborhoods close to churches, are also decorated and sprout grotto/manger scenes in random corners and, indeed, sometimes in the middle of the road. The prize for the oddest decoration goes to one here in Hanoi though, a giant 30-foot Christmas tree shaped spiral of Heineken beer bottles. I’ve got nothing in particular against Heineken I guess, but, a Christmas tree made of bottles of beer … I’m still trying to figure that one out!
Aside from reacquainting myself with a few of the street cafes I remember, I also went to a birthday party for the one-year old daughter of a friend of mine. All good fun, and I think that is the first time I’ve eaten ostrich … a good impression! While walking around the mall in search of a birthday present for the one-year old, I was truly amused to see the advertisement in front of a dental clinic, for a “revolutionary beauty treatment”, teeth whitening I believe. It featured giant side-by-side iconic portraits of Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe. It seems I think about advertisements too much – but as I did not run out and buy cases of Heineken for Christmas or spend any money whitening my teeth to look like Che (?) I guess being amused by them doesn’t let them into my wallet!
The new experience of my trip south was Cần Giờ. I had read something about Cần Giờ and wanted to go there last year while I was living in Saigon, but just never got there. This area recently became a sort of outlying district of Ho Chi Minh City. Incidentally, expanding city boundaries seems to be a national fad, I think it was last year that Hanoi absorbed Ha Tay province, so now you can drive for two hours west of Hanoi into the middle of nothing resembling city, or even village, but you are still in Hanoi… Anyway, Cần Giờ is billed as the “green lung” of Saigon, it consists mostly of mangrove swamp between the city of Saigon and the coast. To get there you go out thru District 7 (what I like to call the Southern California district of Saigon), cross a ferry and keep on going straight. After a bit you get past the remnants of town, and into the mangroves. They are building a pretty significant road out to the coast, so at the moment there are stretches a unbelievably nice road, considering the paucity of traffic on it, and stretches of the old road, which is perfectly adequate as long as you don’t want to go too fast.
The area is of course very flat, but there are several significant channels that you cross over on bridges and you can get a look over the trees. Along the way locals were set up along the road selling dừa nước – the fruit of the nipa palm. In spite of being called DỪA nước (water coconut) in Vietnamese, as far as I can tell it is no relation to coconut. It is apparently the only palm tree that is also considered a mangrove. Truly a pretty weird tree, it has a “trunk” which grows horizontally underground, or under-mud usually. What you actually see are technically just the leaves, bunches of green palm fronds that are big enough you’d consider them trees just by themselves. The fruit is a giant, brown, spiky thing that looks like, shall we say, a pineapple-of-doom… But, you can separate each big brown point into a piece about the size of my dictionary, then you hack at that a bit more and inside the woody hull is something edible. Softer and juicier than coconut meat, it is refreshing but doesn’t have a strong flavor at all. Mostly, I suppose, it was refreshing to get off the motorbike for a bit!
The mangrove trees themselves are also, well, funny to look at. I have travelled I-10 across the Gulf Coast enough times to know what a swamp looks like, but I honestly couldn’t say if those are mangroves! These mangroves, in any case, look like what I suppose most any tree would look like if it were about a meter or two higher. I mean, a meter or two off the ground, the trunk stops and the roots start, and by the time they reach the ground there isn’t anything bigger than a couple inches in diameter, just a lot of them. So you look into a forest of these trees and you can’t see any dirt (or mud or water) or anything underneath, you just see trees coming up out of something resembling the backside of a gigantic shag carpet.
Just before getting to the coast you can stop at Monkey Island. It does indeed have monkeys; it is not, however, an island. It has a small museum, with bits of a prehistoric skeleton, a few remnants from the war, and a lot of stuffed and mounted animals. Including a beaver with a hairy tail. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that beavers WERE beavers because of the slap-happy tail, without that wouldn’t they just be really big, buck-toothed lithping rat-th?? ?? After the museum you pass a “circus” with loud karaoke music coming out of it – I did not have the nerve to go in there so I cannot report what exactly a circus (or karaoke masquerading as a circus) is doing in a mangrove swamp. Monkeys ran around everywhere, eagerly ripping anything shiny or delicious out of the hands of careless visitors, and generally making mayhem. You could actually buy feed for the monkeys, but you had to buy it from the staff there, and then you had to give it to the monkeys really fast unless you wanted to take part in the squawking and brawling that ensued whenever food came into the picture. I had enough fun watching. The crocodile mud-pit seemed well stocked, and there was a truly rancid concrete pit about eight feet long with a giant monitor lizard in it, about 5 feet long I’d say. Apart from those diversions, you can take a boat down a bunch of little swamp alleys to visit an old military site from the war.
