Ho Chi Minh is a great city that we instantly like - I guess a combination of the sun shining and a great place to stay (Thang Ngoc guesthouse) in the centre of town helps. There are 1000s of scooters on the road, and initially seems like chaos, but adopting the walk slowly over the road and they will avoid you attitude works wonders. I guess it's like when Moses parted the Red Sea really... HCM is a modern city with a few high rise buildings, and plenty of modern 5* hotels, and its really easy to navigate - we manage some decent Thai food at a place opposite our guest house called Sawasdee, and then an early night after watching Memoirs of a Geisha on TV!
Its not too noisy next morning, which is a pleasant change for VietNam. After breakfast we head out among the Red Sea of scooters once more over to the Reunification Palace - built in the 1960s, and with the architechture to match (reminded me of Sunderland CIvic Centre,) the building is exactly the same as when the tanks barged through the main gates in 1975 symbolizing the re-unification of the country under Communism after French and American best efforts otherwise The first part of the tour involves the state rooms for dining, welcome foreign dignitaries and gambling (!) and is OK, but then the second part looks more at the history of the building and the American War in general and is much more interesting. It's similar in parts to the CHurchill War Rooms back in London, with the telephone exchanges and maps all still in situ in the basement. The tour finishes with a very Anti-American video of the war. Its interesting to see film from the opposite perspective, how the US were the cruel invaders running a dictatorship, and how the war effort was so vicious and murderous and ultimately so futile costing way too many lives, never mind the millions of dollars.
After a spot of lunch we back to the history of the American War at the War Remnants museum. This place cant help but move you in a way similar to the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem showing just how brutal the Yanks were, and how resilient the Vietnamese were and ultimately deserving in their victory. The devastating effects of the US chemical attacks that were tested during the war are still felt today. The arrogance of some of the American soldiers is sickening. One reason that the war happened at all was that the US wanted to maintain their supply of cheap tin and tungsten, that was apparently under threat by the Communist North Vietnamese desire to reunify the whole country under their regime. Although obviously biased against the US, you cant help think that the similarities with what is happening in the Middle East today are astounding. Additional displays on the world's protests against the war, and a fascinating piece on how the war was covered by photo-journalists make this a truly memorable museum, and one that we cant help but think every school child in America should be made to visit to try and prevent any further similar atrocities.
OK, rant over, getting off the soap box now...
Our evening is spent at one of the best restaurants we have been to so far. Trish, who spent a couple of months in HCM has recommended this place as has the Lonely Planet and the Luxe guide. We'll add our recommendation too. Its called Quan An Ngon, and is basically all the street vendors brought together under one roof. So you could claim that its a sanitised version of the real street food, but once you have the BBQ squid with chilli and salt, and the rare beef salad, you wont care.
Next day, we're up with the lark, and the Vietnamese builders who are back and off to the Cu Chi tunnels. These are a huge network of tunnels built by the locals during the American war. Initailly 3 m under ground, as the war continued, they moved further underground to avoid and confuse the US soldiers. The ingenuity and capability of the Vietnamese is astounding. We get to see and crawl through one of their tunnels. Granted most Vietnamese are about half the size of your average Westerner, but the tunnels are still hugely claustrophobic (1.3m tall, 0.6m wide), and we can barely get 10m through one tunnel before we have to get out. During the war, there were 18km of tunnels and whole villages surviving underground. They deserved to whop the Yanks butts.
We're back to Quan An Ngon for another squidy beefy lunch, and would probably move in here for the next 6 months if we could, but we need to move on and head down to the beach at Phu Quoc - an island tantalisingly close to Cambodia, but frustratingly doesnt offer a direct route onto our next country.
HCM is a great city, one of our favourites, and the sort of place where we would happily come and spend some serious time. There is definitely a seedier side, which we see at the bars near our guest house. Older, overweight single Western men with tiny Asian women on their arms reek of sex tourists and catalogue brides, but they are definitely in the minority and easily avoided. We also seem to have dropped the Abba fixation, which is a great relief for all. Hopefully we will get to come back again - if only for some more BBQ squid with chilli salt...
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