Ho Chi Minh City

Our first destination in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) - formerly Saigon. We'd only been in HCMC a matter of hours when we realised that the city is stereotypical of what everyone associates with SE Asia. It has all of the things you tend to see in the movies: narrow roads, tall buildings, crazy traffic and something for sale in every place possible. It's a good thing that television doesn't capture smells, but that's another story.

The city itself is more than slightly gigantic with a population of 10 million people. The city is divided up into districts (1, 2, 3 etc) of which there are roughly 20. Each district is more or less the equivalent to the Wellington region in population.

We spent an afternoon at the War Remnants Museum learning about the Vietnam War. Parts of it were very much slanted against the Americans - for instance we felt the amount of civilian, child and old person casualties were unfairly dramatised. Age and uniform doesn't determine whether someone can use a weapon. Still I'm sure the donation box is in a much healthier state as a result.


The most hard hitting section of the museum was easily the photography section - lots of war time photos documenting both sides of the war. The photos were often taken by photographers that had died while photographing the war. The military equipment section was impressive and the armaments were rather imposing. If we didn't know better you'd think the war would have been a mismatch - steel vs. bamboo.


After seeing the weapons the Americans had it was time to check out the Vietnam side of things so we spent a day checking out the Cu Chi Tunnels.

Instead of buying a guided trip to the tunnels we thought we'd do it local style and catch a public bus. With the help of some very nice retail ladies (they told us the place, bus # and time) we were on our way. For a ridiculously small price (approx $1 NZ) we rode a bus for a solid 90 minutes. After that things went downhill... the tunnels were still 15km's away and the moto drivers organised some rapid price fixing. After a lot of debating and false take aways (i.e. us walking away) we settled on a reasonable price and were off. In hindsight the guided trip seemed like a better option.

(Peek-a-boo, Charlie shoots you...)

The tunnels showed how cunning and clever the Vietnamese were during the war. They'd thought of everything when it came to the tunnels and were exceptional at disguising air vents and entrance ways.

(A termite mound grafted with bamboo to act as an air vent for the tunnel system below)

The booby trap section was rather graphic and the guide seemed to take pleasure from describing how they were used to take down the Americans.


Random Fact: Saigon was renamed to HCMC in honour of a Communist, Marxist-Leninist Vietnamese revolutionary and statesman - Mr Ho Chi Minh (commonly known as Uncle Ho).

Highlights:
- Crossing the road. No easy feet considering each side of the road has about 5 moto's side by side.
- Being in a truly massive city.
- Dumplings, the meat pie of South East Asia.

Lessons Learned:
- HCMC is a big city with big city prices. We spent a long time trying to find cheap accommodation but the best we managed was $15 US per night.
- Food and drink are cheap ridiculously so if you hunt around.
- The correct exchange rate is slightly above 17,000 VND to $1 US. When it benefits the locals they'll use this rate, when it benefits you they use 15,000 VND to $1 US. Best option is to load up on the local currency - Dong.