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Published: August 8th 2007
At this point in our journey through Vietnam, we were very aware and sad that our time in this lovely country was coming to an end, there was only Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) left to visit. Vietnam was a country that really surprised us, we had never had Vietnam on our itinerary, but with the change in visa rules in Thailand and so many good reports from friends we had met along the way we decided to give it a go. We are so glad that we did!
Anyhoo...we booked ourselves onto the 1:30pm bus from Mui Ne to Saigon (the southern Vietnamese prefer to call it this rather than Ho Chi Minh City as their little 'rebellion' towards the government!). At 2pm we were still waiting for the bus to collect us from our hotel...at 3:30pm the bus finally turned up and it wasn't the large air con bus we had booked with but a tiny 12 seater bus, crammed with people and luggage. This is 'name and shame' number 1. The company which we had so much success with on previous bus journey's, An Phu had let us down in a BIG way. Fair enough the air con
worked, but a pick up that was 2 hours late, luggage packed onto the back seat (which, incidently, as we were the last pick up, kept falling on our heads!) and a journey which was meant to last 4 hours took 6 hours. The driver also kept stopping randomly to pump up a tyre which was flat, why he didn't just change it is anyone's guess! So we finally arrived into Saigon, to say it is different from Hanoi is an understatement, it is so developed in comparison, so much so that to us it seems like the 'Asianess' of the city has been lost in favour of the pursuit of money.
Donna went off to find accommodation, with a list of 12 guesthouses we had previously researched as looking good. Every one of these was full, as were the other 20 guesthouses she checked...nobody had told us we needed to book in advance for Saigon. This wasn't just due to the time we arrived either, on the days we stayed in Saigon we saw numerous travellers wandering around at midday looking for a room but everywhere was full. While Donna was away looking at rooms, Neil got chatting
to a nice, heavily pregnant lady, munching on a huge packet of chocolate chip cookies. It turned out that this lady and her family owned a guesthouse in the budget Pham Ngu Lao area of Saigon and for $12 (seemed about standard for the guesthouses/hotels in this area) she had a double room. Let us say that this place was awful...time for 'name and shame' number 2. My My Art House, is - excuse the language - an utter shithole. The rooms are tiny, they smell of mould and have mould growing on the walls, in turn making everything in the room damp. They advertise wi-fi, but in actual fact you can only pick up the signal in one room and they charge for the internet (when everywhere else it was free), they provide breakfast (reluctantly) and take so long to serve the breakfast it makes you think they they really don't want to provide it. Whenever we went in there, night or day the lights were off and there was no-one around if you wanted to complain. Actually complaining to anyone but the pregnant lady didn't do any good, she was the only one that spoke English and she
That'll Ding Dang Doo for me!
Especially for Donna's mum and dad to bring back memories of playing poker in Thailand!was only around when the buses arrived to 'create a good impression'!
Our first morning didn't get off to a good start in Saigon...all the hotels and guesthouses have a 'shoes off' policy at the door. My My Art House lady assured us that our flip flops would be safe by the door. When we came down for breakfast we noticed that Neil's flip flops weren't where we left them the previous evening, we asked the lady's brother where they were and he couldn't tell us. It seems that somebody had come along and stolen the flip flops, and by his attitude it seems that this has happened before. Oh we were so very very angry...we couldn't work out if it was the staff of the hotel which had taken them or a random passer-by, but when you come into the front of a hotel and there is no staff around with a bunch of room keys hanging up for anyone to take, we really started to doubt the security of this place. From that point onwards we took our key with us wherever we went. But really who would want to nick a pair of skanky and (sorry
Neil!) smelly flip flops?!
Saigon was different to Hanoi in a few ways. The people there obviously had more money than the northern Vietnamese, there were lots of flash cars and mopeds driving around and with this wealth came more unfriendliness than we had encountered anywhere else in Vietnam. Vendors hassled a lot more and were quite rude when we said no to the hammock or whatever piece of crap they were trying to sell and shopping in the market for a new pair of flip flops for Neil (which he had to walk there in his bare feet!) was a nightmare, none of the sellers would haggle down with prices. There were also a lot more beggars on the streets...we have begun to wonder if begging goes hand-in-hand with tourism and development as we have noticed that places with larger numbers of tourists have an increased number of beggars, maybe the local people get lazy and surviving on hand-outs is easy enough when there are large numbers of foreigners?
There were some very good points about Saigon, it is officially the cheapest place in the world for beer hoi...3,500 dong a litre, that's 10p, YES 10p. We
found this beer hoi place on our first night, after walking past the mainly Western bars (one of which had a sign up saying black people weren't welcome there, so we definitely did not want to go in there) thinking that we didn't want to pay £1 for a small bottle of beer. Just down the road, joy of joys we found our little bit of heaven in Saigon. Locals and tourists alike crowded into a little shop and sat on the tiniest plastic chairs (the type intended for kids to use in primary school), which these are fine for the small and graceful Vietnamese, but for us Westerners most of the time our knees were up around our ears whilst we were drinking the beer! The beer was served from a huge vat with it's own air con unit to keep it cool into litre containers. They also had 2 litre containers which we always went for...it saved re-ordering!
One night in the beer hoi place, surprisingly we got talking to a group of Vietnamese lads around the age of 23 who were all studying at college, they wanted to 'bridge the cultural divide' (their words!). We took
wow, the Vietnam Idol van...
