Vietnam and Cambodia
MICHAEL TUREKBa Muoi Thang Tu Park
Vietnam and Cambodia are linked by the waters of the Mekong, by the lush green of mangroves and mangoes, and by the darkness of the last century. Seek out the relics of colonial Saigon and explore chaotic Phnom Penh, and you will discover their life-affirming present. Words by Nick Fraser.
In Vietnamese markets, peasants wearing conical straw hats and dressed in what seem to be pyjama outfits designed by Coco Chanel squat among chickens, buckets of odd-looking clams, bewilderingly whiskered river fish, gross carp and vegetable mountains. The flowers are flame-red, yellow or violet. Poor as they are, there's an ensemble aesthetic here. I can see what inspired the idea of Indochic.
I like what appears to be the utter absence of sentiment in Vietnamese life. Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon) is less brutalist than a Chinese city, because the rebuilding has barely started. The food is barely to be believed. I know a bit about pho, the soup that forms the basis of Vietnamese cuisine, and I've eaten nem, rolls sometimes filled with glass noodles as well as shrimps and coriander; but everything is different here. Tastes are pungent without being overpowering. What you eat mixes with the herbs you can smell around you.
Pictured: Ba Muoi Thang Tu Park near the opera house in Ho Chi Minh City
MICHAEL TUREKHo Chi Minh City
If you're over 40, Vietnam and Cambodia are associated with the swoosh of rotors or the flares of napalm on the television news. Or you might recall emigrants grimly clustered on boats, or indeed the barbarous, genocidal acts of the Khmer Rouge, who emptied cities and abolished money, killing more than a million in their insane quest for utopia.
Brian McNally, a friend of mine who used to live in Manhattan, creating restaurants and running them, lives in Ho Chi Minh City. He wrote urging me to come to Vietnam and Cambodia. 'People are scared off,' he said. 'You shouldn't come to Vietnam for war relics. The Vietnamese have a terrible history, but they don't want to dwell on it. Instead they're interested in getting something out of life.'
Pictured: a schoolgirl on Highway 1, Ho Chi Minh City
MICHAEL TUREKChicken pho
I wasn't prepared for quite so much beauty in Vietnam and Cambodia. Both places are not just surpassingly beautiful, but elegant, too. You understand this right away, with the first Vietnamese girls you see perched on scooters in traditional white, their tunics hiked up and tied stylishly around the handlebars, their long black hair hanging from identical helmets.
On river journeys, over green hills, through one pothole after another, the places are overpowering. It could be the light and the warmth, but I suspect it's so much green - scrub, wild water gardens out of Rousseau, banana leaves, pineapples, jungle and rice paddies. The Mekong river is brown, like clay churned up, the sky often hazy. Day after day, the greenness grows more intense.
Pictured: chicken pho at Pho 2000
MICHAEL TUREKPark Hyatt Saigon
My mother, who died recently, spent her twenties in French Saigon. I suppose I'm here to remember her, but I'm with my 18-year-old daughter for the history. McNally's advice notwithstanding, I'm loaded with books about Vietnam wars and the Cambodian genocide. I'm surprised by how much of the old French city remains. Something of French urban style lingers in the clothes, the cafés, the sexiness. But most Vietnamese justly recall the French colonial moment with revulsion. (It was so brutal and inept that in 1945 British officials didn't want to return the country from its Japanese occupiers to the French; and one may speculate how many millions might have been spared if the country had passed to the Vietnamese in 1945.)
Now the Vietnamese admire Americans who, they say, were always straight with them. 'Unlike the Russians, unlike the Chinese, the Americans meant well in Vietnam,' my guide explains. In the post-war period, the USA was generous in accepting many boat people fleeing the government. All but a few aspects of their brief imperial stay have been destroyed - the embassy, for instance, in the courtyard of which a tamarind tree grew, which had to be cut down in 1975 to make way for the rescuing choppers.
