Saigon: Remnants of the War

Saigon Street with no traffic, a miracle

Arriving in Ho Chi Minh city via the airport is like driving into madness. Here you get your first taste of the Vietnamese dependence on/ love of the motorcycle as the streets become engorged with millions of them, and the air becomes 1 part oxygen to 9 parts carbon dioxide. Everywhere they are coming at you,buzzing and honking for right of way, not content to drive on the streets, they drive on the meager footpaths that are already full of parked bikes. The city is like a great shrine to the combustion engine. The first time I stepped out of my hotel into the heart of motorcycle darkness, I had to beat a hasty retreat into a cafe it was so overwhelming. Everywhere people trying to get your attention to take you somewhere, sell you something, and everything is for sale. The streets teemed with noise and chaos and the Vietnamese of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh city (apparently you can call it either) don't seem to be perturbed in the slightest. 

There is no apparent order to the shops, old crumbling lean-tos with dischevelled people selling trinkets right beside  huge shiny glass and chrome car dealerships selling state-of-the-art mercedes cars. In front of the shops are women with traditional Vietnamese wicker baskets on poles across their shoulders with a few vegetables in them, or piles of green mangoes, and people are preparing food to sell from the most modest of cooking utensils, a pot, a kettle, ingredients: it's all compact and it's all mobile. 

My first day I headed over to what is called the War Remnants Museum, which is where they document the details of the American War of Aggression. Outside, huge captured American tanks and bombers take pride of place, their violent memories scored onto the rusting metal of their massive lumbering bodies. B52s, huge tanks, and gigantic transport helicopters with their outsize roters hanging mercifully useless in the hot morning air. Walking by them, I wondered what action they saw during the height of the madness that was the Vietnam/American war. Saigon itself back then was the center of US command and wasn’t liberated by the Vietcong until 1975 when the last Americans evacuated and the war was declared officially over. 

US Army troop transporter outside the War Remnants Museum, Saigon

Captured US aircraft on display outside the War Remnants Museum, Saigon

When I left the US as a child of seven the war was very much still in progress, my family had already moved back to Ireland when the ‘incident’ at Kent State university happened, where the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war, killing four people and injuring eight. I remember that incident well. It seemed like a turning point, along with the image of Kim Phuc, her seven year old body naked when her clothes were incinerated by Agent Orange as she ran from her village which had been carpet bombed, and just a few years before Nixon resigned for the Watergate scandal. To me, as a teenager, it seemed like the country in which I was born and lived the first seven years of my life and the values on which it was founded was in tatters. Perhaps it was when my own disillusionment set in. Had I been a bit older there is no doubt I would have been out there protesting with the thousands of others.

The museum is an education. Old artillery in glass cases, sections of a sewer children, who were subsequently shot by US forces, hid as the enemy approached, a whole section on photography and how powerful it was in bringing the war to an end, the various photographers from Time and other magazines and papers, many of whom lost their lives while bringing those amazing images to the world. There is a very disturbing section on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals that were used profusely on Vietnam (and on Cambodia when the US Army tried to stem the tide of arms coming in through the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Cambodia’s eastern flank). These toxic chemicals caused devastation to the landscape, causing cancer and serious birth defects amongst the population for years to come. The tragic and heart-rending images of the people affected by these toxins are to be seen in this section of the museum. I was quite happy when the lights in the museum suddenly flashed and an alarm sounded, which I discovered meant it was lunchtime and the museum was closing for lunch. I’d had enough.

I have been trying to comprehend the psychology of a people that could withstand the full force of the US Army for years, hiding out in an intricate warren of bunkers below the steaming earth as it  bravely withstood everything the US had to throw at it. Pretty much everyone agrees it was due to the leadership of Ho Chi Minh that got them through that time.

The famous image of a group of children, including Kim Phuc who had her clothes burned off in an Agent Orange attack on her village. This photograph galvinized anti-war sentiment across the world.

Time magazine's coverage of the Vietnam war showing Vietcong prisoners loaded onto a boat by US soldiers

When I left the US as a child of seven the war was very much still in progress, my family had already moved back to Ireland when the ‘incident’ at Kent State university happened, where the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war, killing four people and injuring eight. I remember that incident well. It seemed like a turning point, along with the image of Kim Phuc, her seven year old body naked when her clothes were incinerated by Agent Orange as she ran screaming from her village which was a smoldering cinder, and just a few years before Nixon resigned for the Watergate scandal. To me, as a teenager, it seemed like the country in which I was born and lived the first seven years of my life and the values on which it was founded was in tatters. Perhaps that was when my own disillusionment set in. Had I been a bit older there is no doubt I would have been out there protesting with the thousands of others.

