My trip to Vietnam didn’t start all that auspiciously. My 8pm flight from Laos ended up being delayed for four hours. I spent most of the time in the dingy little airport¹ terrified my flight was going to get canceled at some point after midnight.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. My travel plans have been remarkably free of drama. Only a handful of flights have been delayed. I’ve made every connection. I’m either good at this or lucky at this. I’ll chalk it up to being lucky.

I want to take a moment to reflect on how frictionless most travel has become. I noticed this most recently when I was looking through travel guides.² Travel used to be this laborious prospect of calling different airlines to find out what flights were scheduled and calling hotels³ to see if they had availability and picking up traveler’s checks and insurance and local maps.⁴

The Internet — in this case travel aggregation sites — have destroyed that. I have far more information about the available flights in Europe than any travel agent did. I can trivially tell you what the cheapest flight is between any two points on the globe, whether it’s cheaper to leave a day earlier or later, how much it costs to take the train instead.⁵

And for hotels, I can pull up a listing for virtually any place and tell you how much it will cost to stay for any particular spread of dates. I can see what the hotels look like and read reviews and narrow my search by places with pools or exercise rooms or WiFi.⁶ And I can book it and pay for it without ever having talked to another human being.

Everything, from having up-to-date maps on your phone, to bank cards and ATMs which give you access to local currency, to websites with opening hours for all the restaurants and museums you might consider visiting, is so much easier than it was just 15 years ago. Even stuck in a dingy little airport with a painful flight delay, I can hop on the Internet and see what it would take to catch a bus⁷ and what hotels are nearby and what the flight schedules in the morning look like.

It might take a little time to learn all the tools at your disposal, and you might still find travel somewhat stressful and difficult. But it’s not nearly as stressful and difficult as it used to be.

Unlike a lot of the other countries I’ve been visiting, I happen to know a fair amount about Vietnam,⁸ largely because I managed to skip out on the general history requirement in college by taking two electives instead, one of which was History of the Vietnam War.⁹ So I thought I had a lot of the basics filled in, from the colonial history to the geography.

But after getting here, it’s obvious how limited that understanding was. It’s not that there’s thousands of years of history before the 1900s (although that’s certainly a part of it). But when your exposure to another culture is entirely through your own culture’s experience of it — not surprisingly the Vietnam War is, from the perspective of the United States, largely about the United States¹⁰ — so you’re never going to get a full impression of the place.

My visit to Hỏa Lò Prison highlights the issue here. It’s best known to Americans as the Hanoi Hilton, where American pilots shot down during the war were imprisoned and subjected to inhumane conditions and torture. You’ll find plenty in the exhibits about the American prisoners, but not a peep about the torture; they go to great lengths to talk about how well Americans were treated.¹¹ It doesn’t take a lot to read between the lines.

But the exhibits also talk a lot about how the imprisoned Vietnamese were treated by the French during colonial rule, which bears a lot of similarities to the ways Americans were treated by the Vietnamese. That certainly doesn’t excuse it — torture is torture no matter who’s doing the torturing — but it does contextualize it in a way that you don’t get from an American history book.

It’s possible to be a hero, a victim, and a perpetrator all at the same time. And if we build strong enough systems of oppression, even those of us with the best of intentions can end up doing monstrous things. The logic of the system will overwhelm us all, in the end.

I started off with three days in Hanoi, in the Old Town. I did some touristy things — the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum was high on my embalmed Communist leader checklist, so I got that out of the way — but otherwise mostly stuck to finding the best Bánh Mì in the city.¹² But then I went to Ho Chi Minh City.¹³ And I was completely and utterly unprepared for it.

Every place else I’ve been in Southeast Asia, I had at least a few thoughts about what I would find, and generally what I found has been moderately close to what I found. I’ve been surprised in the particulars, but not the general overview. That’s not true of Ho Chi Minh City. I guess I got it confused with Hanoi; I assumed given the bombing campaigns against Hanoi there’d be less historic buildings, and more modern construction in the city center. And HCMC, having been relatively protected, would have a lot more old, scenic, colonial architecture.

That’s not the case. HCMC feels like a crazy blend of Bangkok, Kyiv, and New York City. Bangkok for the heat, the street markets, and the food vendors and massage parlors and river culture. Kyiv for the old, dated communist trappings and the importation of Western kinds of culture. And most unexpectedly, New York City for the sheer overwhelming development of the place, the skyscrapers and the constant running around and just the unrelenting vibe of it all.