Pictured: Square One in Park Hyatt Saigon
MICHAEL TUREKSquare One at Park Hyatt Saigon
Cambodia, on the other hand, hasn't recovered from the Apocalypse, and 60 per cent of its population is under 20. But there are few victims of mines in the streets. Phnom Penh is a rackety miracle. It should look beaten down by adversity, but it doesn't. I imagine Rome was something like this in the early 1950s, after the war.
Ageing Khmer Rouge torturers will someday be put on trial by a mixed court composed of Cambodians and international jurists; elsewhere, to a degree that seems quite scary, memory has been blanked out. Bizarrely, the Khmer Rouge were kind to the past. Although they emptied Phnom Penh of its inhabitants, they left it intact. So much of the old French city remains; as in Vietnam, a lost chunk of the 20th century lies before you, cunningly adapted for present purposes.
Pictured: Square One's kitchen in Park Hyatt Saigon
MICHAEL TUREKHo Chi Minh City opera house
A tuk-tuk ride from the centre of Phnom Penh is the magnificent, brick-and-concrete, 1960s Olympic Stadium, built for an event that never came to the city. It survived the Khmer Rouge, and has now become an open-air gym for anyone who wants to bet on kick-boxing, play or watch basketball, or do a variety of t'ai chi. Along with what seems to be a sizeable portion of the city's population, go just before dusk. You can watch Cambodians in their thousands, dancing to a disco beat and waving up-stretched arms as the light turns quickly violet, then a smudged green, finally black.
I found that I loved being in both Vietnam and Cambodia. Most people go to one or other country on their way somewhere else, as a stopover between Thailand, China or Singapore, or on the way to Australia or back. It's better to see both places, and I'm still trying to think of a way to get back.
Pictured: the French colonial architecture of the opera house in Ho Chi Minh City
MICHAEL TUREKHo Chi Minh City's cathedral
HO CHI MINH CITY LIMITS Swarms of scooters are what you see from the plane window on arrival, and you see them again on take-off. Most of the city comes to you through gaps in the flow of riders. Here is a modern Asian population amid a few tolerated relics of the colonial past. So you should like the city not for its decadent, Graham Greene shades - don't bother to stay in Room 214 at the Hotel Continental, where he stayed while researching The Quiet American - but because it has somehow come through. 'Radio Catinat' was Greene's name for the network of cafés where Saigonnaises gossiped, but now they assemble in the astounding Park Hyatt.
Pictured: the rear of the cathedral in Ho Chi Minh City
MICHAEL TUREKHo Chi Minh City's Reunification Hall
The rooms are palatial Art Deco, the lobby filled with paintings that might have been done in the 1930s; and the food merits at least one Michelin star. In the surrounding District 1 are noodle bars and boutiques. I bought a grey linen suit. I found where my mother's house had been (it is now a restaurant).
After that, I went from one colonial relic to the next. The opera house and cathedral look as though they were transplanted from Marseilles. The post office was built in the 1920s, on a magnificent scale, and its echoing, wooden-boothed halls give some idea of the ambitions invested in Annam, Cochin China and Tonkin by French colonialists. In the evenings you can hang around the bars in streets off Rue Catinat. Places like Bangkok supply prostitution as a service for visiting Westerners. McNally says that it isn't like this in Vietnam, or not yet at least. 'The girls come here from the Mekong delta,' he says. 'And they earn much more money working in bars and clubs. You could say that they're making a life for themselves. Many of them are characters out of French novels, hard-headed about getting on. There's nothing specially immoral about that.'
Pictured: a bust of Ho Chi Minh in the city's Reunification Hall
MICHAEL TUREKVietnamese markets
You'll be taken to the horrible War Remnants Museum. Skip the decayed exhibits of foetuses ravaged by Agent Orange, and the array of boys' toys aircraft from the American arsenal. Don't bother to read the inscriptions, which are propagandistic and for the most part accurate. Go instead to the small rooms containing an exhibition of photographs funded by the state of Kentucky. All the photographers whose work is commemorated here died during the fighting in Vietnam. So Larry Burrows' 1968 masterpieces are here, and Robert Capa's last 1954 shots of a French column in a rice paddy. But there are many lesser-known works, just as poignant, by North Vietnamese photographers who were also killed.