The museum is an education. Old artillery in glass cases, sections of a sewer children, who were subsequently shot by US forces, hid as the enemy approached, a whole section on photography and how powerful it was in bringing the war to an end, the various photographers from Time and other magazines and papers, many of whom lost their lives while bringing those amazing images to the world. There is a very disturbing section on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals that were used profusely on Vietnam (and on Cambodia when the US Army tried to stem the tide of arms coming in through the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Cambodia’s eastern flank). These toxic chemicals caused devastation to the landscape, causing cancer and serious birth defects amongst the population for years to come. The tragic and heart-rending images of the people affected by these toxins are to be seen in this section of the museum. I was quite happy when the lights in the museum suddenly flashed and an alarm sounded, which I discovered meant it was lunchtime and the museum was closing for an hour and a half. I’d had enough.

Although written twenty years ago, this piece from a book I've found invaluable throughout my journey is still appropriate:

On entering Saigon I realized that I was not prepared for the shock. I had thought about all the practicalities, but not about what the return would mean for me. The Saigon that came to meet me was a bedlam of humanity. I felt lost and almost frightened. On the morning of the 30^th April 1975 I had wept with joy to see the tanks of the Liberation Army rolling into Saigon: the war was over, and the Vietnamese would now be masters of their own country. When I returned ten years later I had wept with despair when I saw how the Communists had wasted their chance to make Vietnam a truly free country. Now I was even more heartsick. The failure was everywhere, in the life of every one of those who had won the war.

From ‘A Fortune Teller Told Me’ by Tiziano Terzani

I felt exactly the same as I first entered Saigon twenty years after this had been written. I stayed in a hotel in the center, District 1 called ‘Tan My Dinh’, which became my private joke as I would say it to myself in an old-time prospector’s voice whenever something in the environment threatened to overwhelm me, which was fairly often, as in, ‘Well, tan my dinh…’ It’s amazing what amuses you in such times. I booked a day trip to the Mekong and immediately regretted it. And this is because I have come to realize over the course of this amazing trip I’m on that I am not a tourist. Let me explain...

In fact, there is nothing that fills me with dread more than a trip with a group of strangers that involves a ‘guide’ and a tour bus. And, as I was to discover in Vietnam, all tours have a pronounced mercenary character, aimed as they are at showing you as little as possible of what you actually want to see (the floating market or life on the Mekong…) and instead spending the bulk of the time parading you through the local alligator farm, snake pit or iguana wrestling tent, where they just happen to sell the particular animal’s hide done up into a nice wallet or purse. You can try on the python like movable art, wrap the magnificent creature around you like a stole and then be shown how lovely its skin looks in a laptop case. There is something obscene about this way of thinking at which the Vietnamese are so alarmingly proficient, where everything is there to consume, literally or figuratively. It turned my stomach in the Mekong. Glad to hear others weren’t impressed, a New Yorker complained that pretty much everything they were selling in the market was from China. It’s also isn’t lost on me where this voracious consumerism comes from, imported wholesale as it was from the west, traded outright for all the real vestiges of local custom. I had higher hopes for Asia, hoping some of the ancient charm would remain (more twinkling lights, tinkling bells, oddly discordant music filled with chimes and gongs and insanely high-pitched female voices, a people as mysterious as we in the West are mundane). If ever it was there, it is now (if southern Vietnam is anything to go by), sadly, almost completely obliterated. Another thing that is insupportable about being a tourist is how quiescent tourists generally are with the level of utter crap that are confronted with, without a murmur on their part. This is another thing that has brought me to the cconclusion that I am not a tourist. I tend to murmur quite a lot....

Take lighting, for example. Everywhere are fluorescent strips flooding everything with flat vacuum tube light. No hint of mystery left, everything blasted in brilliant floodlight.

We took a three hour cruise up the Mekong, a wide, languorous muddy river with great tufts of green branch-like islands, and a lot of plastic debris, floating around. People were out on ancient river barges selling whatever they could. Not at all like the floating market outside Bangkok, this was a quiet, nonchalant affair. The shanties of the people lined the water, on wooden posts. After the confines of Ho Chi Minh the wide open sky and great vast river was refreshing.

Later, I wandered around Saigon looking at historical landmarks, the Continental Hotel, the Opera house.  Everywhere a million honking motor bikes vying for space. Everywhere a hundred people urging you to buy something, to let them take you somewhere, every encounter behind the smile and the friendly, Where you from? an eyeball rolling up into dollar signs. I wanted to get away as soon as possible. I booked a ‘sleeping bus’ to Nha Trang, a seaside resort two hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh, and more importantly, on the Pacific ocean.

