Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Vietnam

Thursday to Monday, 7 - 11 December 2006

After another long bus journey and the obligatory few hitches looking for accommodation, we end up staying in MC184 guesthouse on Cong Quynh. Despite the gulag-sounding name, the room is fantastic, rat free, very cheap and has Premiership football on tap!

We visit the War Remnants Museum. It's stridently anti-American but this shouldn't be a surprise. There is a gruesome photo gallery showing the deformed victims of napalm and Agent Orange. The "Requiem" part of the museum shows the work of journalists who were killed in the war. It's eerie to see the very last photograph taken by a journalist and then to read that he was killed moments later by a bullet or landmine.

The next day we do a tour to the Chu Chi tunnels, a network of tunnels outside Saigon, used by the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. Our tour guide calls himself "Mr. Bean" and, at US$5, gives good value for money. He has a unique command of the English language, drawing heavily on phrases from Vietnam movies like Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill and Platoon ("that's bullshit, man!", "relax!", "you don't know me, you don't know my life!"). According to his at times self-contradictory and generally murky account, he spent two years in the US to become a US navy officer and was stationed during the war near the Chu Chi tunnels - narrowly missing serving on the same gunboat as "Senator John Kerry". He shows a sneaking regard for the Viet Cong's ingenuity and resourcefulness in facing up to the might and technology of the US. At the site of the tunnels, he shows us a sniper tunnel, terrifying booby-traps (e.g. a box of spikes which would be concealed underwater in a paddy field to maim GI's jumping out of helicopters) and encourages us to have a go at the rifle range. We are not sure about the rifle range and decide to give it a skip. It sounds preachy but surely it's the last thing tourists should be doing in a country that was devastated by war. We do the claustrophobic 100 metre long crawl through a surviving section of the tunnel network. It's a bit tight at the entrance and the biggest fear is that one of the "big ass tourists" (Mr. Bean's words) will get stuck in front and behind us! Thankfully alot of tourists leave at one of the early exits so we get a chance to do the rest of the tunnel unimpeded. We find it scary enough and imagine the lurching daily fear of people who spent months below ground during the war. Mr. Bean tells us a tortured story about him putting dog-tags in the mouths of slain GI's so that they can be identified later. He tells us that he "drinks to forget" and is anguished that today he has been shut out of good jobs because of the side he took in the war.

Apart from the scarred history, Saigon was a good city to spend a couple of days in. We were surprised to see the amount of Christmas trees, elves, reindeers and lights adorning buildings and shopping malls but learn that there is a large Christian population in Vietnam. We eat at a great restaurant, "Vietnam House", on Dong Khoi in the posher part of town near the Municipal Theatre. The Ben Thanh Market was also good for haggling over fake sunglasses for our trip to the islands in Thailand.

If you want to see more photos of Saigon please click here.