Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; War Remnants and Warmth

I had been told that Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, is a city of 4 million motorbikes. Right now a fair proportion of them seem to be coming straight at me. Attempting to cross the roads here has me feeling like a character from the retro-arcade game Frogger and I'm scared – stepping into a wave of oncoming vehicles defies all human instinct and waiting for a gap is futile – there is never a gap. Applying my travel mantra of 'do as the locals do', I watch their techniques and realise that how these people cross their roads – with fortitude and resilience - encapsulates everything they are. And everything they are, I have come to discover, is fairly amazing.

I'm not really sure what I expected to find in a country so relatively recently torn apart by a brutal, long drawn-out war which claimed maybe as many as 4 million lives (exact figures are not known) but it sure as hell wasn't this..........this vibrancy........this spark......this complete absence of victim mentality or self-pity.

I can't help but think, as I look around, that anyone my age or older has almost certainly been touched in some way by this war – lost loved ones, been maimed, struggled to feed their families or just lived every day in fear. And although the war may have been over for almost 40 years, one of its cruellest legacies lives on – Agent Orange – one of the most toxic substances known to man. The 20 million gallons dropped during the war by the US military, with the intention of mass deforestation and crop destruction, is still claiming victims today as thousands of children continue to be born with birth defects.

Ho Chi Minh City is crazy, congested; noisy and polluted like major cities everywhere but unlike other urban sprawls it is also so very alive, warm and human. In fact HCM is a living embodiment of its people.

As I walk the streets here, every few paces some one tries to sell me something. I clumsily haggle the price of a pair of sunglasses as a lady with fans executes a flanking manoeuvre and a cigarette seller ambushes me from the rear. I'm surrounded. But these encounters are neither irritating nor intimidating – smiles never seem to be far from the face of a HCM citizen and anyway, I'm in no hurry. My favorite HCM activity is to grab myself one of the city's excellent coffee offerings and then simply sit and watch. I watch the old, old ladies sitting cross-legged on the dirty pavement trying to sell their basket of fruit, toothless mouths spread into grins as they share jokes with their neighbors. I watch motorbikes and scooters zooming past impossibly laden with humans, animals, fruit, stuffed sacks, boxes, planks of wood and sometimes all of those at once. I watch the old man with his motorbike taxi, mopping his brow with a dirty handkerchief as he sits in the midday tropical heat, calling 'taxi' hopefully to every white face that passes. I watch the young sunglasses sellers with their boards strapped to their shoulders that will maybe sell one pair a day. I watch a city of people simply trying to live as best they can and it wrenches my heart a little and it fills me with admiration. Nobody seems beaten down although it is evident that so many have so little.

My other favorite pastime is to wander the city's alleyways, most so narrow you can stand in the middle and touch the walls either side with your fingertips. This doesn't stop the motorbikes weaving their way through, slaloming the playing children, the doll-size tables where people are served food and the feet dangling into the alley from rooms just large enough to take a mattress. These tiny corridors are simply heaving with life and color and are just as full of the smiles and waves I have found elsewhere in the city.

HCM is a destination in itself but with so much to see and do in close proximity it also acts as a touring base. Not far from here are the Cu Chi tunnels – an immense underground network used by the Viet Cong during the war as hospitals, weapons caches, living quarters and supply routes. Now a major tourist attraction, you can even fire a few AK47 rounds here if that sort of thing floats your boat. Reminders of the war are everywhere physically but not so it would seem in the attitudes of its people.

The only piece of tourist souvenir tat I have ever bought is a sticker, which says ' I LOVE HCM'. The simple fact is, I do... although I never did master crossing a road without experiencing a sensation of mild panic. No where’s perfect.

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