Pictured: preparing herbs in a noodle soup
MICHAEL TUREKOn the Mekong River
The most interesting relic of war is the Reunification Hall, which used to be the presidential palace. The palace was bombed in 1962, during the American-sponsored coup which removed the notoriously corrupt Ngo Dinh Diem. His successor, Nguyan Van Thieu, also corrupt and backed reluctantly by the USA (and described aptly by Neil Sheehan in Bright Shining Lie as being 'like a Bourbon who returned after the French Revolution'), lived here until his departure in 1972. The style is French-kitsch-oriental, and the ceremonial rooms are airy, filled with elaborate carpets and potted plants, with many open walkways leading nowhere in particular. On 30 April 1975, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates. The cabinet of the government of South Vietnam was meeting in a last emergency session. Around a long table stand the same pale green stuffed chairs, abandoned.
No place I have encountered gives a more poignant impression of the futility of empire. I learn here that our guide's family, some of whom supported South Vietnam, left the country after 1975, becoming boat people. He tells me that the great American error was to appoint Catholic puppets in a Buddhist country. 'They didn't know what they were doing,' he says, in what I now know is the laconic Vietnamese style.
Pictured: on the Mekong River near Ho Chi Minh City
MICHAEL TUREKCrab fishing on the Mekong
INTO THE HILLS Forty minutes from Ho Chi Minh City, the propeller plane comes down among low, landscaped mountains. A short drive away is Dalat, formerly the summer place of French businessmen and bureaucrats. The town has a lake and many hotels. At the edge, backing onto an abandoned factory and suburban houses with roosters, is a large, 1930s estate containing 19 houses, built in the gabled, mansarded, fake-beamed style favoured by French architects of that time. The rooms are large, wood-panelled and comfortable. There is a restaurant, quite empty at this time of year, and a chef whose family left Vietnam and who trained in Paris.
It's as warm in October as it might be somewhere in Normandy in June, and at 4pm it rains each day: soft, warm rain which accounts for the profusion of bushes and flowers around the dark green slate pool, the giant clumps of bamboo and the huge, three-needle local pines. At home I have photos of my mother and my sister as a baby with her Vietnamese nanny in a place like this. The Dalat wine over dinner is odd, but the food is astonishing: sharp salads with shrimp, crayfish and chicken; stir-fried morning glory, and other vegetables no one can name in English.
Pictured: crab fishing on the Mekong
MICHAEL TUREKChau Doc to Phnom Penh
ALONG THE MEKONG More than 40 million people owe their livelihood to the mighty Mekong. The river floods each rainy season, from April to September, so the settlements at the edge of the water are makeshift, built out of wood, worn to light grey and approached by a variety of ladders. Mekong dwellers travel in boats powered noisily by a small propeller with a shaft that looks like a stalk. All but the smallest craft are decorated on the prow with a single large eye. At its widest the river extends to the horizon in paddy fields or fish farms. You enter narrow channels, and you can see into simple houses - often one large room, with a system for catching rainwater from the roof. Here are real markets, where peasants load up their boats with green pineapples or mangoes, selling the fruit each day from the hold of the boat. Other small boats, often powered by old ladies wielding oars and rowing standing up, supply noodles. Families sleep out on deck. Within an hour or so you can see what it must be like to live on the Mekong: hard, although these are among the most prosperous peasants in Vietnam, and not without grace. It reminds me of the France of 19th-century novels.
