Day 12 - Midnight Train to Georgia

We had arranged for a sleeper bus to Nha Trang at about six that night but we had some time to kill before that. I still wanted to see the Reunification Palace, which we had been unable to get into the day before. It was a bit of a walk over to the Reunification Palace. Dave and Ken loved to talk to all the people trying to sell us stuff. People asked him about three questions: Where are you from? How long have you been in Vietnam? Would you like to buy this? Dave loved turning the questions back on people. Invariably they were not only from Vietnam, but from the city we were in. Sometimes when people hand us cards or fliers Dave will go on and hand them to other people mostly to those handing out different fliers. When we finally got to the palace we saw people going in right by where we were the other day. Maybe it was closed, but more likely we just missed the entrance. The Reunification Palace was so named by the Communists after taking the city. Before that it had been the Independence Palace, and I believe Imperial Palace. It was originally built by a king so unpopular his air force bombed the first palace he had built on the sight. He had a new palace built complete with air raid shelter, but never lived to take possession of it as he was killed by his own army. When the French took over they used it and when they left the South Vietnamese used it until the Communists took over.

The palace isn't much to look at from the outside. It mostly looks like a four story office building set on really beautiful grounds. Around the grounds they have reproductions of the tanks that "won the war" as they crashed though the palace gates in a well staged photo opp. The most interesting part of the palace is that besides some statues of Ho Chi Minh it is mostly preserved as it was found in '75. In fact some rooms have a distinctly 70's vibe to them with colors of carpeting and furniture you just don't see anymore. They offered free tours in English that were enterprisingly free of political statements, mostly just focusing on what every room was used for. The palace was actually very pretty on the inside. There were a lot of marble stairs and columns and the rooms themselves were decorated with traditional paintings and some lovely wood carvings. Nothing inside was particularly grandiose. It was much more normal looking than I expected. The balconies had beautiful views of the city, which despite having more people than a place like Changzhou actually had less tall buildings. On the roof of the building was a dance floor that looked down on a helipad that had a model of a US helicopter from the war.

The most interesting part of the palace was the underground section. It was still preserved as it had been as a bunker plus command and control room for the war. There were still really detailed maps hung up on the wall showing battle lines and free fire zones, as well as sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Again every chair was a sort of green which I think they stopped making on January 1st 1980. While I had an ice cream from a vendor on the palace grounds I could see people coming in for some sort of corporate meeting, as they apparently rent out parts of the palace at various times. After the palace we went back to the hotel to invite the cute receptionist out for some dinner. We thought that she'd be gone by the time we got back to the hotel so Ken stopped some people on the street to borrow their cell phone after we discovered that there didn't seem to be a working pay phone in the city. I have no idea what she thought being asked to dinner by three strange Americans, but she agreed. We met up with her back at the hotel and she suggested some Pho restaurant a few blocks away. Pho is an extremely popular noodle soup dish that can be made with any type of meat. They also always bring some sort of sprouts that you can mix in.

Pho is pretty much the national food of Vietnam, and is sold on every street corner. It's pretty good, but it just gets a little old after a while. Tho had one of the 10-20 million motos in Vietnam and gave Dave a ride to the restaurant. She told us how she came from a town south of the city and came to the city after her cousin told her it was a good place to work. She was taking off for Tet so when she came back she would have to work literally 24 hours a day for a week. She still had her usual upbeat attitude, laughing about every other sentence. After dinner the bus came to take us to the beach town of Nha Trang. We payed extra for a sleeper bus but the bus they put us on wasn't exactly great for sleeping. The seats did recline a lot. In fact the most upright position was about as much as an airplane seat reclines, and the most reclined position could crush the person behind you to death. It was hot out and the bus was air conditioned, sort of. They would turn it on and off in spurts so it either got too hot or too cold all the time. The first thing the bus did was to drive around the city picking up more people where ever they could be found. I don't know what they paid, but I know no Vietnamese person would pay what we paid for the bus.

Eventually it looked like we had all the people we were going to get so we headed out. The lights stayed on for the first bit which was good as the seat lights did essentially nothing. I read for a bit as the Vietnamese guys in the back carried on and listened to loud terrible music on their cell phones. A little bit into it they turned off the lights which meat an end to reading but not the terrible music at the back. The real fun started after they turned off most of the lights. For some reason every 15 minutes or so they would turn on or off another pair of random lights. Sometimes it would get really bright, other times really dark, and sometimes these red or pink lights would come on bathing the whole bus in an other worldly neon glow. The whole effect made it impossible to sleep as it would be too warm and dark, than too cold and bright followed by too warm again and yellow. I spent most of my time looking out my window. It was hard to see much outside unless we passed something illuminated. God knows the highways aren't lit by anything other than the headlights of cars and buses. I passed a few churches with lights string all around the building like it was Christmas time. Mostly it was just one little town after another rolling by in the night.