HCMC aka Saigon

After the rough ride there, we found Ho Chi Minh City aka HCMC aka Saigon really quite pleasant. We met Tony on the bus from Phnom Panh and bonded over our shell-shock, we were also staying at the same cheap-but-alright Hotel. So we did some sightseeing together, visited the market and the War Remnants Museum and park, we also ate at ‘Pho 2000’ where Bill Clinton ate (!!), it had tacky pictures of him sitting there and eating his pho, but it was actually really nice cheapish food which we enjoyed (although note, the free wet towels they put on your table at the start are not free!).

The city itself was much cleaner than anything in Cambodia, it felt a lot more developed and we certainly got hassled much less (no ‘tuk tuk sir! Lady!’ when we walked down the street). The parks were lovely and always had people in them doing exercises or dances or strange slow sword dancing! There are lots of people in conical hats in Vietnam, it makes for lovely pictures! There are also lots of girls wearing traditional long dresses with floaty trousers, its really pretty and the school uniform (I think its for older girls) is the same but completely white and its so nice to see them cycling down the street. The most noticeable thing about Saigon was the motorbikes everywhere! There are 6 million people in the city and 3 million motorbikes and you know it is you ever try to cross the roads on foot. Everyone wears helmets which they don’t in all of the other countries we have been to nearby and they have the coolest helmets ever! They have whole helmet shops and they look like pretty cloth hats in every style of hat you can think of, but there’s a helmet underneath!
We also took a trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. Our guide (Mr Bean is apparently the best was to pronounce his name in English) was a Vietnamese veteran who had worked on the American side during the war. It was really interesting to hear his point of view as he was still troubled by the fact that he is not accepted by the Americans or the Vietnamese any longer, he had worked at the same base as Oliver Stone (who later made lots of war films), he didn’t like him though and ranted about how bad the films were and said he didn’t like him. He worked helping the Americans fight the Viet Cong as he knew the land and he recovered bodies from the field, he later spent years in prison where the communists ‘f**cked with his brain’. He was quite messed up, but his tour was excellent (if a little intimidating!). We saw the multitude of traps that the VC created in the jungle and the teeny holes that snipers hid in. There was also a chance to fire real guns, Tony had a go and I couldn’t even watch because once you got anywhere near the guns the noise was deafening, it was really scary! At the end of the tour we got to go down into the tunnels themselves, they were so small that we had to crouch down and sometimes crawl the whole way, they were hot and sticky and mostly pitch black, it was really scary and we were all shouting down the line to each other to warn of what was coming next. We were glad to be out of them at the end, but more glad that we had done the whole stretch without coming out of any of the emergency exits!

Other than sightseeing we made the most of the happy hour at one of the rooftop bars overlooking the busy streets, and ate lots of cheese sandwiches.