Pictured: beating rice
MICHAEL TUREKPhnom Penh
It's possible to journey by river to Cambodia from near Ho Chi Minh City, but this takes a long time. It's better to be driven some of the way. You stop at Can Tho on the first night, or go straight to Chau Doc, near the Cambodian border. The four-and-a-half-hour speedboat ride from Chau Doc to Phnom Penh mustn't be resisted. Sit up near the prow, and you travel at water-ski speed past white cows, the odd monkey family, abandoned or working temples, whole villages and, in jungle clearings, huts. Clumps of green mangrove dot the brown flow, seeming to threaten the propellers, but the boat skims onward. The customs post looks like a set from Apocalypse Now. Dizzy, elated, out of breath despite hours of being seated, you walk straight off the boat into the centre of mad Phnom Penh.
Pictured: a novice monk in Phnom Penh
MICHAEL TUREKRoyal Palace in Phnom Penh
PHNOM PENH A film-maker friend gave me instructions on how to see Phnom Penh in a day. You take tuk-tuks everywhere, which are cheap (about US$1.50 per trip), noisy and ubiquitous, and supply a mild, pleasurable level of risk. First you go to the Russian Market, which sells pirate DVDs, fake watches in profuse quantities and a variety of Cambodian karmas, the all-purpose scarf worn by the Khmer Rouge in red-and-white checks, but which exists in more attractive colours. (I'm still smarting from having walked away from a deal which would have given me enough DVDs to last several years: he wanted US$120 and I was offering a measly US$85.)
Take in the National Museum and the Royal Palace. The latter contains a bewildering collection of gold statues, gongs, thrones, robes, recreated coronations (if you're interested, there's also a photographic exhibition about Sihanouk, the man who was first absolute ruler then head of state, who went into exile in Beijing in the 1970s, supporting the Khmer Rouge, and who eventually returned, pursuing a career as a film director). Be sure to buy a ring or a Buddhist charm or a ruby in the back room of Mr Sit Down (at 116 CEO Sihanouk Boulevard).
Pictured: faded colonial grandeur near the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh
MICHAEL TUREKCyclo taxi in Phnom Penh
You eat lunch at Friends, a restaurant in which street children are trained to cook and become waiters. A more sophisticated restaurant, run along the same lines in a villa with a small pool, is Romdeng, which serves delicacies such as fried tarantula. Linger over the food, because in the afternoon you have to see less pleasant things. Outside the city at Choeung Ek, too far for a tuk-tuk, stands a glass tower filled with skulls, in one of the country's many former killing fields. I went instead to Tuol Sleng, in appearance a school with courtyard built in the French style, in reality a shrine and museum on the spot where the Khmer Rouge extracted confessions by torture. About 10,000 people were murdered here between 1975 and 1978. The iron beds, to which they were shackled, and on which dead prisoners were found by the conquering Vietnamese army, are preserved; so are the spades used to kill people. Each prisoner was photographed on arrival. The subjects of these portraits are of all ages; some have their children with them. You won't easily forget them, and you will never know why these things were done. After so much death, take another tuk-tuk to the Olympic Stadium and see how Cambodians live now: happily, it would seem.
Pictured: cyclo taxi by the Dancing Pavilion at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh
MICHAEL TUREKPhnom Penh
THE COAST OF CAMBODIA Two-and-a-half hours over rutted roads from Phnom Penh and you come to Kep, a 1960s resort vandalised by the Khmer Rouge and not quite rebuilt. Behind a wall you can find Knai Bang Chatt, a collection of villas designed by admirers of Le Corbusier in the 1960s, restored by a family of Belgian connoisseurs in 2004. There are 11 rooms in separate, small buildings with grey or pink walkways. You eat at a long table by the sea or sit around the slate-grey pool. A guest was the Beijing correspondent of Le Monde; the manager, Stéphane Arrii, used to work in the film business. We talked about Pol Pot, why it all happened, looking at the haze of the sea and the islands.
