ok short one, i'm hungry.

after leaving phnom penh, i took a lovely boat trip down the mekong across the vietnamese border and landed at chau doc.  as with the thai-cambodian border, it's like night and day going across.  first of all, everyone still wears those conical VC hats all over the place which are beautiful.  secondly it's an intensely dynamic and entrapreneurial place.  EVERYTHING is for sale and every structure also functions as a store selling anything from hookers to goat-intestines to lottery tickets to rice.  which i find interesting since this is the first truly communist (i.e. not-capitalist) country i've visited.  Chau Doc was quite a small delta town with a significant portion of it literally spilling into the river.  there are floating houses and markets and lotsa boat-people.  some of the first people i met were war-vets who'd worked with the Americans to fight the VC (their english, along with that of teenage-ish schoolkids is the best).  [after saigon fell, everyone who faught for the south was imprisoned and either killed or stripped of their citizenship so they can't hold decent jobs even to this day.]  it's a very complicated country with a lot more issues (at least prima facie, on the surface) than most. 

i hopped a minibus full of vietnamese to siagon which took about seven hours and went through miles and miles of beautiful wet-delta-rice-paddy-country.  the little kid behind me spent the first two hours spitting lotus seeds down the back of my neck and laughing, to everyone-elses general glee.  getting into saigon is kinda like entering new york city.  it gets dense and hairy a few hours before you're actually there.  and it just keeps on building and building in intensity until you're in the mouth of the beast itself.  first a word about the traffic on the way in:

the road has a line down the middle, but the traffic isn't organized into lanes, so much as braids.  apparently, the eternal-yet-futile goal of driving in vietnam is to get to the front at any cost.  the driver (and all other drivers) do not feel comfortable behind other vehicles, so, whenever they're behind one (which is always) they just veer out into the oncomming traffic, give a nod to the bhudda on the dashboard and fly crazy past whoever is in front of them only to jam themselves in behind the next guy which gives the guys on the other side the half-second-window that they need to try the same thing.  it gives the whole thing a nice kinda suicidal swish-swash sorta rythm.  now this is not on some super-highway with big walls on the sides, on either side (where all the motorcycles and bicycles are forced to flee) are houses, shops, children, trash-fires, card-games, meals, and everything else spilling right out into the insane road.  crazy.  but all that was just a prelude to what was to come once you're actually IN The City.

the first thing everyone notices about saigon is the traffic.  first of all, motorbikes and bicycles outnumber cars or trucks about 800 to 1.  they're like hornets.  everywhere.  a big dense seething breathing mass of them flying everywhich way (they usually drive on the right-side here).  there are virtually no traffic-lights, so it's basically all about balls.  when they want to turn left, they just stop in the middle of the road and wait until enough other turners have accumulated to scare the oncoming traffic into stopping as they surge blindly into certain-death.  crossing the road is intense, but good for the circulation.  today an old lady helped me across the road.  it was humbling.  you basically just have to go.  they're going to kill you but you have to go anyway.  there's no other way.  and then somehow miraculously you're on the other side still alive.  it's actually quite fun.  bangkok's got nothing on this place.