I didn’t really have any ideas of what I wanted to do in Saigon, but Meka had looked up a whole bunch of stuff. We decide the most fun way to get around would be to hire a bike. This turns out to be both incredibly awesome, horribly painful, and ridiculously dangerous.
I love it. 😛
The traffic in Saigon is nothing short of madness. But it’s a comprehensible madness. There’s a system, and by the end of the day I had it down pretty well. We head first to the War Remnants Museum. It is amazing to see the Vietnam war from their perspective. I honestly know nothing about it and I really need to educate myself, but seeing the pictures of American soldiers brutalising the Vietnamese and seeing the weapons and the photos of the aftermaths was a pretty grim experience.
We didn’t last too long there, and went off for lunch with some people Marieke knew who happened to be in Vietnam.
Next up was the Jade Emperor Pagoda. I guess we both expected something really clean and beautiful, but it was kind of grimy and unimpressive. I did get this one awesome photo though:
It’s about 2pm by now and we start heading off for the Co Chi tunnels. It’s not easy to navigate the city so we’re constantly stopping the bike and pulling out the GPS to make sure we’re on the right highway. And then it starts to rain. We stop at the first shop and buy ourselves ponchos. I wish like anything that I’d taken a photo, because they were Angry Birds ponchos – blue for me and pink for Meeks. Every traffic light we stopped at we had a crowd of Vietnamese looking at us and laughing. It was totally awesome.
The drive to the tunnels took forever. We kept thinking we were lost so many times but we finally get there in the pouring rain at about 5pm. We go to the ticket desk and it’s closed. This is the first point I really start to feel bummed out. I’ve dragged this girl halfway across the world and the first thing that’s happened is that I’ve taken her on a 2 hour ride in the cold pouring rain, to a destination that’s closed, leaving us with only the option of driving all the way back.
We talk to the lady at the souviner counter and she thinks she can do something for us. She shouts out to a few people and arranges us a one-off personal after hours tour. It’s D90,000 per person, no idea how much the tickets are normally but I really don’t care.
Our guide is named Tien, and you can see the obvious pride on his face as he’s taking us around the tunnel site. He shows us the tiny entrance and exit holes. We go down into the tunnels and it is incredibly small. These are the real ones, not the ones enlarged for tourists. These are the real tunnels that they used in the war. This is amazing. It’s pouring with rain, we’re in the rainforest in Vietnam, we’re the only ones there, and we’re crawling in and out of tunnels. I doubt there has ever been a more thematic and realistic tour there. I’m feeling exactly like I was really there. I couldn’t have more respect for the Vietnamese and what they had to do to survive while their country was being invaded. 30% of the fighters were women. Everyone was involved in protecting their home from the attacking armies.
We finish up and we both kind of dumbstruck. The rain on the way back doesn’t seem so bad after having an experience like that. Driving in the rain at night in Vietnam in Saigon is a bit of a mission, this place is madness. We stop at a store on the way home and buy a litre of Vodka for $2.50. Awesome.
Home, and then a long, long hot shower.
