Chau Doc and Saigon

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While in Chau Doc, our first city in Vietnam we also took a 'moto' ride into the hills. Located about 15mins from the our hotel we headed to a bar on top of a mountain, overlooking the river. The motorbikes ride, the first of the trip for everyone was great fun, if slightly nerve racking in places. Traffic rules and rights of way seem none existant in Vietnam much like Cambodia, a blast on the horn suggests 'get out of my way im coming through'. Once at the top of the mountain, all without injury, we got a drink and watched the sunset before riding back down in the dark. The sunset was pretty poor as the nightly clouds set in but we both had to admit to really enjoying the ride! (laura sends her apologies liz).

We had another early start in the morning as we headed for Saigon. In saigon we went to visit the Chu Chi tunnels, where the Viet Kong had resisted the American attacks and built extensive networks of tunnels. The tunnels were tiny and not a pleasant experience, we crawled through a 20meter section and that was far enough. Our guided told us some of the soliders would have crawled over 40km to Cambodia or to another province to escape the bombings. As well as the tunnels people had the opportunity to fire weapons used by both the americans and Viet Kong such as AK47's and M16's, for a large fee ofcourse. We both passed up on this as it seemed gimickie. The whole trip was very eye opening and one not to be missed.

The hotel we stayed in was pretty average, laura saw a rat tugging along a baguette from the kitchen for its dinner - nice. Saigon offered our first taste of a vietnamese classic Pho, a noodle soup served usually with beef and as much thai basil as you can handle - since then we both became fans.

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