There’s something disconcerting about arriving in a city where you feel like you’ve already been. It’s not deja vu; it’s not as if I’ve seen these shops or restaurants before. But there’s something about the way the city is built that I understand already.¹⁴ It’s like shopping in a grocery store you know well, you know what aisle contains the juice and whether the bakery’s over to the left or the right, and even if you’ve never bought taco shells there you’ve got a pretty good idea where they’d keep them.

So I spent an inordinate amount of time just wandering around the city after dark, walking through the night markets, stopping at microbreweries¹⁵ or gelato shops or cocktail bars. I ate at a Tex-Mex restaurant¹⁶ and a burger joint.¹⁷ I allowed an intern to sign me up to their company’s rewards app to help make her quota. I spent a lot of time sitting and looking out over the river, reading or thinking or sometimes just nursing a beer and watching the street traffic.

And it was all felt very familiar. If it weren’t for the fleets of motorbikes, it could have just as easily been Koreatown in Manhattan.¹⁸ It’s the same number of neon signs, the same towering skyscrapers with weird architectural fillips,¹⁹ the same kinetic energy. I loved it.

But it didn’t feel like home, for all that. Part of it was the heat; I’m never going to be able to really relax someplace I’m stuck in air conditioning year-round. But I think mostly, for me, it’s because HCMC hits the uncanny valley for New York.

I greatly enjoyed being able to walk around the city, wander into bakeries or cafés, find a decent pizza place or Turkish restaurant or smoothie shop pretty much anywhere. But that’s nice for about a week. It’s been a good visit. But staying longer is just going to remind me of all the ways it’s not New York, and I already know that. I’m still hoping for someplace new.

Next: Krong Siem Reap (REP) to Penang (PEN)
Prev: Vientiane (VTE) to Hanoi (HAN)

Footnotes

¹ Supposedly the Wattay International Airport recently underwent a number of recent renovations and expansions, but boy that wasn’t obvious. Crappy seats, no free WiFi, and limited food options — my dinner was a stale chocolate croissant and a pack of Lays Green Curry Potato Chips — made the wait pretty excruciating.

² I still use travel guides — Rick Steves and Lonely Planet generally — because it’s super helpful when you arrive in a stange city and think “What should I do now?” to have a reference with suggestions.

³ How did you even know what hotels existed in a foreign city without a travel guide?

⁴ Which really meant you went to a travel agent who had the magic box that gave them flight information and hotel information and you paid them to make all the arrangements for you. Or, if you didn’t have that kind of money, you used a guide like Let’s Go and spent a lot of time making expensive international phone calls booking places to stay.

⁵ Literally the only thing I have trouble with is figuring out all the direct flights into a city. Given the way I travel, I often find myself with someplace I want to be on a particular date, and a month to kill before that date. Getting a list of decent travel options to that place would be nice. And I know that information is trivially available to these aggregations services. It’s just hard to find it.

⁶ Every place has WiFi, these days.

⁷ 22-hour bus ride, so not a great option

⁸ “A fair amount” is relative, and given the huge swaths of my ignorance, a low bar indeed.

⁹ The other was History of Mayan Civilization. In retrospect, a general history survey would have been more useful, for trivia if nothing else. Not a lot of Mayan history questions on Jeopardy!.

¹⁰ Slightly more amusingly, there’s an awful lot of heroic American reporters mentioned in these histories. Not all that surprising when you think about who’s writing these things. Hagiography isn’t reserved for politicians.

¹¹ The exhibits even claim the phrase “Hanoi Hilton” proves it, because it suggests conditions were like staying in a really nice hotel.

¹² It turns out the best vegetarian Bánh Mì I found was at My Bahn Mi in Ho Chi Minh City. Marinated tofu with black pepper sauce. Astonishingly good.

¹³ I am really not comfortable with the renaming of cities — Ho Chi Minh City, Leningrad — which play into this kind of cult of personality. I’m still weirded out by Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

¹⁴ There’s a superhero created by Warren Ellis called “Jack Hawksmoor” who is empathically linked to cities, and that’s the closest I can get to describing the feeling.

¹⁵ So far a reliable marker for how Westernized a city is has been the number of microbreweries they’ve launched. HCMC has, like, a lot.

¹⁶ They had a frito burrito stuffed with vegan chili and nachos, which I ordered wet, because of course you order it wet if that’s an option. And so, yes, the most authentic Tex-Mex food I’ve found outside of North America is in Vietnam.

¹⁷ Soul Burger. Hi, Ruben!

¹⁸ Well, the motorbikes and the fact that all the signs were in Vietnamese.

¹⁹ The Bitexco Financial Tower in HCMC is a 68-story elegant glass-sheathed skyscraper that looks like someone jammed a pie plate in it about ⅔ of the way up.