Day 30 Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

Day 30 – His.

 It is amazing how tiring travelling can be. We have been travelling now for 30 days and had only one rest day. A rest day – for those interested - is a day spent doing nothing but sitting in a hotel room and doing nothing. That’s not strictly true actually a fair amount of time is spent sleeping. It’s not only travelling but travelling in a hot sun. It gets to you and you don’t even know it. The temptation is to ‘do’ all the time. After all this is a holiday – but, when you spend so much time travelling there are three things to remember:

1) Spend a day doing nothing,

2) Don’t buy lots of tourist things – or your backpack will be full of fridge magnets by the time you get home and finally,

3) Wash your underwear regularly.

There is a 4^th rule if you are pale skinned and travelling in a sunny climate: don’t get to much sun.

Thankfully we had a morning to chill as we were due to travel on to Saigon (Hoi Chi Minh City) at 12 and chill is pretty much what we did.

These simple rules are something both Peter and CanDo (Kendal) forgot. I am pretty sure they are both good underwear washers so I can only assume it was one of the other rules they forget. Peter had to spend a day in bed and CanDo fell over in a market. Apparently she fainted. Heidi, who was with her said it was as if she had been pole axed. One minute she was standing there and the next she was on the ground. The Vietnamese were wonderful it seems. They carried her into a shop and massaged her until she awoke (The gentle massage was pretty brutal actually and Kendal still has the bruises from it.) When we saw them this morning they were clutching a suspiciously large number of tourist mementoes so perhaps it was rule 2 they forgot.

Anyhow we were bussed to the domestic airport in Da Nang and took the one hour shuttle to Saigon. During the bus ride Vinh gave a little talk on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The Ho Chi Minh trail was a system or roads and tracks that ran from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) to the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) through the neighbouring kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia. The roads – if you can call them that, fed manpower and material, to the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War, mostly by young women carrying food and weapons to the soldiers. According to the United States National Security Agency's official history of the war, the Trail system was "one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century.” As Vinh talked and showed us cable bridges and pontoon bridges built by the Vietnamese it became obvious to me at least this was a people who were determined to win.

Ho Chi Minh City is the official name for what used to be Saigon, and is the largest city in Vietnam. It was once known as Prey Nokor, an important Khmer sea port prior to annexation by the Vietnamese in the 17th century.

Under the name Saigon, it was the capital of the French colony of Cochin-china and later of the independent republic of South Vietnam from 1955–75. Saigon fell when it was captured by the communists on 30 April 1975, or liberated – i guess it all depends on your point of view. Whatever your view in 1976, Saigon was officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the man himself though apparently laziness keeps Saigon in common use – after all Saigon is only two syllables and the official name is a hell of a lot more.

We landed at three and the plan was to visit the war museum and have a cyclo tour to the hotel. As the museum shut at 5, Vinh practically frog marched us there. I was in half a mind not to bother but i was half morbidly interested so decided not to whine too much.

The War Remnants Museum mostly contains stuff relating to the American phase of the Vietnam War.

 Operated by the Vietnamese government, the museum was opened in September 1975 as "The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government [of South Vietnam]." Later it was known as the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, then as the War Crimes Museum until 1993. Its current name follows liberalization in Vietnam and the normalisation of relations with the United States.

The museum comprises a series of eight themed rooms in several buildings, with period military equipment located within a walled yard. The military equipment include a UH-1 "Huey" helicopter, an F-5A fighter, a BLU-82 "Daisy Cutter" bomb, M48 Patton tank, an A-1 Skyraider attack bomber, and an A-37 Dragonfly attack bomber. Several display aircraft (F-5, A-37)

One building reproduces the "tiger cages" in which the South Vietnamese government housed political prisoners; they are little more than barbed wire boxes that prisoners were crammed into. Other exhibits include graphic photographs, accompanied by short copy in English, Vietnamese and Japanese, covering the effects of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliant sprays, the use of napalm and phosphorus bombs, and atrocities such as the My Lai massacre. The photograph display includes a display of works Vietnam War photojournalist Bunyo Ishikawa donated to the museum in 1998. The oddest things are a guillotine used by the French and the South Vietnamese to execute prisoners (the last killed was in 1960) and a plastic case of a preserved human foetus deformed by exposure to dioxin.

To be honest the museum was horrific testament of man’s inhumanity to man – The overall effect is to make you both angry and sad. Although the museum is well slanted to the Vietnamese view (making no mention of the Hue Massacre, the Dak Son Massacre and the Chau Doc massacre, or the brutal treatment of American POWs) it still harrows you as you walk through. Given that 1.2 million Vietnamese soldiers and 3 million Vietnamese civilians were killed during the war on gets a feeling that something amounting to genocide was attempted here 20 years after the holocaust. Will we never learn?

After the harrowing of the soul that was the trip to the museum, we returned to the normality of the city with a cyclo tour. Vinh had rounded up 5 cyclos ad they were waiting for us to take us to our hotel via a round trip of the rest of the important sights of the city. The cyclo is basically a seat with a bike attached – the seat you sit in goes first. This is important to remember as the rider thrusts you into the oncoming traffic as he sets off. I am sure we mentioned before Vietnam is a country of motorcycles and Saigon is where most of them seem to congregate (There are something like 30 deaths a day on Vietnamese roads from motorcycle accidents – this, apparently, is more deaths per day than in the Vietnam war.) and they all rush headlong towards you as the cyclo rider sets off. It is a cross between a roller coaster ride, a moving crash site and your worst nightmare all rolled into one. Vinh had described it as interesting and it most certainly was. After about five minutes when I realised we weren’t going to find ourselves beneath a pile of twisted metal anytime soon, I sat back and began to enjoy the ride. It was in fact a truly splendid way to see the city. We went past the Notre Dame cathedral, the opera house, the city hall, the market, the main shopping street and no end of parks, gardens and temples. It was fascinating. Saigon is a busy modern metropolis. It seems a shame we won’t be spending more than a day here.

 Day 30 – Hers.

I found the museum upsetting.  However much you know about the facts of something, seeing the images – there, where they happened – is difficult.  The cyclo tour of this vibrant, modern city  - propelled by a man who must have seen the war himself, pedalling furiously, weaving through the motorbikes, pointing out the sights – did something to shake off the melancholy.  We arrived at our hotel, showered and then set off all together as a group for dinner at the night market.  Vinh chose a great ‘restaurant’ for this evening’s meal – it was a completely temporary cafe’ – set up in the street for the evening and then packed away.  It is amazing the food they can cook  - and the number of people they can feed – with such a simple set up. Vinh recommended an ‘at the table’ beef barbecue dish.  Peter and Kendall followed his suggestion, cooking spiced beef on roof tiles over charcoal and wrapping it and a pile of herbs into thin rice pancakes.  It looked delicious – but far too much food for me – I had a mini beef barbecue plate. Rob had a sweet and sour dish and Heidi – who had apparently already had dinner - had shrimp wrapped in potato strings.

It began to rain heavily during dinner.  We were under a canopy so it didn’t matter too much – but unlike the few afternoon showers we experienced in Hue and Hoi An, it didn’t pass quickly and we realised that we would be drenched on the way back to the hotel.  The others took a taxi – but Rob and I had a mission to find a camera shop so we huddled under my umbrella and each got only half wet.  After two blocks, we gave up trying to keep our feet dry and sloshed merrily through the streams running down the pavements and roads.  We found a camera shop – open – but they didn’t have what we wanted so we ended up just returning to the hotel – a bit damp (okay, more than a bit) and ready for bed.