The Search in Vung Tau

The weather has been slowing me down over here, but I guess that is all part of the experience. It is so hot and sticky out, 90-95 F and 80% humidity, that I nearly give in to heat prostration if I stay out walking or in a closed space, like a museum or shop, which almost never has air conditioning or even a fan blowing, for too long.

I took the hydrofoil, or ferry, down to Vung Tau from Ho Chi Minh City. The boat was not the sleek modern craft I expected, but it cut the travel time to one hour from three.

The economic progress is evident on the main roads, but a few streets behind that, where tourists don't usually venture, life is still pretty basic. I was wandering around looking for the neighborhood we stayed in when I was in Vung Tau in '89 a couple of nights ago. At first I was in a pretty middle class commercial area a few blocks from the hotel, then a neighborhood with cafes for regular working folks, then quieter streets around it. I passed one VN woman around my age sitting on one of the characteristic small wooden stools on a street corner with a friend. She nodded and smiled at me in acknowledgement. I wandered a bit in the neighborhood and coming back to that corner, saw her still sitting there. She gave me a look like "You again? Are you lost?", a little concerned about me. I shook my head "No. I'm OK." And circled my hand to indicate that I had just gone around the block. We smiled at each other and I wandered on.

I read and researched online trying to find the address of the clinic we worked on in VT. Should have written to the Vets' org before coming over, but didn't think of it somehow. Anyway, Friday I went down to the desk there at the Palace Hotel (decided to treat myself for two days, since it is a 4 star hotel at only $75 a day and put me in the center of town where I needed to be). I asked a woman at the desk to help me do a google search in vietnamese. She knew the streets that I had for co-ordinates but nothing about the "Friendship Clinic" built by the Americans and Vietnamese together. We searched online for forty minutes and didn't find anything concrete. We tried looking at the satellite picture on google mapping and that seemed to jog her memory. "I think there is a small clinic right by this intersection," she told me, "but not the school" (that used to be next to the building site).

She helped me get a taxi to go there, telling the young man what I was looking for and where it should be. We drove out Le Loi street, which, of course, was much bigger and busier than I remembered--going out to the job site used to feel like driving to the edge of town, and this street felt very near the center, was lined with furniture shops much of the way and there was a giant high-rise hotel, Petro Hotel, in the district that I gather was built to give the ~1250 Russian workers a place to live and/or gather.

When we arrived at the address the receptionist had explained to the young taxi driver, there was nothing marking the rather run down building facing the street as a clinic, to my eyes. There was no little lane down which to drive, as we used to, to go by the school and to the mostly empty lot where the clinic building was built. Still, I walked back, through a small, empty parking lot and saw a long, low building on the right that was in the style of the Friendship Clinic. I walked up to it and there was a plaque, in a dust-covered glass case mounted on the front of the building. In english and vietnamese it told of the building of this clinic by the donation of funds and work of the American Veteran's Vietnam Restoration Project.

The building was still intact, but the whole place was empty, locked up and abandoned. Sort of sad, really, that it is not being used. Even if the government used it for small studio apartments for old people, that would be something, though it isn't close to a market and there is no real community/commercial center out there. The structure itself is still in decent shape and the rooms are a good size, bigger than your studio apartment, for instance, and have nice, big windows at the front and the back.

Anyhoo, just to say that I got a reasonable amount of work done there in Vung Tau, in the relative opulence of the Palace Hotel--which, as you might imagine, was irresistible because the name reminded me of "the Palace", my apartment in Amsterdam, but also, mainly because it used to be called the Hoa Bin Hotel, that place I wrote of in the book where we would go for ice cream in the evening. I think it was the only place you could buy ice cream back then, refrigeration being at such a premium and a freezer almost non-existent. (I think they made it using evaporated milk.)

Finding the repurposed Hoa Binh Hotel and being based there helped orient me to the neighborhood, which is so changed that I had great difficulty finding anything that looked familiar. I never did manage to locate the building where we stayed or the site of the old market around the corner from there, though I know I was nearby both at night and during the day.