Our accommodation comes with a very affectionate and playful, if slightly naughty, cat called Sheba. This a great bonus as far as I am concerned. A good night's sleep renders me more functional than yesterday, so we amble through the park into what appears to be the backpacker district of town. This is obvious from the concentration of budget hotels and tour operators, but also from the number of motorbike and cyclo riders offering us tours, who happen to have family in Manchester or are staunch Man U supporters.
With a tour to the Mekong Delta region booked for next week, we stopped for an early lunch, as the local offices were disgorging hungry workers into the surrounding restaurants and cafés. We picked another promising vegetarian restaurant close to the War Remnants Museum - our next stop.
At Ngo Quang Chay, I chose the sister dish to banh xeo, which I had sampled a couple of days ago: banh khot. Seven tiny pancakes arrived accompanied by the usual forest of herb leaves: mustard, sweet basil, mint and a strong and bitter unidentifiable herb. Armed with at least the knowledge of correct eating procedure, I proceeded to inexpertly roll a pancake inside a lettuce leaf stuffed with a handful of herbs and a slice of chilli. Dipped into the accompanying sweet and vinegary sauce, the combination of savoury fried pancake, fresh herbs and hot pepper hit all the tastebuds at once. Although unrefined cusine, building the littlr bundle of flavour was immensely satisfying.
Alongside, we also ordered a goi bon bon 'salad'. As with most salads outside Europe, there was fortunately no lettuce in sight. A plate heaved with mushrooms, 'bon bon' (a kind of white, chewy long vegetable), tofu, cucumber and peanuts, all dressed in a sweet/sour dressing and served with prawn crackers.
Well fortified, we made our way to the War Remnants Museum on the corner of the street. Outside the museum are a number of US tanks, aircraft and Howitzer guns, which provide a very physical reminder of the Vietnam War. However, I was not prepared for what was inside the museum. We were assailed by graphic images of the atrocities of this war and of the aftermath - especially the effects of Agent Orange on the first and second generations of Vietnamese. The disfigurements were such that I would have thought it was a trick of the camera, had I not known better. The exhibitions were a catalogue of cruelty, stupidity and woe that lasted for the 17 years of the war and well beyond, deeply scarring the country and its people. The futility of this and other wars was summed up by these words.
We repaired, stunned, to a nearby café to exchange our views and knowledge on the causes of the Vietnam War. Not being alive at the time of the war, and the UK having (to our knowledge) no great role in it, we had entered the museum shockingly ignorant of all but the basic facts. While successful in portraying all parties in the war as venal, power-hungry and tortuously brutal, the museum assumed a level of historical knowledge we lacked and didn't answer our questions. We were confused as to how a civil war between communist North Vietnam (including the guerrilla Viet Cong forces in the South) and the rest of the Vietnamese people in the South could have morphed into the war of agression and destruction waged principally by the US. What began as support from allied forces seemed to escalate swiftly after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by US Congress, permitting greater acts of force. There can be no conscionable justification for the war crimes that followed.
In much need of some light relief after this harrowing history lesson, we bought tickets to see a show of centuries-old 'water puppetry'. The juxtapositon of the frivolity of this show with the horrifying images we had recently seen was an odd experience. However, the show was a joyful combination of live traditional music and ingenious puppetry, using a bed of water to hide the puppets' mechanics. A team of eight puppeters skillfully piloted fishermen, lions, dragons, phoenixes and a cat around the watery stage to tell traditional Vietnamese tales.
With spirits somewhat lifted, there was just enough time for some quick food before heading home. Returning to Hum vegetarian restaurant, we tucked into steaming bowls of soup offering complemetary flavours - one hot and sour, the other full of umami-laden seaweed and bitter gourd.
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