Arrived home from Ho Chi Minh this evening and am feeling quite grateful for a clean scrub with some good ol’ antibacterial soap (as opposed to the usual cryptically-labelled hotel soaps you get). It’s been a much better time spent in the five days there than expected, in spite of the bulk of the days being taken up for work-related activities.

I say “better”, not just in terms of enjoyment (of which I had a lot, surprisingly, for one admittedly not-as-readily-adventurous as myself) but also that I’m better informed now. Lesson One: Vietnamese food isn’t just pho, pho, pho. A lot of local homecooked food tastes remarkably Chinese, and not just hot-and-sour. A delicious lesson learnt.

Lesson Two: It isn’t filthy—or at least, not as filthy as people say it is. Sure, the air is a little dusty, but I was able to comfortably walk around in flip-flops for the most part of leisure time, much to the surprise, perhaps of even the locals, who were hygienically toe-covered. Woe betide the lady who had to do my foot reflexology session on Day Four. She’ll never see this, but I’m sorry.

Lesson Three: People in Vietnam aren’t yabbering away in their own tongue, oblivious to other languages. By this I also mean Chinese, by evidence of the taxi driver who replied curtly in Mandarin that he wasn’t taking us for a ride (pun unintended), after we complained to each other in halting Mandarin that he was a “cheat” and a “typical opportunist”. Though an entirely embarrassing situation, it does make me wonder how somebody who so flagrantly went in circles on a simple route, can sit through an entire bitchfest about him, and then still have the cheek to retort.

Lesson Four: There’s something to do for the whole family. Women can go sweat it out in the numerous market arenas, where they’d find most of your run-of-the-mill pasar malam-styled stalls. And everybody else can go visit photostops like the Notredame Cathedral, Art and History museums, and perhaps take a day tour to the Cao Dai temple and Cu Chi tunnels.

My only regret was that I missed the aforementioned temple/tunnel tour, because I didn’t have the time to. More than anything, it was the Cao Dai temple I wanted to visit, after the secret agenda behind them, as hypothesised by friend-living-in-Vietnam, which even though I haven’t found a lot of scholarly published work on, was most intriguing.

The Cao Dai temples have three popes: Sun Yat Sen, Victor Hugo and some Vietnamese guy who founded the whole thing. Sun was 19 the year Hugo died. The Vietnamese guy died in the 16th Century.

So there’s a good chance none of them met. But what were they doing as popes of some obscure Vietnamese cult? Could Victor Hugo have been spreading Freemasonry? (There is a rather similar-looking “all-seeing eye” on a pillar in the temple, reminiscent of the Freemason symbol you see on the reverse side of U.S. currency.) Or could Sun Yat Sen have been building a secret army of a million devout cult members who have given their lives to the cult?

Or did Sun just namedrop Hugo to lend pomp to his gathering of the troops, because of the French influence at the time (and how popular Hugo was as a French writer)?

With all of these ideas beaten about by a curious friend-living-in-Vietnam and a most uneducated me, it came up fruitless and mostly frustrating, since I didn’t manage the trip down to see all of this for myself. Not that I’d get any answers online, since a search of the Cao Dai temples just led to descriptions of it.

Rituals by the devotees are still going on till today. You’ve got to wonder, however: surely they ought to elect a new pope since it’s been awhile since they had one still alive?