Ho Chi Minh City

Today started off the right way with a delightful breakfast of bread, fried eggs, bananas, and pineapple juice. The hotel staff continues to be very helpful, and Tou, a young woman with pretty good English, is super cheery. We then headed over to one of the many tourism companies lining the street in our touristy district and waited for our bus. Eventually we loaded our bus (things are considerably more relaxed time-wise here than in China or the US). Our tour guide, Minh, was a very interesting character. His English vocabulary was stellar, although his accent was pretty thick. His family had moved from North Vietnam to South Vietnam as the VietMinh consolidated power during and after the war with the French. He then studied English and worked as a translator with the 101st Airborne during the war. His story seemed very plausible, but you never know completely what all is true when on a tourist bus. He was not bashful at all with his criticisms of the communists then or the current government. Our first stop was a Cao Dai temple in Tay Ninh, northeast of HCMC. Cao Dai is some wacky conglomeration of about four or five religions. There was a service going on when we visited (I think that all the tours schedule visits according to this) which was kind of interesting. It consisted of a lot of people in white robes (colored for the leaders) chanting and praying continuously. It didn’t seem like a great use of time to me, but I guess that’s why I’m not Cai Dao. Our small tour group then headed to a restaurant for lunch, which was inexpensive (a shock when on a guided tour) and my fried fish was very good. After some more bus time, we went to the Cu Chi tunnels historic area. During the Vietnam War (which has many names here-although not the Vietnamese Civil War) the people of this area and the Viet Minh guerrillas established a system of tunnels. The area has many different outdoor displays scattered throughout the woods/jungle. It displayed some of the different types of tunnels, guerrilla warfare techniques, leftover US artillery, B-52 bomber craters, and lots of gift shops. At the peak of usage there were close to 200 km of tunnels. The locals had essentially set up an underground city, at some points almost directly under US Army bases. We were able to go through a short bit of one tunnel, which had been enlarged and lit for tourists. I can’t really fathom what it would have been like to actually live in this tunnel network for such an extended period of time. At the end of the tour we watched a short documentary/explanatory film; it was anything but pro American and you could almost taste the North Vietnamese disdain for America’s involvement in the war. A very amusing anecdote is that the workers of the historic area wore army and guerrilla uniforms of the Viet Minh. These two visits took most of the day, not because of distance, but because the road infrastructure here still has a ways to go and we of had an obligatory stop at a handicraft shop. For dinner, we had a delightful meal at a nice Vietnamese restaurant. I had two different types of spring rolls, both of which were delicious. We then dropped by one of the bars near our hotel and took advantage of its (delayed) happy hour special. Like everything near our hotel, it was mainly foreigners drinking at the bar.