Saigon - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
September 3rd - 6th. We recieved an early morning wake up call and boarded the bus at 7am to leave Cambodia and head for Vietnam. As we drew closer to the Vietnamese border, we took in the sights and smells of Cambodia for the last time. After visa/passport control our journey progressed into the heart of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), arriving at 1pm. It was national day when we arrived, the City was covered in satin red national flags and banners alongside images of the hammer & sickle and Ho Chi Minh. HCMC is a megatropolis with a sea of motor cycles zooming and weaving through the streets...... roads were truely organised chaos!In the evening after we'd freshened up we headed for Pham Ngu Lao area, which is the entertainment/back packers district. Our tour leader, Bill Raymond, took us to the locals' watering hole called Quan Nguyet at 28 Do Quang Dan, this is where you go when you're down to your last Vietnamese Dong, and what a great starting point! There was no room on the outside terrace so the bar owner cleared up some space in her bar KITCHEN! setting up our own private room with small tables and chairs for the 12 of us. As we made ourselves comfortable she continued to cook with her extra large wooden chopskicks, occasionally you would hear the thud of a huge chopping knife as she'd crush a whole bulb of garlic, followed by the chopping sounds of peppers and onion....... we were surronded by all sorts of oriental spices and green and red coloured crates of beer, with her puppy dog asleep in the corner.....so we were very cosy. We ordered 5 x 2 litre jugs (10 litres) of local beer and the cost came to only 40,000 dong which is about $2.50, the bar girls came around with huge slivers of ice and dropped them in our glasses to cool down the beer. It's not everywhere you get this type of hospitality, bargain beer and a free oriental cookery lesson.... they really did make our evening.After the street bar experience, walked through an intricate maze of back streets, and experienced how the poorer residents of HCMC live in their one room extended family accomodation. It was just a whole new world of dimly lit passage ways lined with family dwellings, you could see into every home, with whole families glued to their TV's for the evening entertainment or just sitting on their door steps for air conditioning. As we exited the dark alleyways we were once again greeted with neon lights and the huslte and bussle of city life.... we ended the evening at Saigon Bar, where they serve good tiger beer alongside Japenese rice wine, one bottle in particular had a Cobra and Scorpian inside..... pickled of course in the wine.... the experimental Kwis sampled it!The next morning Bill our tour leader, gave us a guided city tour, he is a walking encyclopedia! He took us to the War Remanants Museum, a collection of history from the Vietnam War. Bill gave us the best history lesson on the conflict in Vietnam. There are images at the museum you may find disturbing..... you just have to remember that the picture does not tell you what happened before or after it was taken..... it's just a snapshot of one particular moment and shows the real horrors of the war in Vietnam.Ben Thanh market has exotic smells, coffee bean and tea leaf aromas, and is a real treat where you can get almost anything: cobra and scorpian rice wine, coffee beans, kimonos and even ivory and made to measure suits etc.... word of advice, you can haggle down the price by up to 50%, give it your best shot, if the haggling does not work then just walk away and the chances are they'll chase after you! On our penultimate day in HCMC we visited the Ch Chi tunnels, which are situated 96Km out of town. The tunnel network became famous during it's role in facilitating the Viet Cong in the 1960's. When the Americans came with their artillery and bombers and transformed it into a moonscape. A few of us managed to fit into the dark and very narrow pasageways, we gained an empathetic and claustraphobic awe for the people who spent weeks underground. With Jitka and her flashlight infront, Adam, String and James behind us we crawled through the sizzling hot clay walled tunnel network. This tunnel was 100m in length, we had the option to exit every 20m, we managed to do 60m.... if we'd contined any further we'd brobably passed out of heat exhauston. We emerged the other end covered in dust and scruffs of dry clay!Crossing into Vietnam you really can see it's wealth as all the Western stores, hotels and commerce is here. People drive flash cars.... organised caos on the roads but the people very civilised and respectful..... there's still poverty, but nothing compared to certain provinces of Cambodia. On our final day in HCMC we boarded the overnight sleeper train for a 12 hour journey to Nha Trang.