VietnamFiveo1

I landed in Saigon. Vietnam. Also known as Ho Chi Minh City. A cheap flight from Chiang Mai, Thailand.

As massive and bus as Ho Chi Minh is, I found it surprisingly easy to navigate. English being common in Vietnam made it as simple as asking airport security which bus to take to arrive at my destination. After a thirty-minute ride through the busy streets of Saigon, I hopped off and walked the remaining mile to find my hostel. A cheap yet warm and welcoming place to start my journey of Vietnam.

Once checked in, unloaded, and a Saigon beer in hand, I caught up with the other travelers. Vietnam is a common backpackers destination due to its friendliness toward foreigners and its currency exchange rate. Withdrawing $300 USD made me an instant millionaire. Expats can live a life of luxury on $500 a month. A great meal and a beer can be found for about a dollar. Beautiful, fully furnished apartments go for as low as $350 a month. Vietnam is an excellent destination for expats.

After a day of searching Vietnamese expat Facebook pages, I quickly found my steed of choice. As many backpackers come and go, the availability of cheap motorbikes is an easy commodity. One hundred eighty dollars later, I was the proud owner of an all-black 150cc motorbike complete with a metal militia logo on the gas tank.

Riding a motorbike in Saigon is as fluid as a hive of bees. What looks like a disaster in the making is a fluent dance of movement. Thousands of motorbikes swarm every intersection. The flow never stops. Red lights are suggestions. Turn signals are nonexistent. The key to your safety and sanity is to never stop moving. Decelerate, work your way to the outside of the mob, and you can easily exit and continue on your path. Hesitation kills. Stopping kills. Fear kills. You learn this in the first five minutes or you learn it in a hospital bed.

One of the first destinations recommended to me by other travelers was the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The museum is housed in the former building of the U.S. Information Service. It opened in 1975, just months after the fall of Saigon. Originally called the Exhibition House for U.S. and Puppet Crimes — propaganda was not subtle in the aftermath — the name softened over time. But the content did not.

The museum is not comfortable. It is not designed to be. The courtyard holds American military hardware: F-5 fighter jets, M48 Patton tanks, howitzers, armored personnel carriers. Children climb on them. They pose for photos, smiling, unaware of what these machines were built to do. That is Vietnam in a nutshell: the war ended before their parents were born. The past is a museum exhibit. The present is a selfie.

Inside, the exhibits are brutal. Photographs line the walls. Black and white. Unflinching. My Lai. The Hanoi Hilton. Napalm victims running down roads, skin peeling from their bodies. Agent Orange deformities preserved in jars. The text does not mince words. The United States is condemned. The language is direct, angry, and justified. I read every placard. I looked at every photograph. I did not look away. That would have been disrespectful.

I was born in 1979. The war ended in 1975. I have no personal memory of Vietnam. No family members who served. No political axe to grind. But standing in that museum, surrounded by evidence of what humans do to each other, I felt something I cannot name. Not guilt. Not shame. Just recognition. This happened. These people suffered. And I am here, on a motorbike, drinking cheap beer, because they survived and rebuilt and decided to let tourists like me come visit.

That is not nothing. That is forgiveness. Or pragmatism. Or both.

From the museum, I rode to the Cu Chi Tunnels, about sixty kilometers northwest of Saigon. The tunnels are a network of underground passages dug by the Viet Cong during the war. Over 250 kilometers of tunnels stretched from the outskirts of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border. The Vietnamese dug them by hand. They lived in them for years. They fought from them, slept in them, gave birth in them, died in them.

Tourists can crawl through a section of the tunnels. The entrance is small — deliberately small. The Viet Cong were small people. I am not. I crouched and shuffled and scraped my back against the ceiling. The air was thick and wet. The walls were packed earth. After thirty meters, I emerged sweating and grateful for sunlight. The Vietnamese soldiers spent years down there. I spent five minutes. Perspective is a brutal teacher.

Near the tunnels, the Vietnamese have built a shooting range. For a few dollars, tourists can fire an M60 machine gun or an AK-47. The sound echoes across the jungle. Children cover their ears. Old men watch with unreadable faces. I did not shoot. I had no desire to fire a weapon designed to kill people. But I watched others do it. Tourists. Americans mostly. Grinning as the recoil kicked their shoulders. Paying money to experience, for one brief moment, what the Vietnamese experienced for decades. There is a word for that. I do not know what it is. But it sits heavy.

