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Published: August 13th 2009
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From Hoi An we returned to Hue on a slow train. We had supposedly paid extra for a tourist train, but suspect that all we got was tourist prices. The carriage was crowded with resigned looking locals, who unlike us seemed unfazed by the state of the compartments or the fact that most of the chairs were broken. The ones in front of the boys were jammed in the reclined position, and although ours looked upright if you leant on them they offered no resistance but fell back. We saw several cockroaches, but it was not until we got off the train that Elliot cheerfully announced that he had seen a rat on the floor beneath our seat. On reflection we were pleased not to have known about it at the time.
Once in Hue we haggled with a taxi driver and returned to the hotel we had used before, the boys happy to play by and in the pool, and we happy to read and research. Just two observations on the food we had on our second trip to Hue, Little Italy is hugely overrated, and if those are the best pizzas in town it is not worth bothering with
pizzas (even with 12% off and a free t shirt) but the curry in Omar Khayam is far better. From Hue we flew to Saigon and again took a taxi to our hotel. First impressions? Saigon is huge, crowded and even more manic than Hanoi. Ever more scooters buzz about trying to squeeze through impossibly small gaps yet doing their best to ignore all the other traffic. We were surprised though (and Grandad would have been thrilled) to witness one light jumper hauled over and reprimanded. Still the enforcers have a long way to go!
We ate that night in a simple vegetarian restaurant beside our hotel. We discovered that even the roughest looking restaurants in Vietnam produce fresh tasty food - as long as you stick to the local dishes. The following day was one for the boys and we walked to the local bus station to get a bus to the water park We enjoyed the journey hugely, the traffic was more amusing when you were a metre above it, and we were diverted by one moped driving into the bus, getting up and dusting himself off with no-one but us paying it the slightest bit of attention.
The bus squeezed itself down streets that surely cannot have been on the bus route and just as we began to think we would never arrive we were dropped at the gates to the park. It was crowded with inadequate changing facilities and a poor selection of food, and dreadful entertainment (picture 3 girls in white tank tops and hot pants belting out pop songs that should have been left in the eighties in poor accents, 2 of them seeming in step as they sung and danced but the third seemingly oblivious of the prearranged routine and auditioning for an entirely different sort of dance). The stage was set up at the back of a large pool with a wave machine in which locals bobbed up and down in inner tubes. We read and ignored them as much as we could, while the boys had a ball. There were various slides which you descended with or without a variety of mats, inflatables and tubes. Most extraordinary was a zip wire over a pool, with a bumper that flung you off half way across the pool, if you did not let go in time you were spun through a quarter turn
and landed flat on your back. My absolute favourite thing there was the sign at the zip wire showing photos of how to and how not to use it, complete with a photo of someone going down the slide upside down gripping the handles with feet rather than hands. I could not decide if I was more surprised at the perceived need to explain that this was not how it was done, or that they actually had a photo of someone doing that.
At night we had another good curry from an Indian restaurant by the hotel and were amused to note that the pizza that Jake ordered was delivered in from elsewhere.
On the Sunday we went by coach (and via an inevitable unrequested stop, this time at a lacquer workshop) to the Cu Chi tunnels. We enjoyed the propaganda film we were shown beforehand (especially watching the Americans squirm at the descriptions of invaders from 2000miles away dropping bombs on innocent villages, and of peasant fighters awarded hero status for killing the American enemy). The tunnels themselves were fascinating and astonishing. The boys quite enjoyed crawling through the 25m or so we could, but as adults it was
cramped and claustrophobic and you could not help marvelling at the ingenuity and spirit of people driven to live like this. 5 minutes was more than enough. There were more than 2500 miles of tunnels at 3 different depths and we were also shown the ways in which bombs dropped were carefully opened and reused. The Vietcong’s main source of munitions was the very weapons dropped upon them.
That evening we found a new favourite Italian restaurant, sadly Good Morning Vietnam is not very convenient from Stourbridge but the handmade pastas and pizza were as good as anything we have tasted. From Saigon we flew to Phu Quoc for another holiday within a holiday on this trip. After the intensity of Saigon (no locals call it Ho Chi Min City well would you call Birmingham Winston Churchill city?) we were all ready for a change of pace.
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