Dateline: Phu My, Vietnam. We spent the day in port at Phu My, which is the port for Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. We were docked alongside a large but largely unused container port. We saw acre after acre of paved, marked off storage area for containers, with hardly any containers in it. Lots of big cranes for moving containers, but the only boats being loaded were a couple of riverboats being loaded for the trip upriver on the Mekong. Either the Vietnamese have built far in advance of their needs or the recession has hit this poor country pretty darned hard. I suspect the latter.
The river traffic is interesting, as it always is on big rivers. You see how the so-called “swift boats” were needed during the Vietnam conflict to control which side had access to the river for transport. Anyway, it gave the Navy a shot at getting involved beyond launching carrier planes and occasionally shelling coastal targets.
Looking at the river traffic reminded me of the river scenes in the iconic film Apocalypse Now. The film’s main character is sent upriver on a swift boat to find and kill a U.S. ‘adviser’ gone native, played by Marlon Brando. I kept wondering if we passed the place the film’s macho aircav general wanted to surf as we came into port. He is the fellow who loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
We are north of the equator so it is nominally “winter.” Not that you’d ever imagine it to be winter as the heat is oppressive, energy-sapping. For those of our passengers who came here from true winter, this muggy heat has to be a major adjustment.
