Day 362 - A crawl of the bars of 5 star hotels

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Today meant we went on one of our last guided tours of our year away. This we did in the exact way we have liked all along - privately.

We drove the 70km out of Saigon to Cu Chi, which is home to a labyrinth of tunnels that the locals have developed since the French resistance and grew with avengence in the Vietnam war. The tunnels played a major part in the survival of the guerillas and prolonging the way long enough for the Americans to lose heart and withdraw. By being able to shift their forces in secret the Americans needed far more troops to defend Saigon that they otherwise might have, and apparently despite the Americans' vastly superior technology and so on the VC were in the strange position of being able to dictate when and where the battles would take place.

The very one-sided video that we saw on our arrival showed us a glimpse in what it was like in the 1960s and 1970s and how they used the American bombs and tactics back at them. Unexploded bombs were dismantled to make booby traps, for example. One of their war heroes was a young woman who was renamed 'The Heroic Killer of Americans' in recognition. We then had a very well guided look around the set-up of the tunnels as well as some of the utterly vicious booby traps. Some of it left not much to the imagination and had you doubling over in anticipation and pain.

Some memorable moments were watching the traps in working order and experiencing the tunnels first hand (even though they had been doctored slightly for the western tourist). They were still tiny, smelly and sweaty.

In the evening we found ourselves out on the Saigon town and doing a bar crawl of the 5 star hotels. We were after somewhere nice to eat and none of the hotels were really taking our fancy until we ended up at the Hyatt Hotel again and again had a delicious, un-disappointing Italian meal.

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