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Cu Chi Tunnels
6 metres below groundFrom Hue we got the bus to Hoi An where we found a cheap hotel with a small pool which was much appreciated in this incredible heat. Hoi An is a georgous town on the Tru Bon River, full of perfectly preserved streets of shops, assembly halls and traders houses from the days when it was Vietnam's most important trading port. It has French, Chinese and Japanese influences and the town is now a UNESCO world heritage site; a sort of living museum.
Neither of us were very familar with the cuisine so Vietnamese food has been something of a revelation with its fresh clean flavours and plently of delicious seafood. In Hoi An we ate local delicacies of 'White Rose' (small steamed pork dumplings), steamed shrimp spring rolls, Cao Lau (noodles with croutons, pork and vegetables in broth), and lots of fresh fish.
We hired scooters for only $5 a day and drove up the coast to the Marble Mountains which, once past the irritating hawkers, was a great place to visit and see the atmospheric caves with their hindu and buddhist shrines and to take in the views of China Beach which was used for r&r by
Hoi An old town
French Vietnamese fusion the Americans during the war.
Our next stop was for some r&r of our own in Nha Trang, a modern beach resort on the South China Sea. We flopped on the beach for a couple of days and took a boat trip to snorkel the reef around the nearby islands. We both got horribly sunburnt here when we discovered too late that the factor 50 we had bought must have been fake!
Our mental image of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) was stuck in 1960's wartime or something from Miss Saigon. We had half expected neon lit streets of seedy bars with girls calling out "Ten dollar - love you long time". But we found Saigon to have a quite sophisticated centre of wide avenues and colonial buildings in amongst the urban sprawl of narrow streets and tall-narrow shops and hotels. Although the seedy side seems less obvious than we thought it would be, the motorcycle taxi drivers do often seem to double as pimps and pushers.
Saigon seems to be setting itself up to become the Seattle of Asia with western style coffee houses springing up everywhere - a welcome find after drinking Vietnamese coffee for
the last couple of weeks (an aquired bitter-sweet, almost chocolate, taste). Many of the tourist attractions here seem to centre around the war, and we visited the War Remnants Museum (a biased but chilling account of the American war), the Cu Chi Tunnels (a massive network of tunnels used by the Viet Cong Guerillas outside of Saigon) and the Renuification Palace (the delightfully kitch 1960's Presidential Palace that has been left exactly as it was found when stormed by the communists in 1975).
Leaving Saigon we set off at a leisurely pace towards Cambodia by taking the three day route through the Mekong Delta, viewing rural Vietnamese life of floating markets and riverside villages on the way.
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John Newman
non-member comment
Blue Peter
Neil looks like you got a Blue Peter Badge for crawling through those tunnels! Looks an interesting place. Can't wait to catch up when you are back and hear all about this leg of your travels.