It seems strange to think that I am currently at the peak of the mountain, and from here on out I am heading down the other side towards a return home. It's obviously too far to consider just yet, but I do wonder how I will feel after having spent a quarter of a year travelling through different parts of Asia.
I remember when I came back from Korea there was about a month or two where my life just felt really empty, as glad as I was to be home, I really missed everything that I had left behind and constantly reflected on the positive experiences I'd had. There won't be any emptiness this time as circumstances in my life are very different, but I'm sure there is likely to be an adjustment period - even if it's just the couple of weeks it takes me to realise that I can't just go walking across the road and hope that the traffic will work its way around me!
Hopefully when I return I will have some incredible memories and great experiences to share with the important people in my life, and I will feel a sense of achievement having survived for four months on an entirely different continent. With that goal in mind I was ready to begin the latest stage of my trip which began with the arrival of a familiar face.....
*********************************************************************************
I feel like part of my enjoyment of seeing new cities and new countries comes from my family who I consider to be a very well travelled bunch.
My Grandad was in the army so my mum and two aunties spent a lot of time abroad particularly in Germany and Cyprus when they were younger.
In 1996 my mum's twin sister, got married and re-located to the USA with my oldest (and dearest) cousin giving my mum and I plenty of opportunities in the last nineteen years to fly across the Atlantic to go and visit them.
I'm fortunate enough to have quite a bit of family in other parts of America as well as some in Barbados and also Jamaica where my Grandad is originally from.
The first holiday I ever took to a foreign country was a soggy and miserable trip to Copenhagen in Denmark, though as I have mentioned previously my lasting memory is of constant rain, but also the world's choppiest seas ever on the way over to the Danish capital.
Before then I'd never been abroad, but took plenty of trips to the south of England where a large portion of my family lives.
Visiting America for in 1997 was the first opportunity I'd had to get on a plane, although I think on this trip I might have doubled the amount of flights I've actually taken throughout my entire life! I'd taken a few more trips abroad before moving to Korea in 2009 and as you can tell if you've read any of my blog entries, it still has a major effect on my life to this day. During my stint in Korea I got a visit from two of my friends, James and Luke, who came out to stay with me just before I eventually headed home, but before that my mum had paid me a visit the previous August and spent about a week experiencing plenty of the things she'd read about in my blog.
It was the furthest my mum had ever travelled on a plane, and I think before coming over she was a bit apprehensive about what she was going to be seeing, and more importantly eating whilst she was in what seemed like a very 'foreign' country. As it turned out, she had absolutely nothing to worry about, and as I was busy teaching during the day she became very adept at exploring the sights of Suwon and had a thoroughly enjoyable time.
Breaking her record for 'longest flight' this morning my mum set off from Heathrow last night to come and join me in Vietnam for a the duration of my stay here. I was already awake when she arrived this morning, and it was nice, if a little surreal, to see her face. We ate breakfast together in the hotel and then despite the long flight she wanted to forgo sleep and head out into the city to make the most of her stay.
Having not seen much yesterday other than the park at the bottom of my street I had a few ideas about where we could go, and how we could spend the first of our two days in Ho Chi Minh City.
It was quite overcast when we headed out this morning but still fairly humid, and predictably the traffic hadn't ceased in its craziness since last night. I kept hearing horns beeping well into the night, and I'm pretty sure that if I'd have gone out into the streets early this morning there would probably have been about ten thousand motorcycles travelling on the roads.
We walked through Tao Dam park and then continued up the road towards Independence Palace which is on the next street along. There were some people walking around in the grounds, but the main gates were locked, and the sign on the front of the ticket building stated that it closed at 11am, and would re-open at 2pm this afternoon. It seems that even in the relentless chaos of Vietnam, attractions allow themselves to close for a little while. We crossed the road and discovered this was true of the impressive looking cathedral which was opposite the palace as this opened at 3pm so we had some come up with a new plan until then.
We got to the zoo which was surprisingly inconspicuous when we arrived there and paid the 100,000 dong (£2.50) it cost to enter and then were quite surprised to discover from the map that there was actually quite a large number of animals living there:
We started off by heading towards some of the smaller cages where we saw some varieties of birds and monkeys before then looping round to where there were some bears...
...and some very sleepy lions:
I think this might actually be the quietest zoo I've ever been too as we were probably two of only about twenty people who were visiting it. We carried on walking towards the opposite side of the zoo to the one we had started on and then saw some more animals including elephants....
