Vietnam & Singapore - Saigon part 1

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Our flight from Da Nang to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) was quick and uneventful, and we soon arrived at our hotel for the next two nights, the Avanti, set on one of the main streets of Saigon, with the busy Ben Thanh market just across the road.

On the front door of the hotel was a notice banning Durian in the building. Durian is the world’s smelliest fruit, and is very popular in South East Asia. I can concur that it is indeed a very unpleasantly smelling fruit, and having sampled a Durian sweet (candy) will not be doing so again! It’s also very obvious when one is nearby, and I seriously can’t understand the appeal. I read that it tastes like ice cream and is sweet, while others say it’s more like eating cheese. I love both ice cream and cheese, and personally I thought it tasted very unpleasant and nothing like either of those!

The hotel lobby was bedecked with Christmas decorations and had Christmas muzac babbling out of the lobby speakers. In fact, we were seeing more and more Christmas decs around the cities we were visiting, as well as tinsel, cardboard snowmen etc. etc. for sale in the market and roadside stalls. A little over 8% of the Vietnam population are Christian, with almost 15% being Buddhist, so I was surprised at how prolific Christmas seems to be. Any opportunity to make a sale I guess!

We took our luggage up to our 7th floor room, and while checking out the view Susan spotted some workmen hanging off ropes painting a nearby hotel. When I say hanging off ropes, they were sitting on wooden seats hanging from ropes secured over a balcony at a similar level to our room, with no safety harness or other safety features. One of them shimmied up the rope and over the balcony railings, so presumably he’d finished painting his bit.

Saigon – apparently ‘no one calls it Ho Chi Minh’ – houses around 10% of the population of Vietnam with 9.7 million people living there. This means there are around 6 million scooters scooting around the roads, and my word, it felt like it! Once again when crossing a road you take your life in your hands, looking for a quick gap in the traffic, then going for it and somehow the traffic just streams around you. While I was becoming fairly confident on the smaller streets, we did need to cross a couple of really big roundabouts, and I was very happy to be able to follow Mr T on these occasions!

Mr T took us for a quick foot tour passing by the Notre Dame Cathedral where I was able to find the answer to one of the Saigon Tourist Trail AdLab questions. We then visited the Central Post Office before visiting a cafe called Cong where iced coconut coffee and iced chocolate coconut drinks (like a chocolate slush with coconut milk) were the choices of the group.

Mr T was taking the night off, and Susan didn’t fancy going out for dinner, so I went to Soul, a nearby restaurant and cocktail bar, with Aidee and Diane. We sat on the balcony and ordered drinks, Aidee and I choosing cocktails and Diane ordered a bottle of beer. We also ordered a light dish of food each. Then we waited... and waited... and waited, while tables around us were getting food and drinks delivered, we seemed to have been forgotten! Diane asked where our drinks were, and we were told they’d be with us in five minutes. A few minutes later our food arrived, but still no drinks! After several more minutes the cocktails arrived, but still no beer. Diane’s face was a picture! She queried her beer and it still took about another two or three minutes to get to her – a bottle of beer with the lid taken off, not even a glass!

Once we’d finished our first drinks, we considered whether it would be sensible to order a second, given the wait we’d had. Diane asked a waiter whether there’d be another long wait, and he assured us there wouldn’t. Diane ordered a beer, and it was with her in under a minute. The waiter almost ran to the table with it! The cocktails took a few minutes, but not too long. Jackie joined us a few minutes later, and we chatted for a while before leaving her to enjoy the Hoi An nightlife.

The next morning we visited the Cu Chi tunnels, and what a harrowing experience that was. Unlike the Vinh Moc tunnels we visited a few days ago, these tunnels were built mainly for fighting rather than living. They are shorter and narrower than the Vinh Moc tunnels, and more extensive with around 250km of tunnels, apparently the longest tunnel complex in the world. We were able to enter and walk along some of the tunnels, and even at my diminutive height I had to bend over at the hips to negotiate them. We only did around 20m underground, and if we’d gone any further, I would have been on my hands and knees. How the Viet Cong soldiers managed to move around and defend the tunnels over a prolonged period of time is remarkable.

Mr T’s grandfather had been a Viet Cong (VC) soldier, and he shared some personal stories from his grandfather. One was about the 3-3-3 strategy; VC soldiers on the move would carry 30kg for 3 hours before resting for half an hour, and every 3rd day would have a half day rest before moving on. This meant they all knew what they needed to do, when they would rest and they didn’t get worn out.

