Through the tunnels
Monday, January 30, 2012
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Another dodgy bus journey which was worse than the last one due to the fact we were both a little stressed, hungover from the cruise and there was no air con or toilet on this bus. It was fairly old and I managed to get a seat above a hole which lead straight to the engine so I had hot air blowing under my seat all the way! We got into Saigon about 7am in the morning. By now we are wising up to the taxi men who try to rip you off. So when a taxi man is asking where you want to go before we even got off the bus you know somethings up. This guy wanted 200,000 dong (£7!!) to take us to our hotel, which I thought was a little steep. So I went to ask another driver who looked a little more reputable and showed him the address of where we were staying turns out it was across the road from where we were! Scam averted we got to the hotel and booked on a trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. Our tour guide was called Mr Dong but he wanted everyone to call him Slim Jim. He loved a bit of cockney rhyming slang and was coming out with it left right and center! The trip consisted of a guided tour round the tunnels
and the ways the Vietnamese avoided the Americans
they also had a display of working gruesome boobie traps that were used.
Then we had the chance to go down into the tunnels and crawl through a 100m stretch that was double the size of the original tunnels (60cm x 70cm were the original sizes) so Western people can actually fit in them! I did the full 100m and at times I had a job to fit through! Mel got out at the first escape hole!
After we sat down to some refreshing Vietnamese tea and some Tapioca root, which was the staple diet of the troops who lived in the tunnels. They boil up the root and it tastes similar to potato. We then went off to the shooting range where you could shoot a variety of guns, obviously I had to go for the biggest one the M60 machine gun,
even Mel had a go and the gun was bigger than her!! Lastly we watched a grainy black and white video about the war from the Vietnamese point of view which was quite disturbing as they gave medals out to the people who had killed the most white men! But the Americans did drop 586,000 tonnes of bombs on them so I guess they had their reasons. We both enjoyed the trip and the sound of gun fire from the range made it seem all the more realistic. That night we went out for some food and decided to treat ourselves to a cocktail in the Sheraton roof top bar which looked out over the whole city.
We only stayed one night in Saigon which was a shame as we liked it and could of spent more time there, Saigon seemed more like the captial city than Hanoi did.
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