Tuesday 20th February

We met up with an irish girl called Cat on the flight from Danang to Saigon and she joins us for a tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels and the city. The tunnels were made by the Viet Cong who lived in them in hiding during the war. I crawl through a small tunnel, around 30metres long. It's hot, smelly, dark and dusty - it must have been horrible to live down here.

There are 3 levels of tunnels down to 10 feet. They started at 3feet deep as a B52 bomb would leave a hole 2.5ft deep so they know this level is safe. to hide the dirt they extracted while digging tunnels, they would put it in a big pile and place a bomb in the middle and explode it so it just looked like the bomb did it.

They were ingenious with inventing traps, ways of making airholes, hiding cooking smoke. Quite amazing. There's a firing range on site - bad taste I thought but they clearly make a lot of money from it.

We go to the War Remnants Museum which shows victims of agent orange (chemical warfare) and the subsequent generations deformities. There are images of people about to be shot including small children and other children whose faces are contorted in grief at having heard their parents get shot. There's also a particularly disturbing photo of a soldier holding up the remains of a corpse blown apart by a grenade.

We then went to the Reunification Palace which is now used as a conference centre. Apparently other governments helped build it (reading between the lines, the americans did, and you can see the american embassy from the top floor too). Americans who visit Vietnam often lie and say they are australian as they are embarrassed.

The top of the Vietnamese flag used to be red and the bottom half blue with the yellow star in the middle that symbolises their yellow skin. In 1975 when the war finished, they made the whole flag red as it was said the blood of the people ran down and dyed the blue to red.

Finally the tour of the city ended with a visit to the Post Office and Notre Dame cathedral. Very odd!

Wednesday 21st February

We travel up the Mekong Delta to Chau Doc on the border with Cambodia and stay there for the night.

Thursday 22nd February

We float down the Mekong Delta in small paddle boats, rowed by women who stand at the back with their long oars. The countryside as we cross into Cambodia is breathtaking and we watch people washing themselves and their cows in the river.

On the bus travelling into Phnom Penh we pass rice fields and the people wave and smile. Huge glittering temples would rise from out of no-where in the middle of the poorest countryside villages. Some of the houses are built high up on bamboo sticks to keep the mosquitoes out apparently and to create a shaded area underneath for use during the daytime.