I was writing this inside our twelve-dollar room in Saigon. My brother was already snoring and sleeping soundly, while I just had the urge to write something. That was our last night on a journey that had taken us from Saigon to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in Cambodia, and back again to Ho Chi Minh. It was a trip that finally morphed my childhood fascination with seeing Angkor Wat into a reality. By the next day, that epic on-the-road experience would total eight days—one of my longest so far in terms of traveling in between my day job.
Dispatch from Saigon
The Pull of the Familiar Unknown
While I enjoyed every second of our trip and the bonding opportunity I had with my older brother—in spite of a few times getting pissed at each other, mostly arguing about which direction to go when exploring a strange city for the first time together—I was also looking forward to coming home. I felt like I had a lot of stories to write about that trip in the coming days.
Saigon, known today as Ho Chi Minh City, had been a part of my childhood memory ever since movies like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Full Metal Jacket became a staple of war movies shown on television. I finally had the chance to see modern-day Ho Chi Minh, at a time when it was around thirty-five years removed from the brutal era of the Vietnam War.
A City Reborn
I was pleased with what I had seen so far in that city. It was bustling and on the verge of breaking out, if it had not already. The tourists that flocked to the city, its rows of hostels and hotels, and the travel booking offices were a testament that it had become quite a hotspot for tourism. When I woke up in a guesthouse run by an elderly couple after my first night, I thought, "Waking up and exploring a strange city that is slowly becoming familiar makes traveling addicting."
And Saigon provided that experience, with its seemingly endless parade of motorcycles, wide choices of food, and friendly people. One would never feel they had left home; rather, Ho Chi Minh City portrayed that home-away-from-home kind of place.
It felt great to finally be able to mutter to myself, even in the worst Robin Williams impersonation, "Good Morning Vietnam," while actually being right there in Vietnam—in a city that had seen its share of war, brutality, and destruction, but had now been able to transform itself into a city that attracted people from across the globe and provided them a strange yet familiar place one could never find any difficulty in calling 'home.'