The VC soldiers dug dummy mine holes and filled them with sharp pieces of metal and human faeces. When the enemy soldiers put their hands into the holes thinking they would be removing a mine, they cut their hands on the metal and needed to wash off the faeces, so would go to a nearby river where the real mines would be waiting for them.

The VC soldiers may not have had the firepower that their enemies did, but they did have plenty of brains and cunning.

The tunnels were built at Cu Chi because it’s at the end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, it has suitable soil for tunnelling and the local farmers knew the geography of the site.

There whole area is now a historical site and museum, and there are examples of some of the booby traps the VC soldiers used to injure the ‘tunnel rats’ who were attempting to clear and destroy the tunnels. The majority of the traps used bamboo or metal spikes to injure or trap various body parts. Rather than kill the tunnel rats it was more time consuming for the intruders if they were injured, so their colleagues had to spend time rescuing and treating them.

There were small underground ambush holes where a couple of VCs would wait for the intruders before jumping out and fighting them. A few of the group gave them a go, but I declined along with some of the others. I did however enter one of the original tunnel entrances to look along some of the tunnels even smaller than the ones we walked along. These were only a couple of feet high, and a similar width, and they would have been dark and hot to negotiate.

There is a shooting range next to one of the cafes where bullets can be bought for 50,000 VND (about £1.60 or $2US). I absolutely hate guns, and hearing the shots only a few metres away made me feel incredibly anxious. So much so that I was almost in tears at one point. To think about what it must have been like during the war is hugely distressing. Surprisingly with the noise from the guns, we did spot a bird in nearby woodland which I think was a White Throated Laughingthrush.

I was very glad to move on from that area, and we headed along the path to an M41 tank that had been damaged in 1970 and was still there. I was grateful it was as I needed some information from it for an AdLab cache, which I successfully completed.

The journey back to Saigon was uneventful, and Mr T shared some more information about his fascinating country. A couple of military vehicles passed us with blue registration plates which we learned meant they were government vehicles. Personal vehicles have white plates, and business vehicle such as trucks and taxis have yellow plates. A good time was had by Susan and me spotting which vehicles on the road had which coloured plates! Fuel is cheap in Vietnam, a litre of fuel costing around £0.80, or approximately $1US.

There are thousands of rubber trees in the Cu Chi area, which I’m assuming is useful for the tyres of the millions of scooters in the country. One acre of land has around 500 trees on it, producing around 1.5 tonnes of rubber each year.

We stopped at a restaurant called Propaganda for lunch, and then visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. My goodness, if I’d considered the Cu Chi Tunnels harrowing, they were much less so than some of the things that were shown and described here. We found out that the museum had been paid for by the Americans as part of the recompense for their war crimes in the Vietnam-American war. The exhibits include disturbing photographs and stories of the war atrocities, many from US sources, and they certainly show a graphic representation of the incredible suffering of the Vietnamese people. There was a whole room on Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide used by the US military and which still causes ongoing health issues for people living in the area in which it was dropped. More info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange

Susan and I both found the displays and stories at the museum overwhelming and distressing, so we went to the cafe to wait for the rest of group and had a fresh coconut while chatting to a Malaysian woman travelling with her British husband. It wasn’t long before others from the group arrived at the cafe.

I was able to tick off one more section of the Saigon AdLab here.

A quick stop back at the hotel before dinner minus Mr T who was having a rest from his brood of middle-aged women. We headed out to try what he’d described as the best pizza in Saigon about 50m away from the hotel. They had no tables available, so we walked 50m past the hotel in the opposite direction and discovered Terraviva, a delightful little Italian restaurant hidden along a narrow alley, and up 3 flights of stairs. The food was delicious, including the pizzas, although I had salmon ravioli, and I’m really glad the first place was full!

We head off to the Mekong Delta tomorrow.

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Photos

Seen in Saigon.
Scooters carry people, goods, whole families at times!

Hang on in there, you guys!
Taken from the level of our 7th floor hotel room.

A random grave in a field.
These are very common.

Demonstrating some of the traps.
Used by the Viet Cong against the enemy to maime and injure, not to kill.

Ambush hole.
Two VC soldiers would hide in here. The entrance is approximately 18 inches x 12 inches.

Several prisoners were kept in these cages. .
At the War Remnants Museum. Not obvious from the photo, but the bars are barbed wire.