Building a House in Viet Nam : 2

From this to this, 20 trucks and a roller later.

Building a house Viet Nam: Part 1

Around four years ago Chi and I sold her mother's small house in Binh Thanh and used the money to buy two plots of land, one in Cu Chi and one in Binh Chanh. Four years later, we've decided its time to start building a house for mum to live in before she turns our hair gray. And potentially a nice weekend retreat for us too.

I plan to chronicle the process here.

The land was purchased at 600,000 per  sqm, 1000 sqm. So a total value of 600 million VND at time of purchase, around $29,000, in 2009.

Since then, all we have done is erect a huge fence and set of gates around the land (cost: $1000). The land is totally overgrown with tall grass, trees and bushes. Recently we had someone survey the land for clearance, and he discovered a whacking great bomb crater in the middle of it. That's gonna take a little extra earth to fill in. This same man is quoting us 1 million VND ($50) per truck of earth, and estimates that it will take 30 trucks to fill in our crater and raise the level of the whole plot above the road. Once he's done this, the earth needs to be left at least 4 months to compact naturally before any construction can take place.

During this time, Chi and I will be looking at the house and garden design. Here's what we are working with:

The area for allowed housing is 120m2. We have a friend working on some 2D designs in various shapes.

Once we have leveled the land and the rainy season arrives we'll buy some young trees of varying kinds to plant.

I will be mostly living this project vicariously through my wife and various other family members who live in Cu Chi. The only pictures I have right now are these, and it won't look like this for much longer:

 

 

Cu Chi by river boat to see Great Grandma / Future of Cu Chi

On Sunday I took Chi on a surprise visit to Cu Chi. The real surprise was that we were going by boat thanks to Saigon River Express. Their tour leaves the wharf in D1 on the Saigon River and heads upstream taking you through Binh Thanh, under the Saigon Bridge, through D2 past Thanh Da and then snakes up the north east of the city, passing Thu Dau Mot. The whole journey takes around 1 hour 20 minutes (quicker coming back) and ends at Ben Dinh restaurant, on location at the Cu Chi tunnels. Instead of visiting the tunnels during the two hours onshore we went over to Grandma's house for a short visit, just a few kilometers away. I also got a chance to see our plot of land in the this area too. I have jackfruit (more on that later).

Cruising the river

Leaving D1, a nice perspective on the skyline

Saigon Pearl

Uncle's house in Cu Chi. Waiting for the big bad wolf

Lou with her great-grandmother

Collecting fresh veg to take back to the city

Uncle collecting milk from rubber trees to sell

Uncle's mini rubber tree plantation in the back yard

  Uncle shows Lou and I how to get coconuts out of the tree  

Now I don't own very much that I feel is worth owning, but one thing I do have that I am very happy about is a tree. Not only is it a tree, of a commendable size, but it is a fruit bearing tree. Not only is it a fruit bearing tree, it is one of my favorite fruits, the jack fruit. 

In all its glory. My jackfruit tree

Our land in Cu Chi, back end, An Nhon Tay.

We hitched a ride back to the boat and devoured lunch at the riverside restaurant, left just before 12 and were back in our apartment in Phu My Hung before 1.30. D7-Cu Chi is a standard 2.5/3 hour journey in a car usually requiring a trip through the heart of the city. Cruising there by boat is definitely the way forward. Surely in the future there will be public river transport up to Cu Chi. For now, its limited to this $69++ per person tour.

I'm excited about the future of Cu Chi. Obviously, its in a good location - by the river, near the Saigon/Phnom Penh highway, and within (relatively) easy reach of the city. The Saigon Safari Park project will be very close by to the land above, in the An Nhon Tay/Phu My Hung wards of Cu Chi District. The best map I could find online was here. I love finding a .gov.vn site that has such a crap green arrow drawn in MS Paint. The image is not very good.

I took the liberty out of my own interest of creating a Google Map of the location of the Safari Park. https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=205534455282465890907.0004ce57132e88e2ef47e&msa=0&ll=11.115075,106.475973&spn=0.049943,0.055189

Mel of Antidote to Burnout provided the following map for me as he had been involved in a project for the development of Cu Chi new town - a 1000 hectare area with 1/3 of it devoted to green space.  Don't expect this to come to fruition for another 10-15 years. All this is on the other side of Highway 22 which runs from Saigon through Cu Chi district. 

The Family

Chi's family is enormous and it never fails to amaze and entertain (if that's the right word) as stories come out of the woodwork and I get more familiar with the countless aunties and uncles, most of whom reside in Cu Chi district.

I want to relate one particular recent drama that is unfolding.

