Saigon

Spent 5 days in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. We really enjoyed it. I had imagined it to be really busy and I'd heard it was almost impossible to cross the roads due to the thousands of mopeds, but it wasn't that bad at all. We did all the main sights which involved watching a hell of a lot of propaganda films which glorified the Viet Cong and child soldiers.

We went on a day trip out of the city and visited a Cao Dao temple. Its a strange religion! It claims that Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed are all prophets, okay nothing wrong with that. But then it continues to cite a bunch of random people as prophets including Shakespeare and Victor Hugo! We also visited the Cu Chi tunnels, which are the tunnels the Viet Cong built. THey stretch over 200km to the Cambodian border and people used to spend weeks on end down there hiding from the Americans. We were shown lots of grim booby traps which mainly involved bamboo and metal spikes and we were shown the compulsorily propaganda video. We went down into the tunnels and crawled along for about 100 metres. They were pretty small but they had actually been enlarged 'cos western tourists are too big for the original size. Jon tried to fit down a non enlarged one and couldn't! (The propoganda video had gone on about Americans being  'big fat water buffalos').