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Had a short stop in Mui Ne, home of the sand dunes, before our trek to Saigon. Despite the rubbish weather (yet again, our luck with lovely sandy beaches brings on the rain and thunderstorms) which meant we couldn't enjoy the beach, we had great fun messing around in the sand and sand-dune sledding.
We also learned to ride motocyclos - although the feat of engineering really was beyond me, between gripshift-acceleration, brakes like a bicycle, about 50 pedals sticking out all over the place for gears, brakes, rests.... it was pot luck what thing you were standing on at any stage - so I left most of the driving to Thomas, as I was at my best navigating.... or something, as many will attest to my bonkers internal compass.
Own transportation was a godsend.. especially as we kicked ourselves out at 5.30am to view the sunrise over the red dunes before the regular tours...only to find cloud cover made it impossible, so off we headed to the white sand dunes, about another 40km away, which was less polluted by tourists. Views were fantastic..as you can see by the multitude of photographs. Made me feel like a tiny insect
in a huge sandbox. The white dunes also had the highest dunes, so we duely partook in sanddunesledding down this MONSTER of a dune, at least 100ft from top to bottom. Of course I had to fall on my ass at the end of the run, chewing about a pound of sand in my mouth and grazing my knees like a 6year old, but all in the name of fun!
And so on to Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City, and at this stage I'm convinced the rain is following us, it poured solid for the 5 days we were there. I'm beginning to consider a summer holiday in Ireland from here, however there was a little silver lining, when Thomas nearly cried with joy at seeing a KFC sign as we rolled into the city through the downpour....all the rice and noodle dishes are started to take their toll.
A visit to the War Remnants Museum was extremely disturbing, where the photographs and exhibits made your skin crawl. There were very vivid exhibits on Dioxin (Agent Orange), VX nerve agents, and the civilian casualties suffered.
Went to visit the
Cu Chi Tunnels and were treated to a guide who
was a Vietnam Veteran, who had fought on the side of the United States against the Viet Cong and was evidently very bitter about it, having spent 4 years in a "re-education camp" deactivating landmines by hand when the Communists eventually took power.
He was very interesting, full of information (if a little crazy.. no, VERY crazy) and kept reminding us Westerners that we were "big-asses" that couldn't fit down the 80cm-wide tunnels. They had enlarged a section of the network of tunnels, but it was pitch black and very claustrophobic as we dropped first 3m underground, to 6m, and the final stretch to 8m underground as we crawled the 100m tunnel.
Found a shop selling COCO POPS (!!) so gorged ourselves on a box before heading off to Cambodia by boat, via a 2-day tour of the Mekong Delta, so will catch up with everyone then.
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Paula
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Tell me with all that sand you managed to build at least one sandcastle considering you failed miserably to build a snowman!!!