Advertisement
Published: January 17th 2006
Our arrival into Siagon was signalled by an assault on our eardrums of traditional Vietnamese music blaring into our train cabin at 4 o'clock in the morning. We were not impressed. We had set our alarm clock for 6am as we were told we would arrive at 6:30 - so it was a little annoying! We had no idea what was going on and thought it must be some sick joke. Mathew left the compartment to see if he could find out what was going on and to tell the conductor to turn it off. She replied by saying that we would be arriving in Saigon in 20 minutes and it was our wake-up call!
Our guest house was due to pick us up at 6:30 so we settled down to have a coffee with a Canadian guy we met as we exited the platform.
Our time in Saigon was spent fending off taxi, moto and cyclo drivers, lonely planet sellers, cute little kids selling chewing gum at 5000VND per packet when it clearly said on the packet 2000VND and little old ladies selling back scratchers and nail clippers!
On our second day, we visited the Cao Dai
Cu Chi Tunnels
one of the many traps used by the VC - fall in and you get skewered from toe to topholy city and the Cu Chi tunnels. Caodaiism is a mixture of many religions including Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, as well as Geniism, an indigenous religion of Viet Nam. The city is pretty surreal and a little cult-like.
Our trip to the Cu Chi tunnels was really interesting. The way the VC invented "ingenious" and very barbaric ways of trapping the enemy with the materials from their environment, and also the way in which they evaded capture.
The tunnels are only 40cm by 30cm just about large enough for the slender VC but way too small for us fat westerners!
We got to experience the tunnels by going through one that had been enlarged to westerner size - twice the size at 60cm by 80cm but still a bit too small for some! It was 100m long but we got out after 30 - it was a bit warm down there - that's our excuse anyway!
The next day we decided to take a look around the War Remnants Museum (previously called the American War Crimes Museum). It was very interesting and thought provoking. In our view, it wasn't nearly as biased against the Americans
Bia Hoi in Saigon
drinking homebrew at a makeshift pub on the side of the street - we did have the odd good time! as we had been led to believe by other visitors. It was basically told from the Vietnamese point of view and it was shown that they were fully aware that many Americans as well as many people of other nations were against the war.
Overall, our time in Vietnam was disappointing - the food wasn't that great and the people in general were not particularly friendly and just saw us as walking wallets. It was not understood why we didn't want to spend our money on hammocks, lonely planet books (when we already had a copy of rough guide), chewing gum, combs...
Also, being pointed at and laughed at was pretty distressing - it happened every day. I came to expect it but each time it happened it just upset me and made me just want to get out of Vietnam. Mathew found it pretty hard to deal with too - I had to hold him back a few times. Because of this we never felt able to explore the country further. We had planned to travel further afield, away from the tourist areas, but we just didn't have the inclination to do so. We may have missed
out, but the way we felt, we didn't care!
Vietnam definitely ain't the new Thailand for us! That goes for a lot of other people we spoke to as well.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.054s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0333s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
tim
non-member comment
keep on trucking
good job mat didn't go down a tunnel, you'd never get him out again!! Don't know why the street sellers tried selling him a comb either....