On the last day in Kep, a small boat took us to Rabbit Island. I didn't see rabbits, but there were dogs, a donkey and several small, beautiful beaches. In a hut, Madame Omm cooked extra-pungent pho with shrimp and herbs, and small, peppered crabs, easy to eat and mysteriously tasty. Thinking of Madame Omm and her crabs, lying on a platform under a tree and out of the sun, I wondered how I could plan my return.
Pictured: an open-air market near the river in Phnom Penh
MICHAEL TUREKKnai Bang Chatt resort in Kep
A GUIDE TO HO CHI MINH CITY
WHERE TO STAY Park Hyatt Saigon (+ 84 8824 1234; saigon.park.hyatt.com). Square One serves Michelin-level Vietnamese dishes. It is usually better to drink tea than wine in Vietnam; however, the Hyatt has a large wine cellar. French wines go better with delicate Vietnamese tastes than Australian ones. Doubles from US$300
Hotel Majestic (+ 84 8829 5517; majesticsaigon.com/). The first stop for French arrivals. It has been over-restored, but the nice rooftop bar looks over the river. Doubles from US$184
WHERE TO EAT Pho 2000 Just opposite the market, identifiable by its photos of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and serving five-starphofor US$5.
Ngoc Suong Marina, 19c Le Qui Don (+ 84 8930 6234). For seafood.
LOCAL GUIDE Contact Khanh Le Nguyen (e-mail: [email protected])
Pictured: Knai Bang Chatt resort in Kep
MICHAEL TUREKThe pool at Knai Bang Chatt
A GUIDE TO PHNOM PENH
WHERE TO STAY****Raffles Hotel Le Royal (+ 855 23 981888; raffles.com). Conspicuously luxe, with vast rooms, many named after Western writers including André Malraux. Doubles from US$130
Foreign Correspondents' Club, 363 Sisowath Quay (+ 855 23 724014; fcccambodia.com). Where the NGO crowd hang out, along with a few who stayed on from the wars.
WHERE TO EAT Melting Pot, 168 Street 155. Friendly café/restaurant near the Russian Market.
VAN's Restaurant, 102 Place de la Poste (+ 855 23 722067; vans-restaurant.com). French cuisine in a former bank.
Friends, 215 Street 13 (+ 855 12 802072) and Romdeng, 74 Street 174 (+ 855 92 219565).
Pictured: the pool at Knai Bang Chatt
MICHAEL TUREKKoh Dach
WHERE TO STAY
DALAT Ana Mandara Villas Dalat Resort & Spa (+ 84 63 555888; anamandara-resort.com). La Cochinchine Spa here costs US$35: high by local standards, but not to be missed. Ask the very small women to walk on your back. Doubles from US$157
ON THE MEKONG There are good Victoria Hotels at Can Tho and Chau Doc: see victoriahotels-asia.com (doubles from US$138). Rooms are huge, so are the pools. As staging posts for tourists, they're a bit like the old railway hotels of Canada.
KEP Knai Bang Chatt (+ 855 12 349742; knaibangchatt.com). Just 11 rooms, with a pool and spa. Doubles from US$110
Pictured: a village on Koh Dach, an island 15km north of Phnom Penh
MICHAEL TUREKKhmer dance
HOW TO GET TO VIETNAM & CAMBODIA
The Ultimate Travel Company(020 7386 4646; theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk) organises a two-week tailormade holiday similar to the author's, featuring Ho Chi Minh City, Dalat, Mekong Delta, Kep, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, from £2,620 per person, based on two sharing, including all flights, internal travel and private guided sightseeing. British Airways (08444 930787; ba.com) lies to Ho Chi Minh City from Heathrow via Singapore; Thai Airways (0870 6060911; thaiairways.com) flies via Bangkok.
WEATHER TO GO The cool season, Nov-Feb, is the most popular time to visit; but the rain rarely lasts long during the rainy season (June-Sept), and there are fewer tourists.
Pictured: traditional Khmer dancing in Cambodia
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