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Published: February 28th 2011
After the slow couple of recovereing days and a couple of bus trips we arrived in Ho Chi Minh city or Saigon. It was exciting to be in the hustle and bustle of a large city again. Saigon is the largest city in Vietnam and 10%!o(MISSING)f the population live here, thats 8.7 million people so its by far the largerst city we have been in to date. The city is amazing and instantely we fell in love with it , there is just so much to see and do and the food here was amazing! We managed to score a awesome guesthouse down a back alley that we shared with our roomie Cia again! After settling in and grabbing a feed we had an early night to get ready for our history lesson in the morning.
Reunification Palace
Lesson 101: The war that terrorised Vietnam for 21 years was between the Viet Cong ( known as the VC who were a communist army led by Ho Chi Minh ) from the north and the anti communists in the south who were led by a President. The Americans came to help the south fight the north in an attempt
to suppress the communist domino effect.
So the palace was formely the President's headquarters, after the American's withdrawal from the war the south were left vunerable and on 30th April 1975 the President announced their surrender to the VC and the palace was stormed by VC troops and renamed Reunification Palace. On that day Saigon was also renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honour of their leader who passed away in 1969 and never got to see the end of the war.
The palace is like a time warp and has been left the same after the day it was taken over, I was expecting it to be bombed and stuff but its not and it has been tidied and cleaned for the tourists that truck through there day after day. The coolest part of the 3 storey building is the basement, it felt like something out of a James Bond movie, it is full of little rooms that have maps, radios, type writters etc... you can imagine what it would of been like down there during the war plotting and planning.
War Remnants Museum
The next stop was the war museum, we had heard from a lot
of people that the content of the museum was pretty heavy. They have not left anything to the imagination in this museum and it is not for the faint hearted. One of the lasting effects the war has left on Vietnamese society today was the American's use of chemical warfare. They used a herbicide called Agent Orange to eradicate food supply and cover for the VC. The effects that this chemical have left on society are devastating, reports have estimated that 3 million Vietnamese have been affected by Agent Orange even generations after as children are still being born with defects. In the museum there is an Agent Orange room that contains photo's of adults and children with these defects and it is very saddening ( if your interested and want to have a look just google it to see what I mean ), it also has baby foetus's that were affected by the chemical.
Jono was really interested in this part, I had a look but Cia couldn't even walk in the door!
The rest of the museum contained photgraph's of the war, looking at the pictures were saddening and at one point I had to leave the room
Reunification Palace
One of many board roomsas I felt like I was going to burst into tears, the picture that got that reaction from me was one of a mother who had been gunned down in a ditch with her 5 children 1 of them being a baby. Although saddening we did learn a lot about the war from this museum and Im glad to have a better understanding of the suffering of this nation.
Cu Chi Tunnels
The next day we took a tour to the Cu Chi Tunnels. So we got up early and met up with our new Welsh mate Gareth. We hopped on the bus and headed for the tunnels that gave the American troops such a hard time. Cu Chi was a rural community but they were communist so were allies to the north. Being so close to Saigon this proved to be a nightmare for US troops. The whole village had dug tunnels and were living underground to hide from the troops and also the constant bombing by the yanks. The network of tunnels was enormous but there is just a few that have been preserved. While there we also were shown the booby traps and secret entrances which
were amazing and tiny (see photo). During the war in this area many US soldiers died but they didn't know why "there were no viet cong anywhere but they were everywhere" It's pretty ingenious the way the peasants used these tunnels. We went down some steps and crawled along bout 45m then everyone hopped out this was optional as the tunnels carried on for another 200m. So I carried on the original tunnels were only 80cm high and no more than 50cm wide which is ridiculous because they have almost doubled the size of them for the benefit of the tourists but it was still a tight squeeze crawling alot of the way. I had carried on through the rest of the tunnels by myself cos Zania and Gareth didn't want to. When Zania and Gareth were waiting for me the guide asked why they were waiting they explained I was still down there. And he thought that I was stuck and even repeated that i would get lost and die a number of times. When i finally did get out he came up to me and couldn't believe i had come so far underground. I Didn't think it was
that bad apart from the heat it was so hot down there was sweating like a pig and at times it was frikin scary it was so dark you couldn't see anything and tight you could hardly move. It would have been a nightmare for the US troops with booby traps and people shooting at you in those conditions.
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