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Thirty years later
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Photos:
1. Cycling through the market 1995
2. Bird in a cage
3. A typical overland bus (my photo from 1965)
My thirteenth visit wasn't until thirty years later (30 years and 13 days, to be exact) when my older son Nick and I arrived on a flight from Singapore on Friday, July 21, 1995. We stayed in Saigon Star Hotel and spent the evening at a restaurant in De Tham Street.
The city was now officially called Ho Chi Minh City, but most people still seemed to say Saigon. It turned out we had come at a time when government controls over the country were starting to be somewhat relaxed. People were allowed to start small businesses, and Vietnamese living overseas were allowed to visit the country as tourists -- or as investors.
We met a Vietnamese family that had been living in Canada for twenty years and were visiting their home country for the first time since they fled in the 1970s.
On Saturday, July 22, 1995, we stayed in Saigon and visited the Revolutionary Museum in the afternoon.
On Sunday, July 23, 1995, we went by pedi-cab to Saigon station and later to a bus stop where we caught an overland bus going to Biên Hòa. The bus was very much like the one in my third photo, even though I took that photo thirty years earlier in 1965. The bus was crowded and there was no glass in the windows, so when it rained -- which it did on the way to Biên Hòa! -- we and everybody else got soaking wet.
But in the tropical heat our clothes dried very quickly, and I was really pleased that I could finally ride in one of those buses, which was something I could never do as a soldier in 1964/65 for security reasons.
