Thanh Xuan Hotel Ho Chi Minh City

... is wrestling a Rooster next door", therefore not a dream as I originally thought.

As for Saigon as the elders call it, a chance to grab some culture and history, although bleak. The War Remnants Museum helps to tie in the trip to Hoa's place and our other destinations in Vietnam. Honest and raw, there is plans for a refit. However, the quotes and the ...

... along the tunnel, whilst bigger people had to crawl. Steve and me were sweating like mad and feeling the burn in the back of our calfs. Hot and dirty we finally made it into daylight after 90m of tunnel! It was fairly hard work, but what I found insane was the fact that our tour guide said the Cu-Chi people built 200km of tunnels!! What?! Digging them took many years and many people to create them ...

... before moving on. Early tomorrow, we leave for Cambodia and this is where we'll be putting in less blog entries as we will not have easy internet access.

The good:
- Some absolutely gorgeous natural sites (Sapa, Halong, Tam Coc, etc..)
- Diversity of landscape and climate (beaches, mountains, farmland, countryside, from scalding heat to comfortable weather all in one country at the same time)
- Most cities have really nice and well ...

... for free cappuccinos and steamed pork barbecue buns. The final flight to Seattle left at 11 p.m. Talk about a cattle car. We were seated 5 rows from the very back of the plane in the center section. I had the inglorious honor of sitting next to one of the only other Caucasian men present (out of 372 passengers, I might add). In addition, he was big and overflowed his seat into mine. We had some wordless tussles, not over the armrest (which he completely ...

... the trip a 1960's propaganda video of how the small villagers of Vietnam were crushing the mighty American war machine. Featuring little old lady's sharpening sticks and young girls firing rocket propelled grenades at tanks! All done with a big smile. That one definitely had to be taken with a pinch of salt. Back in Saigon we packed up for a bus the next day to Phmon Pen. Now feeling that we had more than enough war we were heading to Cambodia to learn about Genocide. This is ...

... the museum also enabled us to take a photo of Pike next to his time traveling twin. When we were in Saigon a few years before, we had seen a photo from the war in the museum that looked exactly like Pike -- clearly he had been doing some quantum leaping.

Pops wanted to check out the river and look for a floating restaurant he remembered, so we stopped there before walking to the rooftop bar at the Palace Hotel -- another place we had stopped on ...

... going on. Great shopping at the local markets and cheap food from the street stalls.

We took a 2 day, 1 night trip to the Mekong Delta. It involved a long boat ride along the Saigon river and then into the Mekong river. Its such a busy river system with many families whole livelyhood based around it. You see people bathing in it, going to the toilet in it, washing dishes in it, drinking from it ...

... bustling floating markets on the Mekong River and watched the locals swap their fruits and vegetables. Sitting on top of a massive elephant as he ate his way deep into the jungle will be hard to top but the most amazing experiences were the interactions with the people. I like to blend in as much as possible when I go places but there was no blending on this trip. That made things much more fun though in this place. I loved the times that the locals ...

... guys must have witnessed are unimaginable... it's no wonder so many had such problems readjusting afterwards.

The biggest thing for me was the scale to which innocent civilians were affected even decades after the was (e.g. by Agent Orange and UXO) - surely nothing can ever be worth that cost?

Completely unrelated, but I also hear that Michael Jackson has delayed his July 12 concert until next march... so much for going on my birthday :o(