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Finally arrived in Vietnam - my but Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh as the locals now call it) is a frightening place. Traffic levels like I've never seen before - imagine Hyde Park Corner populated by motorbikes, cars, people, dogs and old people carrying 2 hundredweight of goods either end of a long pole, all criss-crossing at will. Crossing the road is a new skill to be learnt, it involves launching oneself into the road and crossing slowly but surely to the other side while letting the traffic swerve around you. No hesitation or deviation is allowed, and it certainly doesn't do to try and gallop across - lives have been lost by not following these simple rules, but it's hard to get used to navigating your way when you have little control over your destiny. It's up to the drivers to circumnavigate the pedestrians. Helpfully they blast their horns every few seconds just so all the other road users are aware of where they are. We cross en masse clinging on to each other and trying to look but not look at our impending doom. The constant horn blowing makes getting to sleep at night quite a challenge, but it's useful to keep awake all night in order to swat the mosquitoes.
Met our new group, although John, Rebecca and Sandie came with us from Cambodia, so the rest are just interlopers! In the 3 nights we spent in Saigon we ate a variety of food - most of which we had to cook ourselves at a table barbecue, which lead to mostly burnt offerings and clothes that smelt of smoke the next day. Amongst the many choice culinary offerings we could select from roast rat, stomach of frog or goat penis. I politely requested the salmon.
We visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, centre of the Viet Cong resistance and home to thousands of Vietnamese during the war. We went through the tunnels and they are small, damp, smelly, hot and claustrophobic, it's hard to imagine what it must have been like to actually live in them for any length of time. Now however it's just like a Vietnamese Disneyland, there's little sense that this was a site of death and fear - you can even pay $5 to fire an AK47, thankfully the guns are fixed in position so that there can be no nasty little accidents.
We took a cyclo tour round the city, cyclos are one-man cycle rickshaws and it's a great way to travel around at a slow steady pace watching the world go by. It's best to close your eyes at busy junctions though, because watching 5 tonne of lorry bearing down at you while your driver casually lights a cigarette, tuts impatiently at the oncoming traffic and jauntily turns away at the last minute is quite an unnerving sight . I found it best to just look in the opposite direction and try to find God. He appeared to be elsewhere.
There are Christmas decorations everywhere, which seems very strange. It's hard to believe that it's Christmas in less than a month.
On our last day in Saigon we had cocktails at the Rex Hotel, famous for the '5 o clock follies' during the war when the American Generals would brief the foreign press on that day's propaganda - we just had extortionately priced cocktails. Well, about 3 quids worth - we've obviously been in Asia too long. Afterwards we went to eat at another street café - Brian and John had something called beef on a roof tile, which took your basic barbecue at the table formula one stage further - you cooked ON a roof tile (duh). They both managed to burn their roof tile, but claimed afterwards that they weren't quite sure how it happened but were fairly sure it was the other one's fault.
On our final morning we filmed ourselves bravely crossing and re-crossing the road from every conceivable angle, causing much merriment to the local populace.
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