Blogs from Cu Chi, Ho Chi Minh City, Southeast, Vietnam, Asia - page 5

Today we went on a tour to Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels. The bus picked us up at 8 am and we drove to the town of Tay Ninh. Tay Ninh serves as the headquarters of one of Vietnam's most intriguing and indigenous religions; Cao Daism. Cao Dai temple was built sometime between 1933 and 1955. Prayers are conducted four times a day. Women enter the temple through a door on the left side. Once inside they walk around the outside of the colonnaded hall in a clockwise direction. Men enter on the right and walk around the hall in an anticlockwise direction. The area in the centre of the sanctuary is reserved for Cao Dai priests. I pulled up a little history on Cao Daism off the internet. This is what ... read more

We arrived in Saigon around 11. We bought tickets for the island of Phu Quoc in South Vietnam, we had to pay 52 $ for two tickets with bus and boat, and we had to leave the same night at 10. A bit expensive. After this, we decided to go see the Cu Chi tunnels just outside the city, we shared a taxi with an Australian couple that we had met on the bus from Cambodia. The tour out there was okay, but we had to turn around a couple of times because the driver didn't know the way. We saw a lot of their weapons and homemade traps, which where quite brutal. One of the tunnels was bigger than the tourists, so the tourists could try walking around in them (Western people take up a ... read more

Caro: On the first day in HCMC we were woken up by a bl**dy cockerel at about 4am, the joys of staying in a backpacker hotel I guess. After Highlands coffee, the essential for a day of sightseeing, we set off and headed to the market. We weren't there long as we were harassed to death and I still haven't found any bloody leggings! Impressions of HCMC: it seems to be quite western in some places , certainly in comparison with Hanoi but it is clean, busy and you could get anything that you had ever dreamed of (ranging from tropical fruit to birds , drugs women and ust about everything else you could imagine! We decided to follow the walking tour as recommended by the good old Lonely Planet, this took us past the museums, ... read more

Visiting Saigon is like going to a rave on serapax. You just cant keep up and your never going to. The entire giant city is on meth. Its like watching a dvd on fast forward and you're part of it. Arriving in communist countries is always a drama, especially when just a few hours ago you were swimming in the andaman sea trying to straighten up enough to actually get on a plane. When your first meal in a country is rubbery snails, a tub of smuggled yoghurt and half a bar of smuggled chocolate and your mini saigon hotel room is the size of a cell at pentridge jail but with the added view of a vietnamese laneway filled with 126,000 motorcycles busy doing something from dusk til dawn, you are forgiven for having misgivings. ... read more

Wednesday 1-5 Today we headed into the Cu Chi Tunnels. Cu Chi is a small agricultural city outside of Saigon. During the Vietnam War, the gorilla fighters from Cu Chi set up an extensive underground tunnel system to evade and attack the U.S. military base, which was only a few hundred meters away from the tunnels. It’s easy to see why the U.S. had no hope of infiltrating the tunnels and defeating the Viet Cong in this area – the gorillas were hard core & the tunnels are insane! The tunnel system extends for an area of about 200 km. There are three levels below ground: 3m, 6m, and 10m. As visitors, we were allowed to go inside a 200m stretch of tunnel @ 3m below ground. Hard core! The tunnels were widened for tourists and ... read more