Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [65]
Worse followed seven years later, during “Operation Frequent Wind”, the chaotic helicopter evacuation that marked the United States’ final undignified withdrawal from Vietnam. The embassy building was one of thirteen designated landing zones where all foreigners were to gather upon hearing the words, “It is 112 degrees and rising” on the radio followed by Bing Crosby singing White Christmas. At noon on April 29, 1975, the signal was broadcast, and for the next eighteen hours scores of helicopters shuttled passengers out to the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet off Vung Tau. Around two thousand evacuees were lifted from the roof of the embassy alone, before Ambassador Graham Martin finally left with the Stars and Stripes in the early hours of the following morning. In a tragic postscript to US involvement, as the last helicopter lifted off, many of the Vietnamese civilians who for hours had been clamouring at the gates were left to suffer the Communists’ reprisals.
Ho Chi Minh City and around | The City | Along Le Duan Boulevard to the Botanical Gardens |
The Botanical Gardens and zoo
The pace of life slows down considerably – and the odours of cut grass and frangipani blooms replace the smell of exhaust fumes – when you duck into the city’s Botanical Gardens (daily 7am–9pm; 8000đ), accessed by a gate at the far eastern end of Le Duan, and bounded to the east by the Thi Nghe Channel. Established in 1864 by the Frenchmen Germain and Pierre (respectively a vet and a botanist), the gardens’ social function has remained unchanged in decades, and their tree-shaded paths still attract as many courting couples and promenaders as when Norman Lewis followed the “clusters of Vietnamese beauties on bicycles” and headed there one Sunday morning in 1950 to find the gardens “full of these ethereal creatures, gliding in decorous groups…sometimes accompanied by gallants”. In its day, the gardens harboured an impressive collection of tropical flora, including many species of orchid. Post-liberation, the place went to seed but nowadays a bevy of gardeners keep it reasonably well tended again, and portrait photographers are once again lurking to take snaps of you framed by flowers.
Stray right inside and you’ll soon reach the zoo, home to camels, elephants, crocodiles and big cats, also komodo dragons – a gift from the government of Indonesia. There’s also an amusement park that is sometimes open, and you can get an ice cream or a coconut from one of the several cafés sprinkled around the grounds.
Ho Chi Minh City and around | The City | Along Le Duan Boulevard to the Botanical Gardens |
The History Museum
A pleasing, pagoda-style roof crowns the city’s History Museum (Tues–Sun 8–11am & 1.30–4.30pm; 15,000đ), at 2 Nguyen Binh Khiem, next to the Botanical Gardens. It houses fifteen galleries illuminating Vietnam’s past from primitive times to the end of French rule by means of a decent if unastonishing array of artefacts and pictures. Dioramas of defining moments in Vietnamese military history lend the collection some cohesion – included are Ngo Quyen’s 938 AD victory at Bach Dang (see "The battles of Bach Dang River"), and the sinking of the Esperance. Should you tire of Vietnamese history, you might explore halls focusing on such disparate subjects as Buddha images from around Asia; seventh- and eighth-century Champa art; and the customs and crafts of the ethnic minorities of Vietnam. There’s also a room jam-packed with exquisite ceramics from Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, and you could round off your visit at the water puppetry theatre (shows are performed