Saigon

Another 9 hours on the disgusting overnight train and we arrived in Saigon (love you long time) at 5.30 in the morning. We spent the morning on cyclos touring the city - we saw the independence (?) palace that was overthrown in the fall of Saigon and is to be used for the APEC conference in May, the opera house, the Notre Dame cathedral and had vietnamese at Pho 2000 where Bill and Chelsea Clinton once dined. We spent much of the afternoon at the War Crimes museum which was really interesting, but equally sickening, and extremely sobering. While many of the photos depict simply scenes of the war and its soldiers, there were several that portrayed far more heartbreaking scenes such as the deformities resulting from the use of Agent Orange, the excitement and gleeful reaction to the vicious deaths of enemy soldiers (so sick) etc etc. There are some things that we can't even write about on our blog given that our nephew and nieces may be reading. And, besides, you just don't want to know. Dinner that night consisted of beef on roof tiles served in the local markets - delicious! On Saturday we hired motos and spent the morning around the city and then breached our undertaking of no western food (ok - so we did that ages ago but this is the worst!) and had lunch at KFC. It was the best KFC we have ever had. We also headed out to the Cu Chi tunnels - tunnels built by the Cu Chi villagers (a village around 70km from Saigon) centuries ago to protect themselves from the many french invasions. There are about 200km of tunnels in the Cu Chi region that took around 20 years to build. They ate, slept, worked and lived in the tunnels for a number of years until the tunnels were used in the American war by the Viet-Cong (from Northern Vietnam) against the Americans and Southern Vietnamese. The tunnels are unbelievably tiny and you would never believe that the holes in the ground were built for people rather than moles or some other small animal if you weren't advised to the contrary. We went down into a stretch of tunnels that they have enlarged for westerners although the photo of the guard is actually taken in one of the tunnels and you can see how NOT large the revamped tunnel is - very claustrophobic and quite scary. Many of the tunnels have only just enough room for a vietnamese soldier, with an AK47 or the likes, to crawl along on his/her stomach and many many soldiers died of bites from snakes or scorpions living in the tunnels. After the tunnels, we were able to shoot AK47s - definitely an experience.