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On Saturday we took another bus ( our last!) to Ho Chi Minh City. The 8 hour journey was an interesting one! Some guy sitting behind me started stroking my face while I was sleeping! I angrily threw him off but he just looked confused and went back to sleep- he was clearly drugged up. Similarly weird was the passenger sitting next to Emily. He took a load of depressive drugs and fell into the deepest sleep I have ever seen. He started to drop his head and and ended up falling right on top of Emily! Once Emily had moved to another seat he flopped over both seats and onto the floor- still asleep!!! The whole bus was in hysterics and I sneakily captured the whole thing on video!
On arrival at HCMC we started heading to the hotel we had booked but we were accosted on the street by a very persuasive lady, and ended up staying at her hotel instead! Aside from the dodgy introduction, the hotel was actually really nice; it was less plush than others we're stayed in but it had a lovely family-run feel and a really cute dog called Snowy.
The next day we took a tour to the Cau Dai Great Temple and the Cu Chi tunnels. We have seen dozens of temples and pagodas during out travels through Vietnam, but this was unlike any we had seen as it was a temple for followers of Cao Daism. This unusual religion is a combination of Catholicism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The temple itself was very colourful and ornate. We were fortunate enough to witness the 12pm prayer session, which was very interesting. All the worshippers knelt on the floor in their white garments and chanted their unique religious language.
In the afternoon we visited the Cu Chi tunnels, a tunnel network used by the Viet Cong to mount surprise attacks on the US military during the Vietnam war. Our tour guide (named slim jim!) was a south Vietnamese army veteran and had thus fought alongside the Americans in the war. It was really interesting to hear his perspective; he considers the war to have been a civil war of differing ideologies, whereas the current Vietnamese government (and therefore the visitors centre) describes it as the 'American war of aggression'.
Slim Jim showed us some of the booby-traps employed against American soliders, and demonstrated their action, they were horribly gruesome! We also got to crawl through a 100m section of tunnel, it felt very claustrophobic and I was relived to reach the end. The section had been widened as well for tourists- the original tunnels are only 80cm x 60cm, which would have been just big enough for a small Vietnamese person to army crawl through.
In the evening we met up with Dave, who we met back in Hoi An, as well as his friends Sandy, Sarah, Amanda, Jenny, Gilly and Yuudai. It was a really fun night, and it was great to meet some new people.
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