Leaving Cu Chi, I rode north. The landscape changed from urban sprawl to rubber plantations to rice paddies. Women in conical hats worked the fields. Water buffalo stood knee-deep in mud. Farmers waved as I passed. The road was narrow and potholed, but the traffic was thin. Just me and the occasional truck and the endless green.

I stopped in a small town for lunch. A woman sold pho from a cart. She did not speak English. I did not speak Vietnamese. We communicated through pointing and smiling. The pho was excellent — beef broth, rice noodles, fresh herbs, a squeeze of lime. She charged me the local price, not the tourist price. I paid. She nodded. I nodded. That is how the world works when you get off the main road.

I continued north. Da Lat. Nha Trang. Hoi An. Hue. Each city different. Da Lat is cool and French, built in the mountains as a colonial escape from the heat. Nha Trang is beaches and Russians and high-rise hotels. Hoi An is lanterns and tailors and a river that glows at night. Hue is imperial tombs and the Perfume River and the scars of the Tet Offensive.

In Hue, I visited the Citadel. The Imperial City. The home of Vietnam's last emperors. The walls are massive — two kilometers in each direction, surrounded by a moat. Inside, the buildings are being rebuilt. The Americans destroyed most of it during the Battle of Hue in 1968. The fighting was house-to-house, room-to-room. The North Vietnamese held the Citadel for twenty-four days. The Americans bombed it to rubble. Now the Vietnamese are rebuilding, stone by stone, because history is worth preserving, even when it was destroyed by people who thought they were preserving something else.

I rode north to Hanoi. The capital. Older than Saigon. More French. More chaotic. More beautiful. The traffic in Hanoi makes Saigon look organized. Motorbikes pour through every intersection like water through a broken dam. Crossing the street is an act of faith. You walk slowly. You do not run. You do not stop. The motorbikes flow around you. It works. Somehow. It always works.

In Hanoi, I visited Hoa Lo Prison. The Americans called it the Hanoi Hilton. John McCain was held there. So were thousands of other American pilots. The museum presents the Vietnamese perspective, which is not the American perspective. The exhibits call American pilots "air pirates." They show photographs of prisoners being treated "humanely" while the subtext suggests otherwise. I walked through the cells. I saw the shackles. I saw the guillotine used by the French colonial government. Violence layered on violence. Empire on empire.

I left the prison and walked to Hoan Kiem Lake. A giant tortoise lives there. Legend says the tortoise took back a magic sword from a Vietnamese emperor. The sword was divine. The emperor used it to drive out the Chinese. Then the tortoise surfaced, took the sword, and disappeared beneath the water. Now the tortoise is a symbol. The lake is a gathering place. Old people do tai chi on the shore. Couples hold hands on the red bridge. Children chase pigeons. Life continues.

Vietnam is not a war. That is what I learned. Vietnam is a country. It is people eating pho and drinking coffee and riding motorbikes to work. It is farmers in rice paddies and shopkeepers in market stalls and students studying English in cramped classrooms. The war ended fifty years ago. Most of the country was born after it ended. The past is real. The past is present. But the past is not the whole story.

I sold my motorbike in Hanoi. Three hundred dollars. A one-hundred-twenty-dollar profit after riding it across the country. Not bad. The buyer was a German backpacker named Lukas. He inspected the bike. He kicked the tires. He asked about the metal militia logo on the gas tank. I told him it added horsepower. He believed me. Or he didn't care. He paid in cash. We shook hands. I watched him ride away, tailpipe sputtering, and felt the strange ache of letting something go.

I flew out of Hanoi two days later. Next stop: Cambodia. The Angkor temples. Siem Reap. Another country. Another story. But Vietnam stayed with me. The war. The tunnels. The museum. The fields. The people who waved as I passed. The woman who sold me pho for the local price. The tortoise in the lake. The sword at the bottom of the water.

I wrote this from memory. The dates are gone. The exact order is blurred. But the images remain. Saigon traffic. Cu Chi darkness. Hue rubble. Hanoi coffee. That is what travel does. It burns the calendar and preserves the frame.

Vietnam. October. 2022. Or maybe 2023. It does not matter. The story is the same. The war is over. The country is moving. And I was lucky enough to see it, one motorbike mile at a time.