Then it was Vietnam - part 5 - Same, same but different

Get your motorbike running 

As lives do, mine did stabilize, but the Vietnam experience stuck with me.  That is the reason why some 35 years after my return from Vietnam I found myself thinking about revisiting. Since then I've made numerous trips back and once again arriving with my butt jammed into one of those ever shrinking seats in the economy class section of Cathay Pacific. We are arriving at Ton San Nhut, no longer a key US Airbase but now one of the two international

Saigon at night  -  by Nguyệt Cát

airports in Vietnam.  As a US Airbase it was on the edge of Saigon but now the ever expanding Saigon has grown around it.  As our plane taxi es up to the  terminal,  I watch through my window as the few remaining remnants of what was Ton San Nhut Airbase slide past.

"Damn", I think to myself,  all these years when so much has changed and still so much seems the same - "same same but different"

On my first trip back, taxing in was really eerie as the terminal had the outward appearance of base ops of the 60's where my first Vietnam experience began. Since 1999 it went through several upgrades and then a few years ago a new modern terminal was erected. Through the entry drill has remained pretty much the same.

On arrival our flock deplanes, guided by strategically stationed, cute ao dai clad attendants, directing us towards customs and immigration's.  We queue up at immigration's to have our visa's checked and have our entry stamped in our passports. Nowadays this is a quick and painless process, gone are the days of those little slips of paper they called entry permits and wondering if you need to slip a fiver in your passport to speed up your entry process.   Still immigration officers in general are a grim bunch but guess it's part of the job. Though an exception to this was the immigration officer in Singapore who noted I wasn't feeling well, offered up a smile and a cherry sucker.

Head to the luggage carousel, grab a cart and wait for my bags to show up. Load my bags onto the cart and head to customs.  At customs you pull your bags off and send them through the x ray

tunnel, really not sure what that is all about as you only have to send through the big bags and they don't really look at the x ray screen.  Maybe they just want to see you struggle with your bags. Anyway, nothing to declare and my luggage passed the x ray test, so once again I'm officially in Vietnam.  

Bags in hand I look around the terminal, seeing a few currency exchange outfits, some travel operators but as usual the terminal seems strangely vacant. That is until you peer out the exit door of the terminal lobby, looking past the security and the vacant rectangular shaped patch of side walk to see a wall of people.  You work your way through the wall which is a mix of relatives, friends of folks arriving, taxi cab and motorbike types, hotel and guest house drivers flashing cards with their new guests names drawn out in magic marker and of course their are always those enterprising gents who are probably in search of a expeditious way to increase their fortunes. For some unknown reason, anyway to me, people aren't allowed into the terminal to wait for arriving flights.

I work my way through the mass of folks out to the taxi queue.   Taxi queue, in the past it was up to you not to get ripped off and conversations such as "Yes, I know you have a meter but what do you think it will cost" were common conversations as arriving passengers tried to waylay creative long expensive rides to the city center.  

We leave the airport and enter the traffic filled road taking us into city center district 1.  Motorbike traffic in Saigon is legendary and that was when motorbikes were expensive and now a mass of cheap Chinese bikes are available, population was less back then and added to this now you have a tremendous increase in the number of cars on the road which makes traffic a bigger mess then ever. Looking out my window past the congestion of motorbikes, cars, taxi's, buses and trucks and still a random push cart or bicycle I see newly built, modern looking buildings but still much of the old Vietnam shows through.  As one of my friends shared with me "after 24 years of living here, they can make as many physical changes as the want but the Vietnamese people are the same and because of this I stay". 

So, without putting much strain on my brain, even with all the changes, vestiges of pre 1975 Vietnam slip out of my memory and another times comes flowing back...   

                                 "Same, same but different"