Steamy Saigon

Inside the Cao Dai temple and worshippers
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My titles are truly terrible aren't they?

We had 3 nights, or 2 full days in Saigon, so we tried to fit as much in to this little time as possible.

... a bizarre cross between an amusement park and terrible reality

On our first day we went on a walking tour of the city, a great way of getting a feeling of the place, if you can avoid being run down by the many many scooters.   I visited the War Remnants museum, which as it sounds is about the American War and its lasting effects on Vietnam.  Mainly told through photos, some of which were pretty gruesome, I thought about how many of the stories sound quite familiar in the current news..

Statues of Ho Chi Minh are everywhere, and he always looks like a kindly friendly grandfather type of person
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We stayed in the backpacker tourist area of Saigon, which had some unusual sights such as little boys selling chewing gum, then busting out some dance moves that Beyonce would be proud of, for the tourist dollar.  We were staying in a guest house down a couple of dodgy alleyways, where you could see into peoples apartments, noticing that most of the men around the area seemed to do not much apart from watch TV all day while the women were busy with their businesses!

On our second day we had booked a tour of the Cao Dai Temple and Cuchi tunnels.  The Cao Dai temple is for a "new" religion started in Vietnam incorporating elements of most other religions.  The temple itself is very brightly painted in a kind of garish way, with many dragons.  Interesting, but maybe not worth the 3 hour bus ride it took to get there.

In the tiny tiny tunnel that has been enlarged for tourists
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The tunnels were like a bizarre cross between an amusement park and terrible reality.  They are a network of 200ks of tunnels and rooms that the Viet Cong used in the war to inflict great damage on the US forces in the southern Vietnam area.  They were started in the 50's against the French, and some people spent their entire lives living in them.  We saw some pretty brutal traps used in the jungle against the Americans, small entrance ways into the tunnels barely 30cm across, mechanised mannequins showing typical tasks of the time (like sawing open unexploded bombs to extract the TNT, and sharpening bamboo spears for the traps) and got to squeeze through a tunnel enlarged for us large western tourists.

An entrance to the tunnels
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That night we watched NZ getting hammered in the cricket at a rock bar called Guns n Roses, with a name like that we had to visit it!