Pete & Rach's Big Trip: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon): 8-12 Nov 2013

Drinking on the streets of Saigon

Pete says:

Saigon was great fun. It is much bigger and busier than the capital Hanoi and more seedy as well.

Our hostel - Ngoc Thao - was very good and run by a family so you would have babies being looked after and people cooking their tea in reception. The hostel was down a side alley so narrow we could almost touch both sides at once, but people still rode their scooters down

Restaurant / house across the alley
from our hostel

it, forcing us to jump out of the way. It was full of little shops and houses where the living rooms are open to the street like shop fronts and people would just be lying on the floor asleep with their kids watching TV, or cooking their dinner as we walked by. There was also some sort of Japanese ritual going on each night at a small shrine. A group of people, all dressed in the same white clothes and bandanas, were banging drums continuously and seemed to be making an offering of a dead pig. There were some photos of a man on the shrine and we wondered if it might be a sort of funeral wake. At the end of the alley was a chaotic street full of bars and restaurants, with crowds of people on plastic stools filling the paths and spilling into the road. The streets were full of prostitutes which we didn't notice until I went for a walk without Rachael to get snacks for a morning trip and was accosted 4 or five times in a walk of about a hundred feet.

Views of the alleyway where we stayed (above and below)

Rach says:

We took a half day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, which was a Viet Cong base during the war. The Viet Cong were based in the south and on the side of Ho Chi Minh's communist north fighting against the USA. We went down into the tunnels that have been widened to accommodate Western tourists (you still have to crouch down to get through) but unfortunately didn't get a chance to explore the tunnels you have to crawl through - I would have given it a go! One of the hatches was so small, I had to put my arms above my head to get inside. The Viet Cong were really clever in disguising the air holes for the tunnels as termite mounds, only cooking in the morning so the steam/smoke would appear as mist and wearing their sandals backwards to disguise their tracks. There were many bomb craters in the area and we had to walk along specific paths to avoid unexploded ordinance. Pete's highlight was getting to fire an AK47 and M16 (Arnie Commando gun). I had a go, but was a bit nervous and I couldn't even look. When I fired the gun I got a bit overexcited and look like a crazed gunwoman in the pics :-)

On the way back into the city, we stopped at the War Remnants museum. I was shocked and appalled by the scale and extreme nature of the atrocities and learnt about the protests that took place around the globe against the Vietnam War. I had no idea that babies were still being born in the 1990s and 2000s with the most horrific physical and mental deformities from the quantities of chemical weapons dropped on the country that have now touched 3 generations. The photographs were harrowing.

When we booked a Mekong Delta tour for our last day, I was imagining floating markets, stilted houses on the river and quaint waterways. However, it was a sign of things to come when we stopped to hear a supposedly traditional local band and they played "If you're happy and you know it"... Much of the rest of the day was then spent on an alarmingly ill-maintained boat on open waterways, being ferried between coconut sweet makers and bee farms - not what we came here to see! The best part of the day was a (10 minute) trip on a traditional wooden boat, where we got to wear conical hats and take a classic photo! Second best part was when Pete decided to have a massive boa constrictor placed around his neck, crazy fool...but at least it provided a hilarious photo that it makes me laugh every time I look at it :-) Overall: pleasant day, rubbish trip.

Other notes:

There are Buddhist shrines in all of the shops, houses and hotels, with offerings placed on them. Some of these were quite amusing, such as beer, cigarettes, choco pies and M&Ms!
Mopeds are the 'carry-all' in Asia - entire families is only the start - we have seen pigs, chickens, showerscreens (must cause some wind resistance!!) and even huge blocks of ice being transported.