Vietnam Part 1 - Saigon

Hello again! Our lack of anything for the last month can be described very easily! We did originally plan only a couple of weeks in Vietnam, but loved it and stayed for a month. Then this combined with facebook being banned and blogs sometimes carefully monitored we though it would be best to just leave it! The fact that my flickr is linked to my facebook account to log in does mean we have about 5GBs of photos to upload, but once they are done a lot of them are very nice!

Anyway, on to Saigon...

From the airport we ended up in an extremely overpriced taxi, with a driver who was jittery, speeding and constantly honking (we later realised the honking is pretty normal for Vietnam). We made our way into the city, got a nice hotel and booked a few small trips. The roads of Saigon are incredibly scary. Everyone drives motorbikes, there are very few cars, and the roads are almost constantly busy. The only way to get across some roads is to just walk and have the bikes make their way around you (while Imogen screams a bit).

Our first day involved a trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. These were tunnels the Viet Cong guerrillas hid, fought and lived for over 20 years. We saw a lot of the traps used by the Viet Cong which all looked incredibly painful! We eventually got to go into the tunnels themselves, which even though had been widened for us fat westerners, were very tight, stuffy, dirty and hot! We had a choice to go quite far but left at the first exit because it was very unpleasant. The fact people lived in these tunnels for so long is pretty shocking once you go inside.

Cyclo - like the one we took

The evening of our first day in Saigon was much nicer! The evening started with a trip to the water puppet theatre, which was really cool even though we had no idea what was going on! I even thought the dogs were dragons! We the took a cyclo ride (see picture on right!) across Saigon, which was one of the scariest things ever. Especially when the driver is going head-on into traffic at night. The cyclo was taking us to a dinner on a river cruise, which was really lovely and the first time we had wine on our whole trip! The evening on the boat ended with Imogen and some others playing music together at the front of the boat. Imogen's job was playing some kind of cups that were played like castonets!

The next day was a day trip to see around the city. The stops were reunification palace, war remnants museum, a chinese pagoda, chinatown, a market and a laquerware factory. The best of these was definitely the war remnants museum, which we didn't have enough time out so we revisited it the next day! This evening was spent at a rooftop bar where they barbecue food in front of you on the table itself. Was pretty cool and we got pretty drunk!

We went back to the War Remnants museum, which was a really interesting place to visit but very harrowing. This paragraph from Wikipedia describes everything pretty well.
One building reproduces the "tiger cages" in which the South Vietnamese government housed political prisoners. Other exhibits include graphic photographs, accompanied by short copy in English, Vietnamese and Japanese, covering the effects of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliant sprays, the use of napalm and phosphorus bombs, and atrocities such as the My Lai massacre. Curiosities include a guillotine used by the French and the South Vietnamese to execute prisoners, last in 1960, and three jars of preserved human fetuses deformed by exposure to dioxin.

We got our train to Nha Trang very early the next morning. During the journey, I didn't remember when we were supposed to arrive (1pm) and woke Imogen up an hour into the journey at the first stop worried! During the journey I ended up with an old lady behind me with gross feet putting her feet on my chair and Imogen had a man constantly hocking phlegm... Other than these the journey was pretty pleasant!

Next post the beach town of Nha Trang...