Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Having arrived in Saigon still reeling from missing out on the seemingly awesome Nha-Trang, we trawled around for a while to find the best value for money on accommodation. At the beginning of the trip we always booked hostels ahead and would go through all the ratings and reviews on hostelworld.com till we found a good one. But now we're just turning up and finding something off the cuff that 6 weeks ago seemed a little too disorganized for our liking. Clearly we are becoming true traveling bums now. Actually half the time we find better stuff that's not on the net!! Anyway once again we were pushed for time so only had about a day and a half before we had to start heading off towards Cambodia. We spent the first half day just mooching around checking the place out. It's an unexpectedly over-developed city similar to somewhere like Hong Kong, packed with tall buildings and large complexes and bright lights flashing all kinds of consumerism at you wherever you turn. And the roads, wow we thought Hanoi was bad but Saigon is much worse. Where there were thousands of scooters flying all over the place in Hanoi, there are millions in Saigon so tightly packed together that crossing the road was really not for the faint-hearted. You literally have to just walk out looking straight ahead and NOT left or right to the sea of oncoming traffic that flows past you with tremendous guile from the drivers. If you do look, you can't overcome your natural instinct of stopping and starting to try and dodge them, and then you're in trouble, "they will go round you" all the locals say. Difficult to get your head round at first but they're spot on. So for our full day in Saigon we decided to get a bit of history in seeing as we were in Vietnam and hadn't really experienced anything to do with the war. So in the morning we decided to visit the tunnels of Cu Chi in the forest that the Vietcong used to use so effectively against the Americans. The bus ride up there was interesting in that our tour guide has some passionate opinions lets say, and had no qualms preaching them to the bus. Very brave indeed given that he was surely unbeknownst if any of the passengers were some of the peoples he was lambasting. I mean he tore into them all, Americans, Jews, Catholics, Homosexuals, Chinese, he took no prisoners. Nothing to do with the war of course, just a misplaced rant, but he did get some laughs I must admit. Anyway the tour of the tunnels started with a typically anti-American video and lecture of how the war was fought, gleaming with Vietnamese pride. It wasn't particularly interesting but did unlock some age-old memories of GCSE history to make me feel educated and smart. After that we went to the first tunnel. The guide showed us this 'secret opening' the Vietcong would squeeze into, hidden in the leaves. It looked only slightly bigger than an A4 piece of paper, but then we were invited to go in?!? I mean there was no way my fat-ass was going to fit in there, but surely enough people started lowering themselves in, so I went for it. Let's just say not for the claustrophobic. It was less than a metre high in there so everyone was on their hands and knees, there was little air and it was absolutely pitch black, I mean you couldn't see your hand half a centimetre in front of your face. I was a little nervy down there I must admit but plodded along fine. But then the woman in front of me thought she lost her husband so started freaking out and wouldn't budge, and then a bat flew past us which caused the guy behind me to start freaking out. So there I was, stuck underground on my knees in the dark with these people around me having a f***ing panic attack, 'good one Tazly' I thought. Anyway after a little encouragement (me pushing her in the back) eventually the woman moved on and we got to the exit and fresh air, where her husband was having a great time with a huge grin on his face which I thought was funny. Ben came out after me and when I told him about the bat, he showed me the pictures he had taken on his camera. He had just taken an odd one of the space in front of him so that he could see where he was going, but when he checked it, he discovered that were a s***-load of bats in the photo that he was about to traverse over to. I mean thank f*** people didn't see that photo whilst in the tunnel! Anyway I was glad he showed me it after I was out, what you don't know won't hurt you n all that. After that ordeal we were shown all the tactics used by the Vietcong to fight, like using hidden traps that maimed enemy troops, they all looked pretty nasty. It was also interesting to see how they made up for a huge lack of resources by collecting absolutely everything they found and making it into something useful. For example they used the tyres of broken down enemy vehicles to make flip flops and moulded together and sharpened bits of shrapnel from exploded bombs to use in there traps. After another tunnel that was this time well lit and more spacious (and bat-less) so everyone managed it ok, we went to the shooting field where you could fire a host of massive guns if you wanted. Of course Ben and I chose the much better option of sitting in the café nearby and eating an ice cream, purely because it was so expensive to shoot. Plus I've done it all before in Latvia last year where I shot some guns for way cheaper so didn't need to miss a few meals to do it this time, despite my mad skills. Anyway after the tunnels we went to the museum which was basically another history lesson aimed out grossing you out with all the pictures of the direct and indirect effects of agent orange and all that. By the end of it all I think it's safe to say that we had 'done' the war stuff. That night we planned to go out seeing as we hadn't in a while. We started at this tiny little local place where we sat on small plastic chairs in the middle of the street drinking jugs of local beer (about 3.5 pints) for about 40p. It was pretty sweet. Funnily enough we bumped into this Canadian guy who had been on our trek in Chang Mai yonks back. So we all went to the main club in Saigon called Apocalypse Now which was full of local women and middle-aged white men looking for just that, so we u-turned fairly swiftly. We hit another couple of places before the end of the night but there wasn't much kicking off so we didn't get too battered. So the next day we left for Cambodia as part of a 3-day trip via the Mekong Delta which we had been told was worth seeing. I'll save that for the next post seeing as I've clearly just managed to write a small novel about just one day in Saigon. Anyway I promise they will get shorter from now on and my thanks if you've made it this far.
- comments