Facing Page: Ho Chi Minh 1989

Ho Chi Minh Ville 1989

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 Arriving in Ho Chi Minh was a seminal moment for me, being really lost in a place and out of my depth. There is no going back to that sensation, of recapturing one's innocence and feeling of awe. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. Friendships forged in such wildly romantic places as the Rex Hotel rooftop and deckchairs on the Saigon River.
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The Kim Do hotel fast became my regular lodgings. Nothing was ever predictable here. One evening, having been relegated to the 'Eastern-European back-block' on account of my regular, street-frontage room being occupied, I happened to look out from my window across the void between blocks and in through a hole in the wall where an air-conditioner had once stood; my field of view extended to a height of just five inches above the posted bed's mattress before it was cut by the underside of a table placed against the wall and the cloth that was draped over it. With only feet, legs and hands visible, the scene that played out between a resident hooker, perhaps the same one who knocked on my door within moments of my arrival, and a very shy client, who after a short while obviously decided that the exchange was not for him, was both tender and comedic, and from my poor viewpoint, was like trying to piece together a moving jigsaw.

I first stayed at the Kim Do in early 1989. Back then the only 'white' faces belonged to Xoviet sailors, (Americans without money, as the locals referred to them.) So, with my swarthy skin, and my obvious lack of resources, I was greeted with 'Lin Xo' (Xoviet) everywhere I went.
My room stayed the same for several years. Two low wooden chairs at a table on which a beaten up, red floral patterned thermos with a fat cork stopper sat. Each morning it was filled with boiled water; two cheap, green, tinted glasses next to it, the kind with rough fragments of glass embedded in their sides. My four poster bed was the only other furniture. Behind the head of the bed, a shuttered window to the street one floor below fixed with a grill inspired by backgammon hallucinations through which the alarming sounds of the morning would reverberate monstrously. There was a bathroom as well, with a hole in the wall where a doorway once would have stood. The headless shower pipe delivered sensuously cool water.

Ho Chi Minh Ville 1989

Ho Chi Minh Ville 1989

Ho Chi Minh Ville 1989

Ho Chi Minh Ville September 1989

Ho Chi Minh 1993

Tet Festivities, Ho Chi Minh 1993

27th September 1989

The view from my Kim Do hotel room. 1989

Cholon, Ho Chi Minh Ville 1989

From the beginning, I kept the key turned in the lock to keep out the ladies who prowled the corridors looking for customers. Well, them and anyone else that might happen to wander in uninvited.
After midnight on my first night there was a knocking at the door which finally woke me. Someone obviously wanted to get in. I ignored the banging. The banging became louder and more frenzied, reaching a scary crescendo until finally I heard a key in the lock and I jumped out of bed as several police burst into the room. ​​

They entertained and voiced, albeit it in a tongue I didn't understand, the fantasy that I should leave my bed in the early hours and go with them. Something I pointblank refused to do and after a kind of Mexican stand-off, I managed, with much bluster, to shoe them out of the room, a mixture of indignation and disbelief on their faces, no doubt caused by the combination of my display of outrage, my indifference to their power and my confidence in my right to be there. I think they were happy to leave without me.

Ho Chi Minh Ville September 1989

Several hours later, dawn half-cracked, I was jolted from semi-sleep by the sudden sounds of screeching car tyres and small arms fire. I rolled off the bed and covered the few yards to the window in an instant, peering cautiously over the bottom of the sill. The gunfire continued but the streets were completely empty. It was at this exact moment of bamboozlement that the heavy beat of HOT RS started to reverberate through the building.
On exiting the hotel for a morning prowl I walked straight into the banks of speakers set up beneath my window that belonged to a friendly young man who's business was making bootleg copies of his tape selection for Vietnamese teens.
I ordered his morning intro (yes I was awoken by screeching car tyres and gun shots every morning) to take away with me when I flew home a week or so later. I held onto it for many years before it finally went AWOL. 
I'm still taken back to that place whenever I listen to HOT RS. That and anything by Boney M. You couldn't walk between the Rex and Ben Thanh market back then without hearing Boney M, gangs of pickpockets working the streets and vendors hawking sets of polished stainless-steel gynaecological and surgical instruments layed out on squares of fabric on the footpath.

Ho Chi Minh Ville September 1989

Vietnamese Troops in Ho Chi Minh immediately following their withdrawal from Cambodia. 1989

Ho Chi Minh Zoo. 1989

The Punji Pullout. Original Invitation 1989

North Vietnam 2006

Tet Festival. Ho Chi Minh Ville 1993

Ho Chi Minh Ville 1993

Hanoi to Bangkok

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