Saigon

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So after racing through Cambodia next up is Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon as it used to be called. The first thing you notice is how many motorbikes there are, which is a hell of a lot. There must be 10 times as many as cars and they all whizz around rarely following the traffic signals. It makes crossing the road fun. You pretty much walk out and hope they dodge you. It's similar to India but here they're going faster. One of the best things about here is that the food is awesome and really cheap. My mission is to have some snake at one point but haven't seen it yet. My most interesting meal so far was stuffed frogs in Cambodia which was really tasty but I'm hoping for better. We went to a rustic Vietnamese place for dinner and had massive plates of noodles with crab and sweet and sour fried fish and 3 beers (bigger than pints) for a fiver. Makes Cambodia look like London. One feature of eating out in these places is people trying to sell you things constantly, usually books, sunglasses or cigarettes. We managed to get the third book from the millennium trilogy though so when you actually want something it's pretty useful. We managed to bargain down from 280,000 to 150,000 dong (rofl) and the woman claimed she made no profit, yeah right. They can be quite feisty. A boy tried to get me to buy something when we ate dinner (I never even found out what he was selling as he held them above his head). He first threatened to kill me and put his hand to my throat (in a jokey way of course), then wanted to play rock paper scissors for it. When I laughed him off he just did a 'got your nose' thing to me and walked off. I later witnessed an 8 year old girl giving the finger to an Aussie guy we met in a bar because he wanted to pay 6,000 for chewing gum and apparently it's worth 7,000. This Aussie guy was in his forties and had lived in Saigon for 2 years previously. He was clearly still hung up on his ex fiancé who was from Laos and had left him due to an arranged marriage 15 years ago! We spent a fair few hours chatting and drinking the cheap beer. The next day we decided to make an effort to see the not very many sights in Saigon. We headed to the 'Notre Dame' cathedral which was a medium size church that wasn't open until later, then the reunification palace which looked like some weird 70's attempt at a modern style. We made the judgement to not bother going in and instead headed to the war museum which turned out to be interesting. The outside was surrounded by tanks, planes, big guns and a massive Chinook helicopter. I will eventually add pictures but even when we do get to a computer they take ages to upload. The museum had different sections devoted to torture, agent orange victims, general atrocities and anti war protests. You certainly don't leave that place thinking the Americans did anything right. There is virtually nothing about the bad things the Viet Cong did but plenty of American and South Vietnamese and the French early on. There are replica tiny barbed wire cages where they kept several prisoners at a time, photos of GI's posing with their enemies heads and accounts of them massacring villages including all the women and children. The agent orange gallery is basically loads of pictures of deformed kids caused by the poisonous chemical they dropped all over the country and not a pretty sight. Afterwards we went back and did some photo uploading. One thing I wasn't expecting, despite knowing that Vietnam is communist is that facebook is banned here. There's obviously ways around it but surprising that in a country that seems accessible there is still a bit of good old fashioned communist oppression. Oh well. The next morning we were off to the beach at Mui Né.

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