Iconic picture of young Vietnamese girl standing in front of her burning village

Saigon street vendor

Fish for the Buddha: Siem Reap Market

Fish freshly killed by the Cambodian fish wives of the Siem Reap market

It seems to me that Cambodia, if Siem Reap is anything to go by, is still suffering the immense psychological effects  of Pol Pot's mad years of destruction and insanity. Most people are desperately poor, there are no intrinsic industries apart from the newly mushrooming tourist industry, and that is everywhere rampant and overwhelming. What about the psychological effects of all that murder and loss on the Cambodian people? People are so poor they are selling their own children to sexual predators that pour into Cambodia by the truckload preying on young children, mainly girls, and destroying lives. This is a poverty so complete, such an anihilation of self-worth that makes it possible to consider giving up your children to these monsters.


The government is corrupt and not much of the huge amounts of money made annually now from tourism gets to help better the lot of the average person, that's why I felt so outrageous to pay $60 for a three day pass to the temples, knowing how little good it will do the  people who really need it and how many greasy pockets it will line of the powers that be.  Leaving Cambodia I'm feeling a bit sad not to have gotten away from the tourist traps and out into the country where the real people are. But also, frankly, a little relieved to beleaving, getting away from all those wandering ghosts.

Woman picking her teeth in the Siem Reap market



Chicken lady, Siem Reap market

There is a basic dourness about the Cambodian people, although it may just be not liking having their photos taken

Fish and Fruit

A selection of fresh fruit and vegetables at the Siem Reap market

So you get the markets, as photographed here, the many young girls bored out of their minds with no prospects other than the brothels of Bangkok and Phnom Penh and this place at a market stall.

The utter boredom of what they do is most obvious amongst the young girls

Pigs heads and offal for sale

Very happy to be dead, thanks very much!

Definite resistance to photography in the market

Anyone for tarot?

The Legacy of Pol Pot: Skulls & Silence

Buddhist stupa (shrine) Wat Thiem, Siem Reap, Cambodia: skulls of the many victims of the Khmer Rouge found by the Buddhist monks at this temple 


Some people say they can't sleep in Cambodia. I must say I slept pretty well but had very strange dreams. It must be all the souls who died violently flitting about the edges of consciousness. I can't help feeling I am now on the Asian conveyor belt whirlwind tour and am beginning to resent being a tourist. My next trip will not follow a tourist route. Although it is fantastic to see these places I am beginning to be overwhelmed by the 'Asian Miracle'. How can you travel to one of the poorest countries in Asia with such a tragic and violent past and concentrate on seeing fantastic temples, even those with World Heritage accreditation while always in the background are the Cambodian people looking for crumbs from tourists and their own government. I read in the paper on the flight out of Cambodia that the government are trying to get the malnourishment statistics down from 50% to 30% by 2012. That means that half of the population are officially starving. Meanwhile hordes of tourists bypass all the ugliness staying in air-conditioned hotels, shifted about in air-conditioned cars, unaware of the more recent - if less magnificent - history. A two day ticket to visit Angkor Wat and the other temples is $60. Over three quarters of a million people visited the temples last month - do the figures, this is not a small amount the government are making. Where is the money going? Why are the people starving? Why are such huge numbers of Cambodian women and children being trafficked for sex, mostly to western men? It seems to me part of this 'Asian Miracle' is the elevation of money as the new god, at the expense of peoples lives.

Buddhist alter at Wat Thiem, Siem Reap

Detail of skulls

Wat Thmei, Siem Reap, Cambodia: The Buddha Dreams

Angkor What?

One of the backdrops for the Tomb Raider movie, Ta Prohm, Cambodia

Of all the temples you have to choose from of the great smorgasbord of temples around Siem Reap, Cambodia, the jumping off point for Angkor Wat, I am so glad I chose Ta Prohm, or what is now commonly called in the local parlance, 'The Angelina Temple' as the first temple I saw. Not because of it's fame as one of the exotic locations for the film 'Lara Croft: Tomb Raider' in 2000, but because it is really the most incredible of all the temples at Angkor, hugely atmospheric with its background ambiance of flocks of circling wild parrots, ancient crumbling walls and...and then there are the trees. So much time has passed that these trees, giant banyan and kapok trees, are reclaiming the temple with limbs that are more like animal flesh than plant life, so much so that they appear animate, and it's as if you are not on the set of a movie about the search for a sacred talisman but to a science fiction movie, a cross between Day of the Trifids and something very alien from HR Giger.

