Ho Chi Minh Museums

The next morning, we found our cyclo driver, but he had a new partner that spoke pretty good English – he used to be with the South Vietnamese Army and had been driving his cyclo for 25 years. We negotiated to go to six places for 50,000 dong each. Our favourite stop by far was the Pho Binh soup/noodle shop, owned and run by a man who had become recognized as a war hero. The shop was a secret meeting place for the Viet Cong during the war, and it’s where they planned a lot of the details for the Tet Offensive, and the attack on the old American embassy. We got to meet the owner in person, though he doesn’t speak English – it was pretty cool sitting there, eating the great food and imagining what is was like there during the war.

We went to the Revolutionary Museum, covering all the revolutions in Vietnam’s long history. We were disappointed with the lack of English explanations and captions on pictures, it would have been a worthwhile visit had there been any understandable commentary. The war crimes museum (renamed “War Remnants Museum” after the resumption of diplomatic ties between Washington and Hanoi) was excellent. Although it was clearly biased towards the Vietnamese viewpoint, but what did we expect? There were some disturbing captions to pictures (“this American soldier is smiling as he hold the head of his victim”) and there were also disgusting pictures of GI’s brutalizing what looked like innocent farmers. All in all, it was really interesting. In the last room of the museum, we bumped into Victor, a guy from Chicago we’d met in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia. We convinced him to sign up on the Mekong tour, and we’d meet him later for dinner.

When we met Victor at 7:00, he was with an American girl, Kelly, who he’d just met in a restaurant. We convinced her to go with us, and when we cheeked the board at night, there were the four of us and two Dutch people signed up. Perfect.