Tuesday

Sunshine enjoyed a vacation day yesterday, so we were all outside in the tropical sunlight again. We wandered around the zoological and botanical park at Saigon's History Museum, eight blocks down Le Duan Street from Reunification Palace. It's a nearby tourist thing we've never quite managed to do. I was game, even with skin still stinging from Saturday's tourism. I assumed I'd be able to while away the early afternoon sunlight indoors, learning about Vietnamese history. But we paid the fifty cent entrance fee only to discover the museum is closed on Mondays, leaving only the outdoor zoo and assorted desultory amusements of the mostly-abandoned fairgrounds to entertain us. * Many people aren't entertained by inner-city zoos. While I'll admit I'm often shamefully permissive about that sort of thing, we'd visited one just Sunday, and it was admittedly a little bit of a downer. Most animals looked healthy enough, but were displayed behind discouraging chain-link in stifling cement bunkers. Keeping the rabbits in the constrictors' cage shows ingenuity, but can be a little distressing. In an enthusiastic write-up of Sunday’s amusement park, our Lonely Planet Guide ignores this, but for today's zoo it offers the following:

"We strongly recommend against visiting the poorly-kept animals, which live at the usual (ie marginal) Vietnamese standard."

Wow. Besides being a mite callous in dismissing Vietnamese quality-of-life, I find the kneejerk activism of that passage flatly wrong (and a mixed signal compared with their previous endorsement). Today's zoo is shady, very clean, and the animals--save one old, panting leopard--seemed well adjusted to their nearly spacious situations. Here, the inmates are mostly species indigenous to Southeast Asia, and thus rather more acclimated to the heat than I am. I was particularly impressed by the monkey island and the accessibly shallow crocodile pit. [Cavin]