Shortly after I arrived the light shifted to that pubescent yellowish purple pre-storm light and then the heavens cracked and it absolutely poured rain. Soon the red earth in which these huge trees and their now permanently attached temple ran bloodlike into creeper strewn ditches. People, and I was relieved to see I had chosen the time well because not many were there at that time in the afternoon, huddled in the interstices of  the dank temple looking out at the great opera of storm outside the giant stone-cut windows. I have to say that inside the temple there was no elevation of feeling or awareness I would associate with sacred architecture, which I have experienced first hand in the temples of Egypt. Here the overwhelming feeling, not negating the still powerful impact of Ta Prohm, was one of heaviness and morbidity, the huge weight of the stone above you that lent a sobriety to the experience, no elevation of spirit in sight. Actually, I had the same feeling here as I experienced at the Mayan temple of Chichen Itza in the Yucutan in Mexico, of great heaps of time stored in the stones, of the weight of murder and human sacrifice. Perhaps some of this effect is to do with the fact that the outline of Angkor Wat became a symbol on the flag of the Khmer Rouge during the four years when Pol Pot renamed Cambodia 'Democratic Kampuchea' and was busy killing 1.8 million of his fellow countrymen. The symbol then stood for the national traditions of the Kampuchean people - but only those that Pol Pot took to be the ones deserving of retaining. Perhaps that's why the outline of Angkor Wat is so resonant with meaning.

Afterwards, seeing Angkor Thom and then Angkor Wat itself, I was increasingly disappointed by these ruins I had heard so much about finding the architecture clunky and dischevelled and, eh, really rather ugly. As soon as I stepped into Angkor Wat I wanted to beat a hasty retreat and considered going back to Ta Prohm, because at least there I knew was a visual intricacy that the camera loves and that kind of thing makes me happy. I did photograph some of the other temples, but they were much less impressive visually than Ta Prohm.

Human context: the amazing, animal-like limb of a great Kapok tree as it embraces a moss-infested temple building at Ta Prohm temple, Cambodia

Detail of Kapok tree limb, Ta Prohm, Cambodia

Roots of giant Banyan tree in Ta Prohm temple, Cambodia

Temple door enmeshed in a profusion of alien like limbs, Ta Prohm, Cambodia

The Colour and the Chaos: Damnoen Saduak Floating Market

Leaving Bangkok was more of a sweet rather than bitter experience. The day before I went to the Damnoen Saduak, the tour mini van spending an hour collecting people from various hotels around the huge sprawling polluted stinking city that was already beginning to swelter and in the early morning sun. The relentless streams of mopeds, taxis, cars, trucks, buses all heading into the city in frantic, beeping choking unison, a cacophony of horns. The traffic in Bangkok is like a great noxious animal that rarely sleeps and seems to draw energy from the sun itself growing more ferocious in the heat. It is frightening, the thought of what the future holds for this huge metropolis that, if it once was the city of angels as it's name is said to mean, they have all up and flown away, leaving this city to the 'jiin', or spirits that are said to haunt it.

The night before I left I got lost out on the streets with darkness setting in and unable to get a taxi. Even though I had the printed address and map of the hotel I was staying in, the taxi drivers I hailed took one look and said, no, no... and sped off. Then, like a sequence of a bad dream, I stumbled across a woman sitting at the side of the road, slumped over her young child, both apparently asleep. Around the corner, further up the road, sat a little girl who could have been no more than two years old, with night coming on, sitting there alone, begging. 

One and a half hours outside the city is this market that is more of a floating tourist hell where the rampant consumerism isn't cloaked under any nice veneer. But within that there is still beauty, within the chaos and clamour there are distinct pockets of calm and clarity, the traders still resonating a warmth and a human touch that defies the conditions under which they live. I was blown away by the colour and beauty around me.

This seems to be a Burmese custom where women paint their faces with white like this woman, it can make them look quite fearful

You can buy anything at the Damnoen Saduak Market

Care and precision in the midst of mayhem, the women traders of the Damnoen Saduak floating market are the epitome of Buddhist calm

Three generations of a trader family at the floating market

The amazing Damnoen Saduak floating market

Old trader in floating market

Damnoen Saduak floating market, outside of Bangkok

Mango and sticky rice seller in floating market

Paradise in infrared: The Beach revisited...

