Quick time in Ho Chi Minh City
Trip Start
Nov 18, 2011
1
11
Trip End
Jan 07, 2012
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Saturday, December 17, 2011
We only had one day in the city so we dropped by an agency and booked up a full days sightseeing - Cu Chi Tunnels in the morning followed by a city tour in the afternoon. After boarding a coach at the crack of dawn we were soon greeted by our morning tour guide who was eccentric, if not full blown mad. He spoke loudly and animately about his city in what sounded like a cross between Vietnamese and American slang, at 100 miles an hour, and had worked up a sweat before we even arrived at the tunnels. Our initial amusement very quickly turned to despair.
The tunnels themselves were very interesting, and we got to explore them for as long as we could endure. About 1 minute in and everyone started crawling for the exit, ourselves included. They were very claustrophobic and unbelievably hot, and certainly not meant for western body frames. We then made our way through the forest, past various bomb craters and demonstrations of Vietnamese booby traps, our guide working himself into a frenzy of excitement at every opportunity. Eventually we arrived at a shooting range, where for a dollar a bullet you could fire live rounds off an assortment of automatic weapons. Tom, a self proclaimed expert on Call of Duty, tried his aim out for real using an M16 rifle whilst Gosha joined the wives and girlfriends club outside.
The afternoon trip took us round some of the city's major sights - Notre Dame cathedral, the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants museum. The latter, formally known as the Museum of American War Crimes, completely stunned and disturbed us and every other person on the tour. It was basically 5 floors of extremely graphic exhibits showing the atrocities committed by the Americans during the Vietnam war, with the many horrific images of agent orange and napalm victims turning many visitors to tears. It was a really sobering experience that left us confused, angry and horrified in equal measure.
In the evening we were about to leave our hotel room, which had a great birds eye-view of the entire district, when suddenly there was a massive power cut and Tom witnessed building after building plunging into darkness. A whole grid in the centre of the city was then out for 4 hours, and it was a very surreal feeling walking round one of the busiest cities in the world in near darkness as bars and restaurants tried to continue serving the thousands of tourists by candlelight.
As for Saigon itself, it seemed like another Bangkok, only busier. One day felt like enough, and we were looking forward to moving on into the Mekong delta for a couple of days.