Chi's mother is the eldest of twelve children, but the eldest two (Chi's mum and her sister) were fathered by a different man to the other ten. So, there exists some land in Cu Chi which Chi has explained to me is exclusively family land and can't be sold, and is ancestral land handed down from Chi's great-grandparents, the parents of Chi's grandmothers first husband. Originally the land was very big so Chi tells me, but her great-grandmother, as is the custom, sold large portions of it to divvy up the cash between relatives. Now all that remains is a small 6 meter wide plot, big enough for a cosy house and a garden.

We decided that this lunar year we would try and acquire that land to build a house for Chi's mum to use and eventually live, possibly with her sister who is from the same father too and retires this year (she currently lives in a small apartment on Dien Bien Phu and has two sons, one of whom put their housing certificate in the bank to take out a 500 million dong loan to open a coffee shop which subsequently failed leaving his mother with a massive debt and no way to sell the house...)

Still with me?

So, there were only two people we needed to chase up to get the all clear for the land and start some paperwork. One of those is Chi's great uncle, in other words, the brother of her grandfather, Chi's mum's uncle. He is still alive and well and amazingly living in District 7, although Chi and her mother haven't seem him for years. He was once a wealthy man with more than five houses across Saigon, but had to sell all of them after losing his money in an investment in Cambodia that went wrong. He purposely distanced himself from the family as he got fed up with the useless ways - one of the most useless being Chi's father, a man who year after year gambled away the family motorbike - prompting Chi to ask her mother as she picked her up from school on a bicycle 'Where's our motorbike'. 'Oh your father lost it (again)'. Chi's great uncle gave him a job in his restaurant as a waiter where he worked for some time and encouraged him to get on the straight and narrow and live up to his responsibilities - ultimately it didn't work, and you can read that story here.

The great uncle, whom we called this weekend, was very happy with the idea of us using the land. He seems a kind man who tried to do the right thing. Chi's mum was nervous (much to Chi's annoyance) because back in the day he gave her 2 tael of gold to fix up her house in Binh Thanh (almost the same as the value of the house at the time) because he was sending his mother to live there for a while. Chi's great-grandmother lived in the house until she died, Chi was in Grade 8. Safe to say, he didn't ask for his gold back.

So one down. The next person is the one who holds the paperwork, the great uncle's daughter-in-law. The great uncle's son is already dead, and wasn't a particularly nice piece of work. He bullied half his family, including Chi's mum (whose name is Ho coincidently) to sell land to him on the cheap (including portions of the land in question today) and succeeded, eventually building some kind of factory there. He died suddenly, and the ancestral land remains in his name. His wife now lives in another part of Cu Chi. Her number is not in the little black book and so Chi called other relatives who know of her, and a rumour reached us that she intended to sell it. Sell the ancestral land! That is not cool! Great uncle was distinctly not impressed.

In response over the weekend I've watched in awestruck deference as Ho has invoked hitherto undiscovered powers, mobilising long lost relatives in the Cu Chi area who, like an army of sleeping zombies reawakened from their slumber by a call to arms, have risen and joined the cause. Turns out that one relative, one that is so distant that when asked the specifics I just got a wave of the arms and "He's got the same surname" as a reply, is HEAD of the people's committee in the SAME district as our seemingly stricken land. As we speak, relatives in Cu Chi are preparing a form to submit to the PC there in order to block any sale of this land. We are then arranging a diplomatic convey consisting of great-uncle and Ms Ho to visit the lady who holds the papers, where great-uncle will attempt to gently persuade the certificates to be handed over to the rightful owners. This is preferred to the idea of Ho's sister, Chi's aunt, who wanted to find the lady and confront her. I see handbags flying...not a good idea.

Somehow we knew it wasn't going to be easy...

Cu Chi

Lou took a visit to meet her Great-Grandmother and various Aunts and Uncles in Cu Chi yesterday. Cu Chi is a pleasant county with plenty of paddies and greenery, and Chi and I have tentative plans to build a house there some time. Land will be betrothed by grandma but it needs to split between her seven daughters (the boys already have theirs), leaving around 500m2 each. Not really enough for the palace we have planned. One of the main features, if we did build a house, would be the garden. Growing my own fruit and vegetables is the ambition, and around Grandma's house there were plenty of trees in flower.

Papaya:



Bananas



Buoi



There was also Durian and Mango trees in the garden with no fruits.

A couple came by the house with a bucket containing a smashed up bees nest, bees included, selling the freshest honey you'll ever find.



Uncle's house, with wood pile, pig shed and banana trees. He sold six four month old pigs for $1000. Not bad business I reckon...



Then of course the most important thing of the day, lunch.