Saigon

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  Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Thursday, October 23, 2008

We got the bus down from Nha Trang to Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as everyone still calls it). When Lucy booked the bus at the hotel, the lady said it'd be 8 hours, then when it came the lady in charge of tickets said 10 hours, in reality it took 11 and a half hours, 7am to 6.30pm. It was OK though, a sleeper bus so you can recline fully and have a kip or sit up and read or look at the scenery. It stopped plenty of times for food and toilets and went through some beautiful coastal and inalnd scenery, and was half the price of the train so well worth it. Found a nice little hotel down a back street, family run so shoes off, they were all really sweet though only one spoke English so lots of smiling and pointing. Went for a beer at a bar nearby, firstly a group of about 8 britsh lads walk past all meatheads on steroids, the first one just says "beer" and they all follow mindlessly and drunkenly across the road. This is when we realised Saigon is very touristy. We were having a game of pool and suddenly theres a seriously fit Vietnamese girl stood next to me, so my first thought is shes about to say ten dollar soldier boy or words to that effect. But she just kept trying to talk to me in broken english, I just kept trying to ignore her and Lucys just stood across the table laughing. Anyway she ended up playing pool against Lucy and was the worst pool player ever but was friendly to Lucy so we never worked out what her game was.
Next day we went to the Cu Chi tunnels where the Viet Cong hid out in 250km of tunnels, foxholes and bunkers. We had to watch a DVD when we got there explaining that the people of Cu Chi were a peaceful community of women and children who sat around eating fruit and having picnics all day until the Americans repeatedly carpet bombed them with B52's just for fun. Only then did they start fighting back with their stockpile of weapons disguised as fruit and their 250km network of tunnels and traps which they just happened to have there. Nobody believed a word of it but they love their propoganda being a socialist republic so you gotta go with it. We saw how they made all the devious bamboo traps, saw bomb craters made by the B52's then my favourite bit, getting to shoot some guns. There was a wide range of them from hand guns to machine guns churning through bullets, at a dollar a bullet it wasn't as cheap as I thought it was and my visions of me hacking up the jungle with a gatling gun quickly vanished. I went halves on the minimum 12 bullets with an Aussie guy to save cash as Lucy wasn't up for it, we chose the guerilla favourite the AK47 for authenticity. We were given cheapo music earphones with the wires ripped out which provided no protection at all especially as there was about 5 pairs and 20 people standing round so we all ended up a bit deaf. Great fun though. Then we went down the actual tunnels, just the top section a couple of metres underground which is 1.2m high by 90cm wide, the lower out of bounds bits are only 50cm high and 70 cm wide. Lucy got out after 15m of the tunnels as did most sensible people but I carried on the full 100m with the Aussie guys; stupid idea. It was so hot, claustrophobic and dark, with stale air, at points it drops down and rises up suddenly in pitch darkness. Luckily we had a camera with a light on. By the end we were sweating, out of breath and our legs in agony due to crouching and crawling, theres no way we would have been able to fight after that. The Americans were never able to get the VC out of the tunnels at Cu Chi.
Next day we went to the war remnants museum in the city itself and saw lots more stuff about the war, guns, planes and tanks and loads of horrific photos of both sides involved. Rode around on the back of motorbikes, went to the markets and went to one of  a chain of posh ice cream parlours called Fanny Ice Cream. Booked a tour up the Mekong river to Phnom Penh for the next day.

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