...Vietnam's answer to Simon Cowell, Sharon Osborne and Louis Walsh were staying in a hotel around the corner from our craphole...bet they didn't have damp bedsheets?! it as an opportunity to teach them some slang words from the UK. They started telling us how Johnny Depp and Clive Owen were good looking men (?), so we taught them the word buff...after a bit of practice they got the pronunciation right but when asked about Keira Knightley they simply said she was nice! We were talking about all sorts of things and they were letting us try classic Vietnamese food such as sliced pigs brain and bitter melon with shredded, salty pork...mmmm?! One of the lads then turned to Neil and asked if he likes penis and pointed at Neil's groin area...Donna spat her beer out over the sliced pigs brain, Neil looked a bit shocked and didn't really know what to reply to such an open and direct question, so he replied 'erm, I have a girlfriend?'. Now it was the lad's turn to look puzzled, he stood up and reached over to where Neil was sitting (Neil not knowing really what to expect!) and pointed to a bowl of peanuts and said 'no, do you like penis'! It's one of those indescribable moments when we cried with laughter and then tried to explain to the
lads how their pronunciation of the word 'peanuts' worried us...needless to say he was mortified as soon as he realised what he had said! The next thing that surprised us was that the lads insisted on buying our beer for us and no matter what we did they would not take any money off us. This was the first time we have experienced this in Asia and we were honestly astounded by this generosity.
We liked our beer hoi a little too much, the next night we went back to the bar and met a nice Kiwi couple, Rob and Jane and an American girl called Kim and a French Patrick Swayze look alike called Julian (see the pics). We got hammered that night, swapping travelling tips, drunk about 10 litres of beer hoi between the two of us and Donna suffered for it the next day with the spinning room and bed syndrome, which naturally she attributed to a virus...Neil said yes, it's a virus, the drunk virus!
We spent most of our time in Saigon shopping...boy did we shop! It was great for DVD's at 13,000 dong (40p) a DVD so we bought a few films
and series that we've missed since being away to catch up on some TV viewing when we don't have a TV to watch! The other great thing about Saigon was the fruit shakes, there was a little fruit shake shop which made *officially* the best shakes we have had anywhere in the world, for 15p, we had at least 5 a day of these they were sooo good!
After a couple of days in Saigon, we decided no matter how tempting it was, we couldn't spend all our time shopping and drinking beer, so we went on a half day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. The Cu Chi tunnels were built by the Viet Cong initially to fight the French and then they were used to fight the Americans during the Vietnam or American War (whatever your perspective!). The tunnels were an amazing feat of engineering, spanning 250kms...the American military even built a base right over the top of the tunnels without realising it took them months to figure out how their soldiers were being knifed in their beds at night. For $3.50 this was one of the best trips we have done on our travels so far.
Before we got to the tunnels, we stopped at a ceramics and lacquer-ware factory where everything is made by hand by people with disabilities caused by Agent Orange and other defoliants used during the war. It was amazing to see and we were really shocked how reasonable the prices were, so reasonable that we eally regretted not being able to buy anything! We then arrived at the Cu Chi tunnels and had to sit through a video (which looked like it had been produced in the 1920's, it was that grainy) which we couldn't hear the sound to; after the video our guide, Chucky showed us around the tunnels and other tourists sites. There was an opportunity to fire an AK47 or M16 rifle at $1.20 a bullet, we both passed on this not really seeing the fascination. We could hear the rifles being fired quite a distance away and it made us think how loud war must be.
Going down the tunnels was a real experience...they were tiny (they have been widened slightly in the last couple of years for the fatter tourists that visit) but as you can see from the pics they are still very,
ROARRRR...he's a bit of an animal
but Donna took him into the park anyway! very small. Chucky said that to walk (ahem, squat, crouch and shuffle more like) through the length of tunnel we were in would take 12 minutes...it was very claustrophobic, hot, sweaty and dirty. We got about ¾ of the way in and had to admit defeat and go back up to the surface where everyone who had been down were standing, sweating and shaking from the experience. Our guide Chucky also told us how 2 generations of the Viet Cong lived in these tunnels for 26 years and that they had dug out living quarters underground too. Chucky had fought in the war, for the Americans and when Vietnam was 're-unified' he was sent to a re-education camp (a forced labour camp) for 7 years.
Our last trip was to the War Remnants Museum (recently renamed from the War Crimes Museum of American and Chinese Atrocities!), but that wasn't before Donna had led us to Ho Chi Minh Museum, thinking it was the War Remnants Museum! We had paid for a ticket and entered the museum before either of us realised we were in the wrong place...cue a lot of grovelling on the part of Donna, playing the dizzy
snake and scorpion wine...
...doubt it tastes any better than just snake wine! foreigner to the entry man so we could get our money back! We finally got to the War Remnants Museum, which for museums is pretty good, we got to see a lot of planes, tanks and bombs close up. Inside there were photographic displays with pictures of the victims of de-foliants used and pictures of American soldiers fighting. The museum was obviously one-sided with the captions saying things like 'demoralised and defeated' soldiers, but it was definitely a museum which highlighted how horrific war is and the human cost of war. It was well worth the 50p entrance.
All in all we did enjoy Saigon, we just preferred the north of Vietnam more. There seems to be a line which can be drawn at Hoi An to divide the country...although it has been reunified for 31 years, the country to us still seemed divided between the more traditional and poorer north and the richer, more capitalist south. It was certainly noticeable how different the country was the further south we travelled.
We debated for a couple of days whether we should do an overnight tour to the Mekong Delta or just a day trip. We decided on a
Tank and the tour bus...
...we were so tempted to steal it and squish the tour bus! day trip, which will be our next and final for Vietnam (much shorter we promise!) blog.
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