5 April 2016 - HO CHI MINH CITY - VIETNAM

HO CHI MINH CITY

VIETNAM

G'day folks,

By the time you read this post, I will have left this city for Bangkok, having taken thousands of photographs. Here is a great summary courtesy of Travelfish.

Ho Chi Minh City, commonly known as Saigon, is a city in southern Vietnam famous for the pivotal role it played in the Vietnam War. It's also known for its French colonial architecture, including Notre-Dame Basilica, made entirely of materials imported from France, and the neoclassical Saigon Central Post Office. Food stalls line the city’s streets, especially around bustling Ben Thanh Market.

As cyclo drivers rest easy below vast neon billboards, the emerging Vietnamese middle class -- mobile phones in hand -- cruise past draped in haute couture on their imported motorcycles. Welcome to Ho Chi Minh City -- Vietnam's largest and most exciting city.

How things have changed from the sleepy days pre-16th century, when the Khmer fishing village of Prey Nokor was established on a vast swampland. Saigon's origins date back to the early 17th century when the area became home for refugees fleeing war in the north. Towards the end of the century, once the population was more Vietnamese and Cambodia’s kingdom waning in influence, Vietnam annexed the territory. Over the following decades Prey Nokor developed into the Saigon the French found when they conquered the region in the mid 19th century.

 

 
Within a very short time the French began to leave their mark on the city. Some of the best hotels in Saigon are within grandiose colonial buildings overlooking gorgeous boulevards dating back to Saigon's heyday as the so-called Paris of the Orient. For the French, Saigon became the capital of Cochinchina, an expansive region encompassing parts of modern-day Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Through the next 100 years, they extracted as much as they could from the region -- much of it passing through Saigon's ports. Often cruel and thoughtless, French rule remained over the city and Cochinchina until their exit from Vietnam following their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

When the French opted out of Vietnam to avoid recognising the Communist victors, they left the south under the care of Emperor Bao Dai who had made his capital there in 1950. Subsequently, when Vietnam was officially partitioned, the southern government, led by Ngo Dinh Diem, kept the capital at Saigon. And there the southern capital remained, throughout the topsy-turvy period of the American war. Then, as America's role in Vietnam's pains drew to an end, Saigon swelled to the eyeballs with refugees fleeing troubles to the north -- just as Prey Nokor once did. 

 

 
When the South finally fell to Northern communist forces in 1975, what remained was a paltry shadow of its more grandiose self. The following year the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honour of the late leader of North Vietnam himself. Despite this, many still know the sprawling town as Saigon, and the name still refers to central District 1.

The Communist victory was followed by widespread repression and re-education. The economy buckled under a heavy hand from the north as entrepreneurial spirit was almost all but stamped out with the Chinese trading class particularly hard hit. Simultaneously, Saigon's elite and pretty much anyone else with the means did their best to get out of the country, and through the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vietnam's "boat people" were featured in media worldwide.

Through a policy of industrial privatisation known as doi moi in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the country’s economic leash was loosened and Saigon has never looked back. With a very young, increasingly well-educated population, the city has gone from strength to strength. Today, children of party bigshots slide through the heaving traffic in gleaming, chauffeur-driven Bentleys, and the general population looks more to neon shrines for direction than to Uncle Ho and the old guard.

 

 
Towering developments now pierce what was once a very low-key skyline. Five-star hotels and international shopping chains have replaced dowdy government guesthouses and empty shelves. Along with the fancier pickings, Ho Chi Minh City has an excellent budget guesthouse scene and some of the best cuisine in Vietnam, from cheap street eating to salubrious haute cuisine. A renewed interest in the arts has stimulated the art scene and many galleries and museums are slowly being spruced up. For a tourist there is a lot to do in Saigon.

And once you're done with the city, use it as a base to explore the surrounds: head out to the tunnels at Chu Chi, the Cao Dai temple at Tay Ninh or jet off to the sublime Con Dao. Then there's the entire Mekong Delta to explore. How much time have you got?!

TRAVELFISH

Clancy's comment:  I love this city. Great people, top food and so many things to photograph. Visit it if you get the chance.

