Ho Chi Minh City - Saigon

9/03
We spend the day in planes, a stopover in Singapore then arrive in Saigon-Ho Chi Minh around 7pm, we get our visa checked, and then get into a taxi to our hostel in the backpacker area. There are millions of cars and motorcycles in the streets, a noisy mad city, but the vibe is great...We are both tired by the day and amazed by the busyness and hectiness of this place...An hour later, we arrive at our little guesthouse in a small alleyway, Bich Duyen. A small windowless room awaits us, it is going to be our little home here for few days. We go out around the corner for a bowl of pho (rice noodle soup with meat) and are stunned by the city, it is full of people, 11 millions of human beings here....and tons of noise....after that quick meal, off to bed as we want to visit and to explore tomorrow...

10/03
We tour Ho Chi Minh today, the city is hot, hectic, millions of motos in the streets, a complete chaos but again a great vibe. We go and see the market, the Ben Thanh Market, shops, food, clothes, a real mix, we stroll around the busy people and have some lunch in one of the many food stalls, nice to sit so close to the ground and chill out despite the heat...a good colourful market, full of many things...
The warm weather is different from Bali but still so hot...After this break, we continue to explore the city, visit Notre-Dame cathedral, built by the French, the nice old colonial post office and walk to the Chinese quarter to see the Jade Emperor Pagoda, a nice Chinese temple, a colourful pagoda, filled with statues in papier-mache, woodcarving, many burning sticks of encens, people come here to pray, to give offerings but also to rest in the courtyard and escape the rumble of motorbikes and noise.
We also visit the war museum, all about the American war, we learn about the mines, the chemicals, napalm, the terrible agent orange, the mad US bombings amd massacres...a terrible war, traumatic for both sides but with terrible effects still visible here: areas being defoliated, children being born deformed and disabled...still now, a horrible cost for many future generations. The museum is a traumatic place with haunting pictures of massacre, disabled children, horrible tortures...it is hot and I feel dizzy, the shock of seeing this horror and the heat...I have to sit down and rest for a bit , drinking an entire bottle of water!!
Of course it is one-sided but still shows us the tragic legacy of this war...
We walk back past the Reunification Palace, again Ho Chi Minh is intense, busy as hell, the rumble of millions of motorbikes around us, a mad metropolis. Most inhabitants refer to it as 'Saigon', the pre-reunification name. Since the city fell to the North Vietnamese Communists in 1975, the city's name was changed to Ho Chi Minh City, after the heroic founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
We go for a rest then it is time for dinner around our area Pham Ngu Lao, there are many shops, hostels, cafes, it is very lively, we lose ourselves here but in a nice way, it feels peaceful despite the crazyness around us. Our first impressions are good, we were worried as so many travellers were put off by Vietnam, Vietnamese people are full on but nice, direct but not too pushy and we cannot feel this aggressivity we were told of... Yes, true, the constant sounds and smells of hectic Asian city life combined with the hazy, damp heat has an effect on us, an intense sensory overload but a good one somehow.

11/03
Today we book a tour with a small group to go and visit two things: the Cao Dai temple and the Cu Chi tunnels. The Cao Dai temple is part of a Vietnamese sect that seeks to create the perfect religion by fusing the secular and religious philosophies of both East and West. We drive for few hours before reaching the temple, very colourful, we see the noon prayer: few hundred people pray in white dress, there are amazing murals, with some pictures of eyes, their representation of God everywhere, lots of colours, sounds...we see some portraits of Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, a melting pot of religions...weird...it is nice to get out of Saigon and see around, vivid rice fields. We then reach Cu Chi after a quick lunch, we chat to the people in our group, an Aussie couple, a Brit girl, an Austrian guy and another from Singapore, all nice and friendly travellers.
Around Cu Chi, there has been intense bombing, destruction during the war. The tunnel network of Cu Chi is very famous, there were more than 250 kms of tunnel, they made comunication possible between the different Viet Cong controlled areas and allowed for surpise attacks against the Americans...this zone was heavily bombed, defoliated, gassed and devastated during the war...It was an amazing achievement considering it was dug by hand and during bloody conflicts. We visit some renovated parts of the tunnel, it has been enlarged to allow tourists in, we see the camouflaged kitchen with no smoke, the tunnels. I go in, so narrow but Fab feels a bit too claustrophobic to get inside...they are only 1.2 metres high...imagine what the real 90cm ones would have been...we imagine the VC guerilla living here and fighting and the American boys arriving in this heat and fighting them...
We go back to crazy Saigon and decide to go out all together as we all get along well. We meet up for dinner, have some drinks, end up sharing a table with some locals who treat us to some local delicacies: dried cuttlefish, salted fish, water snails, and so on...a funny little bar, wher we stay close to many scooters and motos, fells like being in a garage but in the heat and outside...weird but nice! A great jolly mood and festive night out....nice to be with many people to share about our lifes, our culture, a real melting pot tonight, stories about travels, other countries, experiences....laughter and drinks!!!