...giraffes....
....deer....
...and a rhino:
There really wasn't much else going on, though after standing and watching a gibbon swinging around the cage for a while it did throw something towards us which was pretty entertaining. He did it twice just to make sure we knew that he was directly aiming in our direction!
We decided to head back down the main road we'd been following as hunger was starting to set in, and eventually we found somewhere to grab a bite to eat and have a sit down for a while out of the direct sunlight which was now beaming down on Ho Chi Minh.
After grabbing something to eat we checked the time and saw that the palace and cathedral should probably be back open by now so we decided to head to the church first which actually sits opposite the palace but is facing east towards the river.
Notre Dame Cathedral (no, not that one) is a French-built cathedral in central Ho Chi Minh city and is a pretty impressive sight from both outside....
...and in:
We got there just after it opened up so there weren't too many people in there, and in truth apart from the main area of the church itself there wasn't actually that much to look at as it isn't as large or expansive after the cathedral of the same name in Paris. It sits opposite another famous building in Ho Chi Minh which is the central post office which currently doesn't look very pretty as it is covered in tons of scaffolding and you can barely see the yellow bricks which make up its front façade.
The palace was also back open now so we brought tickets (30,000 Dong) and followed a crowd of people who were heading inside.
I took this photo through the gates when it was closed earlier in the day and walking up closer I have to be honest and say that it actually doesn't look very much like a palace in the traditional sense at all:
Sure it is an impressively large building with a manicured lawn, a lovely fountain out in front and a red carpet at the entrance but I actually think it looks more like a museum from the outside, which once inside we essentially discovered it was.
Having been to a couple of Royal Palace's on my journey so far, it was good to get a bit of variety with something which was a bit more classical. This was South Vietnam's presidential palace until April 30, 1975 when a huge tank crashed through the gate and essentially ended the war with the North.
It was quite difficult to navigate a way around as you enter through the centre and can go left and right at each point, and then up and down a particular set of stairs which are either at one side or the other. We walked around the bottom floor and saw a couple of rooms which were mocked up to look like they had done during its use from 1962 onwards:
Most of the rooms were pretty old-fashioned looking, and pretty lifeless as they seemed to be filled with replica items rather than ones which had actually been used. There were descriptions outside of each room which explained what kinds of occasions they had been used for, and a couple of them mentioned when they had last been used, and what for, but it was hard to imagine them functioning in their current state with what seemed to be old furniture in each one of them.
We continued walking up to the top floor where there was a very impressive view out over the front lawn and over the main street which led to the Palace:
Continuing on the roof there was also a heliport which was marked with two circles where bombs hit and destroyed the palace during the war:
Heading back down we were able to look in another couple of rooms including the Games Room and then some private quarters of the palace:
There was also a room which was used as a tactical point during the Vietnam War with maps all over the wall and phones on the desk which were used to find out the latest information from the army chiefs presiding over the conflict:
An hour or so of walking around and we'd seen everything there was to be seen and decided to head back to the hotel for a little rest before venturing out around 6pm to go and get some dinner.
We decided to walk towards the river which is located just past where I was dropped off by the airport bus yesterday afternoon.
It took a good thirty seconds to cross quite possibly the world's scariest and busiest road but we survived and headed to the banks of the Saigon where there wasn't actually that much going on. The river splits Ho Chi Minh in half, a bit like the Mekong does to Phnom Penh, but aside from a couple of neon lights and a church which was lit up like it was Christmas there were a few people sitting by the water with nothing happening.
Heading away from the river and back in the direction of Notre Dame Cathedral we walked towards a shopping centre we'd briefly walked into earlier on as there was a food court on the top floor which we figured would be a good place for dinner.
There were a bunch of restaurants around and I had some fish with lemon flavoured sauce and some rice whilst my mum went for claypot beef which was also mysteriously served with French fries.
It has been a long day walking around in the humidity, I think it was about 36 degrees today so naturally I was feeling pretty fatigued when I went back to my room. It was certainly nice to have some company on my trip, and having someone to talk to rather than a head filled with my own thoughts probably made the day go a bit quicker. I hope my mum enjoyed her first day in Ho Chi Minh City, and she wasn't too daunted by everything that was going on around her. Hopefully we will have another enjoyable day of exploring the city tomorrow.
Just the Two of Us
Bill Withers (1980)
No comments:
Post a Comment