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27 January 2016 - A PICTORIAL VIEW OF HANOI

A PICTORIAL 

VIEW OF HANOI

G'day folks,

I've just been to Hanoi to take hundreds of photographs, and a what a great city it is for a photographer.  English is rarely spoken, and it's certainly a Communist country. The national flag flies everywhere, and twice a day the government provides a message to its people via a loud speaker system. What's it like as a city? Very cold, but the people don't seem to mind. Even at night, they walk around most areas, eat, drink and enjoy themselves. So, check out these photographs and you will get the picture ... So to speak.

Clancy's comment: Hope you got some idea of Hanoi.

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18 December 2015 - Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Maya Lin’s Vietnam 

Veterans Memorial

G'day folks,

Tonight, I will be guest speaker at a Vietnam Veteran's organisation here in Australia, so I thought it timely to present something relevant.

As the United States honors those who served in the military on Veterans Day, read the story of how an unknown 21-year-old architecture student, Maya Lin, designed one of the most moving monuments in the nation’s capital—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Whenever 18-year-old Maya Lin walked through Yale University’s Memorial Rotunda, she couldn’t resist passing her fingers over the marble walls engraved with the names of those alumni who died in service of their country. Throughout her freshman and sophomore years, she watched as stonecutters added to the honor roll by etching the names of those killed in the Vietnam War. “I think it left a lasting impression on me,” Lin wrote, “the sense of the power of a name.” 

Those memories were fresh in the mind of the daughter of Chinese immigrants senior year when, as part of an assignment in her funereal architecture seminar, she designed a walled monument to veterans of the Vietnam War that was etched with the names of those who gave their lives. Encouraged by her professor, the architecture student entered it in the national design competition being held for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. 

 Adhering to the competition rules that required the memorial to be apolitical and contain the names of all those confirmed dead and missing in action in the Vietnam War, Lin’s design called for the names of nearly 58,000 American servicemen, listed in chronological order of their loss, to be etched in a V-shaped wall of polished black granite sunken into the ground. 

The competition garnered more than 1,400 submissions, so many that an Air Force hangar was called into service to display all the entries for the judging. Since all submissions were anonymous, the eight-member jury made its selection based solely on the quality of the designs. It ultimately chose entry number 1026, which it found to be “an eloquent place where the simple meeting of earth, sky and remembered names contains messages for all.” 

Her design only earned a B in her class at Yale, so Lin was shocked when competition officials came to her dormitory room in May 1981 and informed the 21-year-old that she had won the design and the $20,000 first prize. Not only was Lin not a trained architect, she didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree in architecture at the time. “From the very beginning I often wondered, if it had not been an anonymous entry 1026 but rather an entry by Maya Lin, would I have been selected?” she later wrote.

Although she designed an apolitical monument, the politics of the Vietnam War could not be avoided. Like the war itself, the monument proved controversial. Veterans groups decried the lack of patriotic or heroic symbols often seen on war memorials and complained that it seemingly honored only the fallen and not the living veterans. Some argued that the memorial should rise from the ground and not sink into the earth as if it was something to be hidden. Businessman H. Ross Perot, who had pledged $160,000 to help run the competition, called it a “trench” and withdrew his support. Vietnam veteran Tom Cathcart was among those objecting to the memorial’s black hue, which he said was “the universal color of shame and sorrow and degradation.” Other critics thought Lin’s V-shaped design was a subliminal anti-war message that imitated the two-finger peace sign flashed by Vietnam War protestors. 

 “One needs no artistic education to see this memorial design for what it is,” remarked one critic, “a black scar, in a hole, hidden as if out of shame.” In a letter to President Ronald Reagan, 27 Republican congressmen called it “a political statement of shame and dishonor.” 

Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who administered the site, sided with the critics and blocked the project until changes were made. Over Lin’s objection, the federal Commission of Fine Arts bowed to political pressure and approved the addition to the memorial of a 50-foot-high flagpole on which to fly the Stars and Stripes and an eight-foot-high statue of three soldiers sculpted by Frederick Hart, who called Lin’s design “nihilistic.” The commission, however, mandated that they not be placed directly adjacent to the wall in order to preserve Lin’s design intent as much as possible. (A statue dedicated to the women who served in the Vietnam War was also added to the site in 1993.) 

Clancy's  comment: Mm ... Lest we forget those who died, and especially those who survived but still suffer.

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