Message Stick

We arrived in Saigon bleary eyed at 5:30 AM after our last train journey for a while. A ride on a motorbike taxi to the hotel district soon woke us up however and we realised that Saigon (no one here calls it Ho Chi Minh City) had even crazier traffic than Hanoi. After a quick breakfast it became apparent Mark was as equally popular in Vietnam as China when the swooning waitress declared she wanted to marry someone just like him. After Mark’s head had reduced sufficiently in size to leave the restaurant we took a walk across the city the War Remnants museum. By the time we arrived we were drowned in sweat from the heat and humidity and to our horror it was only 9:30! The museum had some incredible photographs from war journalists from both sides and some truly awful depictions of Napalm and Agent Orange victims.

We spent the evening walking around streets lined with colonial architecture and tried a classic Vietnamese iced coffee. Brewed to a super-strength and sickly sweet, Mark has become addicted to them.

A tour out to Cu Chi was a fascinating insight into the Viet Cong’s network of tunnels in which they lived and fought a guerrilla war against the South Vietnamese and US armies on the doorstep of Saigon. Our guide was a Southern army veteran who told some amazing stories and demonstrated how the VC recycled American bombs, vehicles and rubbish to make weapons and traps to use against them. Though extremely heavy on pro-Communist propaganda it was nevertheless interesting to see an alternative to Hollywood’s portrayal of events. The rain continued to pour throughout our visit and the thunder combined with AK47 rounds from the nearby gun range created a chilling atmosphere as we waded through puddles between the sights. We finished the tour with the chance to be real life tunnel rats and crawl through a 100m passage ourselves. Dimly lit and descending along the way it could be very claustrophobic at times. The last 30m really set the adrenalin pumping as the tunnel became tighter and pitch black. We shuddered afterwards at how terrifying it must have been to raid these tunnels as an American soldier.