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Published: July 17th 2008
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Hi All, I'm writing to you from Ho Chi Minh or Saigon as everybody around here calls it.
We were glad to spend Monday flying rom Beijing to Hong Kong and then on to Saigon.
What a nice means of mass transit, everybody is clean, will have showered at least once in the past 4 days and the toilets are clean.
We arrived to a city where 90% of viehcles are mopeds and motorbikes and where the rules of the road are yet to be thought up. There are no rules, no roadmarkings, any traffic lights are just roadside decorations and pavements are the sole preserve of motorcyclists. Pedestrians use the road and you just have to walk out in front of whatever traffic is forthcoming if you want to get anywhere. We started to play a game of trying to spot the 'highest numbers of people on one bike at a time'. I won with a family of 4 and a family of three including a heavily pregnant woman as back up. Maeve could just come up with 2's and 3's.
Our hotel is quite nice, well located and the staff are very friendly, although the power keeps cutting out,
not good if you're in the middle of a shower. As our room has a/c we don't have a window in our room giving it that atmosphere that only a prison cell can create. There isn't a huge amount to do and see but we did get to the Re-unification Palace, the War Museum and the Chu Chi tunnels.
The re-unification palace was the HQ of the Republican Government. It was quite nice and French-colonial like until the Commies blew it up with 2 stolen American Jet fighters (well that's what I took from the display anyway). Anyhoo the commies built made an even bigger mess of it by re-building it Communist style. Would have made a nicer pile of rubble, if you ask me! In the basement they have all army command rooms like a set from a 60's/70's James Bond Classic.
The next day we went to the extra-ordinary Chu-Chi Tunnels - a 258km tunnel complex built by 'Charlie' or the VC (VietCong) in order to drive the Yanks mad, and that they did. It was actually build underneath a massive US air base and they used to sneek in and steal US weapons. The Yanks didn't know
it existed until quite late. The Americans used Brawn during the war in Nam, the VC used brains - (a.) because they were quite brainy and (b.) they couldn't afford any brawn.
The tunnels are very small 1.3m tall by .6m wide. I had to drag my arse through it to get anywhere. The guide told us that the day before a woman got stuck down there and they only way to get her out was to strip her and grease her up - how humiliating!!
There were really good exhibitions of how the VC lived there and they recycled used and unexploded US bombs to make landmines, grenades and booby traps - these were particularly nasty.
Then my favourate bit, you could buy Machine Gun bullets and go shooting. I went shooting my M60 fully Automatic Machine Gun - Think AK47 x 10, this thing was massive it had to be fixed to a boat, helicopter or vehicle. The power was awesome, the noise was deafening even with earmuffs, but the feeling was great!!! Nobody was going to be annoying me that day, pity I only had 10 bullets. It can fire 600 rounds a minute but that would
have cost me $960 a minute so the world was spared a minute of needless violence. Still worth dong it with just 10 bullets.
Last night we went out for food and a few drinks. The night before we ate in a street cafe for $3 for the main course, the food was a bit rough and quite dodgy; just like the cafe itself. Last night we said we'd splash out and go somewhere a bit upmarket, we walked all the way to the good side of town (i.e. out of the back-packer area) and went to a really nice place with a/c, table cloths, staff in uniforms, no jars of dead snakes on show and no dindgy lights twinkling, like in a cheap strip club. It was a really nice treat and the first really nice vietnamese food we'd had, and the main course cost a whoppng $3 a pop.
Today we got up late as we were taking it easy, had seen most of the sights already and as the power was off and we were staying in a windowless cell we couldn't actually go anywhere. we went to see the war remnants museum which was quite interesting
- a bit too much of a leftist swing on the events but worth seeing all the same.
As I write here it's started to lash rain, hopefully it'll take the humidity out of the air, a bit of relief for a while anyway. It's been about 32-35 since we got here but plenty of humidity in the air, can't complain (a.) because it's monsoon season and (b.) it's better to have a lot of rain in one go that a bit for 40 days in a row like at home.
We're leaving Saigon in the morning and heading for a nice relaxing 2 day cruise up the Mekong Delta. We'll see more of the real Vietnam, as Sagon is quite westernised, and are told it will bee a very relaxing experience. Then at the end we'll be taking a slow boat up the Mekong river to Cambodia and Phnom Penh.
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Deejay Red
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Movin on
Hy there, You did well in updating you blog-pages. I had a look some days a go and no pictures were showing up. Thought may be they do like the guide of the Chu Chi tunnels, they just invent some story and put it on the web! A day before and a strip always get the tourists excited, but you put it on your blog (look like you have the brain of the Yankees...!). Keep up and I will check if Maeve belly is movin...