Facing the Dragon - Chapter 1

By Chris Sarcletti

Country: Vietnam

I grab my backpack from the luggage turnstile and make my way out into the heat and humidity of the mid day to catch a cab to my hotel. I walk up to the first empty cab I see, open the back door and set my bag on the seat right beside me. My driver is friendly and speaks reasonable English. He asks me where I am from and we have a short conversation before my attention wanes. I stare out the window and take in my first real glimpses of Vietnam. The streets are chaotic with all sorts of vehicles moving in every direction. It looks almost as hot and sticky as it feels. It is hard for me to actually believe that I am in Saigon. Amsterdam seems like a world away now. After nearly 30 minutes, I finally arrive at my destination, the Continental Hotel.

The Continental Hotel seems to be a decent enough place and it has a long history. It is mentioned frequently in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American as Greene talks incessantly about the hotel’s courtyard where the novel’s protagonist enjoys many a Singapore Sling.

It feels good to sit down on my bed for a few moments and unwind. I am exhausted but have no desire to go to sleep. I unpack my luggage and organize my room. My spacious room seems to be clean, until I find a dead cockroach on the floor. While I usually would find the site of a dead cockroach in my hotel room to be quite disconcerting, this is Saigon and it is about a hundred fucking degrees outside. I am not too bothered. I take a quick shower and change into a fresh outfit. I am ready to venture out into the city for the first time.

Within minutes of exiting the hotel, I am approached by a cyclo driver asking me if I want a ride. I have no intention of using a cyclo just yet. I’ve been sitting for most of the last 30 hours and need to stretch my legs. In addition, I am excited and have been looking forward to walking around a bit and taking in some of the city on foot. As I walk down the street, I realize that I have vastly underestimated the perseverance of this particular cyclo driver. For the next 5 minutes, he acts as my shadow. As I walk down Dong Khoi Street, he is never far behind. It is hard not to notice him staring at me from the other side of the street. When I look in his direction, his eyes immediately light up. He jumps off of his cyclo and runs half way across the street shouting in the hopes of getting me to stop and acknowledge his existence. After 10 minutes of this, I am already a broken man. Astonished by his determination, I wave him over and jump aboard his vehicle. We exchange pleasantries and he bombards me with a litany of questions. What’s your name? Where are you from? Do you have a girlfriend? The girlfriend question is sometimes followed by additional probing questions if one is foolish enough to admit that they are single and traveling alone. This cyclo driver is a wealth of information as we experience a pleasant sunset and spend an hour or so taking in the environment of the area surrounding the Continental Hotel. This is the center of the city.

The traffic in Ho Chi Mihn City is unbelievable. I have never seen anything remotely close to it. Chaos!

Everyone, whether aboard a cyclo, bike, car, motorbike, truck, bus or on foot is moving at their own pace and according to their own agenda. No one has any concern for anyone else, or so it seems. Acting in a very reactive manner, everyone makes the appropriate adjustments and diversions to avoid colliding with vehicles, pedestrians and whatever else they may encounter on the road. Miraculously, people continue to move amid the bedlam.

My first cyclo ride in Saigon taught me more than I ever could have imagined it would. Remarkably, whether you are walking or are a passenger in some type of vehicle, you continue to make one move after another until the pandemonium doesn’t seem to faze you. It is of no importance what direction you are heading or what side of the road you think you should be on. The vehicles and people just move and there are no rules. I expect to see collisions and people flying off of motorbikes but I only see traffic that moves at a snails pace. Is crossing the street and walking in Saigon dangerous? Yes, but you have no choice unless you want to sit in your hotel or only stray a few blocks from it.

My salesman driver must have seen the wide eyed look on my face as he made sure that this ride would continue on the following day. It didn’t take long for him to get me to agree to meet him at 11 AM tomorrow morning for a half day cyclo tour of the city. He tells me that he will take me anywhere that I want to go. My appetite is whetted and I am ready to see and experience much more of Saigon.
I am exhausted both physically and emotionally. I relax in my room for nearly an hour but know that I need to venture back out into the city for dinner. I make my way on foot over to a restaurant recommended in my Rough Guide to Vietnam. The Vietnam House restaurant has female servers in traditional dress serving authentic dishes with Vietnamese music playing in the background. The hotel concierge said that the Vietnam House is a good, but rather pricey restaurant. For dinner, I have an order of spring rolls followed by a Southern Vietnamese regional delicacy of fish cooked in a clay pot. The fish is served in a sweet and spicy sauce with sticky rice. A couple Saigon 333 beers help to aid with digestion, in addition to numbing my fatigue. My meal is nice and it costs me a total of 10 USD.

I walk back to my hotel with a fleeting thought of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American still in my head and decide that a Singapore Sling before bed might help me rest even better. I find a table in the area surrounding the pleasant, tropical courtyard bar that is so vividly described in Greene’s novel. I order a concoction of gin, lime juice, pineapple juice, grenadine, brandy and cointreau. I take a long sip slowly from the straw. As I taste my drink, snapshots of my first few hours in Saigon flash through my mind.

The polluted Saigon River, women selling fruit on the street, beggars and people with deformities. As I made my way down Dong Khoi street and the surrounding avenues, the deformities became particularly noticeable to me. With excerpts from many different books and articles about Vietnam and the war fresh in my head, what I saw was even more disconcerting to me. While seeing deformed and crippled people would be troubling to most, it is even more so to someone who feels that they carry some of the responsibility for what they see before their eyes. I am an American and many of these deformities are by products of the chemical warfare that the US used in abundance on the Vietnamese populace during the Vietnam War. I know that these things should make me feel uncomfortable and I need to come to terms with them internally, but that is an ongoing process. It won’t happen in a couple of hours or a couple of days. I have deep convictions that what my country did in Vietnam was wrong. This was very clear to me before and it is even clearer now. The Vietnamese seem to have a great propensity for forgiveness when it comes to their past that I wish I could share. Forgive as they may though, no one should ever forget.
I have had one of the longest days I can remember and have experienced more than I could have imagined at this point in time. It is hard for me to contain my excitement for what I will see in the coming days and weeks. However, it is now time to rest my mind and body as they both surely need it.