Home of the Beach: Hollywood got there first…

Arriving at Phi Phi (pronounced as you would number onesies to a little child) is like arriving on the set of the biggest movie ever made with shooting starting the next day. The set is spectacular, sheer limestone cliffs rising on one side framing a bay that is speckled with boats of every shape and size, from giant cruise liners and perilously fast speedboats to hundreds of traditional Thai long-tailed boats criss-crossing the luminous lime green water, all only narrowly avoiding collision with each other. It all has the atmosphere of carnival, except on the pier they’re shouting, roll up, roll up, pay your twenty baht (about six euro) before they’ll allow you entrance.­­ These Thai pier workers are aggressive and unwelcoming as if they realize that regardless of how civil they are people will still be arriving here in droves. And that’s because Phi Phi Don is the jumping off point for the island of Phi Phi Lay, it’s beautiful sister island whose jagged outline rose out of the turquoise ocean for hundreds of feet as we approached, by now infamous home of the film starring Leonardo di Caprio, The Beach.

As we came ashore the sky flashed a quick but intense rain shower, a foretaste of the coming rainy season, but everything cleared off and dried up in no time. Met on the pier, to get to my hotel I was led through a Thai market which solidified my vaguely forming opinion that in Thailand things are not separated off into neat little packages: it is what it is – they don’t try to beautify what is ugly. Religion, for instance, isn’t something found in the separate location of a church, there are temples and shrines literally everywhere: in the middle of markets (Jesus wept), next door to government buildings and in the major functioning shrines and temples like Wat Pho in Bangkok (home of the fabulously relaxing Buddha) there is no conflict in the Thai mind between being open for the business of tourism and still functioning as a place of worship.

This applies to the realm of food as well, as for every beautiful smell of grilling meats and fondant spices you are likely to sniff in a Thai market there are an equal (if not greater?) number of malodorous stenches arising from the bowels of the earth that in the west could simply not go together. For someone trying to get over a six day bout of Montezuma’s (or the Thai equivalent) revenge, this was really overwhelming, the encroaching heat doesn’t help and soon you wish for the enclosure of your air-conditioned room.

But you can’t stay inside for long. The lure of the tropical Hollywood film set island calls. I thought of trying to avoid the crowds and enquired about renting a long-tailed boat (and driver!) and head out to Phi Phi Lay before sun up but the price as astronomical and so I decided to go with the rest of the ‘audience’ and do a regular snorkeling tour, for which I would valiantly trade a snorkel for my camera. So bright and early next morning I met with my tour group who were already bobbing about in a long-tail and we set off into the bay in the direction of Phi Phi Lay, along with, in various modes of vessel, the supporting cast of Ben Hur and Cleopatra combined.

The ride out there was extraordinary.

Armed with my already-ingested mega-dose of travel sickness pills I was feeling very nice as we tore through the aqua sea, limestone cliffs rising up around us like great sea creatures from journey to the center of the earth.  Once out of the bay the open sea quite intense, my twin concern being for my camera as huge splashes as the boat hit the oncoming waves threatened to soak it completely and also the little girl beside me who was with her father (I think they were Scandinavian) with nary a life jacket in sight. This casualness with child safety with which I have been having a particularly hard time since arriving in Thailand is not something I have witnessed much in the west, there being laws to say what you can and can’t do with children. In Thailand let’s say these laws are notable by their absence and children, babies are piled onto mopeds with both their parents and extended family, and of course any kind of helmets or protection is non-existent.

But here on the ocean I am soon distracted by the extraordinary beauty around me as we pull into the most amazing cove of crystalline water where the water is so clear it seems as if the boats are floating in air.  I am in photographer’s paradise once again.

I am now deeply entrenched in my Buddhist stance of accepting The Now and disassembling any expectations of what Hollywood has built up around the idea of the perfect beach that was captured in that film, the takings from which has probably added substantially to Thailand’s GNP. You remember the first time di Caprio comes out from the jungle onto that pristine beach, the white sand disappearing into the turquoise wash, the perfectly enclosing rim of giant limestone megaliths (surely that makes a lagoon?) strewn with jungle green abutting a perfectly sky-blue sky? When we arrived by boat into Maya bay it was like the day before the shoot with a technical crew of hundreds and a cast of thousands as audience.  People nevertheless did jump overboard and join the hundreds of other snorkelers.

Hopefully the pictures will speak for themselves…

Phi Phi Ley, Long-tailed boat view

Sailing to Paradise





One of the coves on Phi Phi Ley





The Beach, infrared







My legs on The Beach, Phi Phi Lay, Thailand



Long-tail boatman, Maya beaach, aka The Beach



The Dutch girls in the long-tailed boat, on the way to Phi Phi Lay, Thailand



Sheer cliffs of Phi Phi Lay, Thailand





After the swim

Maya Beach, aka 'The Beach', Phi Phi Lay, Thailand