Monday 18 March
We do the city; Then and Nows using my old postcards bought in London at the Ephemera Fair in Bloomsbury and In the steps of Graham Greene’s “Quiet American” assisted by blogs by timdolinghcmc@gmail.com and Steve Meacham in www.traveller.au/graham-greenes-saigon-revisited.
For my “Then and Nows” ;
The view of the Notre Dame cathedral built by the French in 1880 , “The Hideous pink cathedral blocked the way” Graham Greene, and the magnificent General Post Office built by the famous French architect Gustav Eiffel in 1891.
The Opera House, designed by the French architect Jules Board and opened in 1899, and the view of the Opera House and the famous Hotel Continental, built in 1880 and where Graham Greene stayed between 1952 and 1955 as a journalist for The Times and Figaro and where he wrote “The Quiet American” , in room 214. The hotel features in the book as does Place Garnier, now Lam Son Square where the bomb was set off by General The, “the big bomb near the Continental preceded and did not follow the bicycle bombs”, he was connected with the Cao Dai Church. Greene based the character General The on a real life warlord General Trinh Minh The [1922-1955]
The Palais du Governor General of Indochina, built in 1871 but demolished by the President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and replaced by the current building in 1962. In 1975 the communists drove their tanks through the gates, the defining moment in the fall of Vietnam. The tanks are still in the gardens. It is now known as the Reunification Palace, an “historical relic.”
In “The Quiet American” the British journalist hero Fowler lived just off Rue Catinat, now Dong Khoi, and now a ghost in the new Sheraton Hotel. The street runs down from the Cathedral and Post Office down past the Continental Hotel, Opera House , and Caravelle Hotel down to the Majestic Hotel. The pavement cafe of the Continental Hotel was where journalists met during the French and American wars and known as “the Continental shelf” . In the fiction the cafe was where Fowler first met Pyle, the quiet American “aide worker” who believed Indochina could be saved from the two evils of colonialism and communism by the “Third Force”, supported by the Americans! Phuong, Fowlers beautiful young Vietnamese girlfriend, regularly visited the patisserie Givral which was opposite the hotel, and is now replaced by the recently opened Union Square shopping centre and hotel.
just south of the Post Office at 164 Dong Khoi, now the department for Culture, was the offices of the French “Direction de la Police et de la Surete” until 1954, was the workplace of Inspector Vigot, a friend of Fowler, who was investigating Pyle’s death. The plaque outside, see photo, commemorates the fact that for four weeks in September 1945 the Viet Minh flag flew over the building. In the book Greene describes its “dreary walls…seemed to smell of urine and injustice”. The building is scheduled for demolition, like so much of HCMC.
I am fascinated by this mix of fact and fiction, threading a story into a real place. The ‘in the steps of” exercise in Saigon has been easier than in Havana for Greene’s book “Our Man In Havana” Margaret does not share this so we returned to the Ben Thanh market for bags and a cool lunch in the Saigon Centre with its choice of 24 restaurants on the top floor.
Visit the 262 metre high Bitexco Financial Tower, Saigon Skydeck, with its bazaar helicopter pad half way up. I find these views from skyscrapers increasingly boring in their sameness.
Drinks on the roof top bar of the Majestic Hotel, Greene’s favourite bar, away from the common journalists in the Continental and where Fowler went at cocktail time to enjoy “the cool wind from the Sai Gon River” According to Insight Guides it is one of South East Asia’s classic colonial hotels, and, being state run, it has not been brutally modernised and still “radiates an old world colonial charm”. When we were there guests in the main lobby bar were straight out of central casting, elderly upper middle class English visitors, not tourists!
As Tim Doling notes in his post; “Sai Gon has changed a great deal in the six decades since Graham Greene walked its streets and anyone looking for seedy opium dens, exotic taxi dancers and world weary colons [and cynical flawed journalists] will be sorely disappointed”. Now full of bland tourists seeking this lost world.
As Paul Fussell noted in his book “Abroad” ;” The explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveller that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist what has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared[ and sanitised] by the arts of mass publicity”
