Blog : Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

We got a particularly sweaty bus to Ho Chi Minh from Mui Ne, which to about six hours or so. The air con was about as strong as a rabbits cough so everyone ended up shedding as many layers as modestly possible and lying legs akimbo trying to get some of the non existent cool air! It was just Al and I on this bus to HCMC, as we'd decided to head down and meet Helen who had bypassed Mui Ne completely in order to sort out her Indian visa. Kate and Christa however wanted to stay another night in Mui Ne and to catch some last rays of sunshine on the beach before the massively intense and hectic HCMC! We arrived at about 8:30pm to the city and went into a travel agents to use their wifi to open google maps and find the directions to our hotel. It's really difficult to do this in advance because you have no idea where the bus will drop you in each place - it seems as though its wherever the driver fancies really! Anyway this travel agent was super friendly giving us free bottles of water and letting us use their office wifi and sit in front on fans to cool down a bit. They have us maps and pointed al and I in the right direction of the road we were looking for. As we were just walking out, one of the ladies, dressed glamerously like an air hostess rather than a travel agent warned Al about having her iPhone out after dark because of thiefs, we thought this was sweet and Al put the phone away. We finally found Helen's hotel, which was on a road like how I imagine Koh San in Thailand to have been about ten years ago. She was staying somewhere pretty swanky and there was room for one o us in her double bed. I said to Al she should take it and I would go and check in at the hostel over the road which looked pretty new, clean, friendly and was relatively cheap. I was in a ten bed dorm with three other girls, all of whom were lovely and interesting to talk to. Al and and I were starving after our journey and missing lunch because of the timings so I dumped my bags, tried to book my bed plus four others for all the girls from the following evening when Kate and Christa would arrive and Al and Helen check out of their hotel. We wandered down the street to an Indian restraint and we thought it would be rude not to go in, seeing as we've eaten curry all down the coast of Vietnam!! We were joined by CJ (from the Thai islands, part of the Liverpool group) who had just arrived into Saigon from Cambodia, brought a motorbike and was planning to drive up to North Vietnam with a couple of other boys he'd just met. He gave us some tips on Cambodia and Laos as in run we told him some of the nicer places we stayed over the last month. I had a vegetable curry and a naan bread, hoping to shift the contents of my bloated belly, after another six days of no bowel movements :/ We tried to order popadoms as well to nibble on whilst we waited for our food, which was hilarious, as they had absolutely no idea what we were asking for as we said slowly and loudly pop-a-doms please and then were all stumped at how to describe them... Crisps, round, corn(?) We tried to find them in the menu, which took a bit of time and they were written Pap-a-dan instead. The waiters understood perfectly once we'd asked for the papadams!! After dinner I went back to my hostel - Koniko - and had a shower. And a chat with the girls on the dorm about where they'd been and stuff they recommended in HCMC. By the time I had done all of that, it was about half past midnight and I couldn't be bothered to get re dressed up and go out to chat with Al and CJ.

The plan for the next morning was that I would head over the road and meet the girls at their hotel around 9am to get in on Helen's free breakfast action. I messaged Al a couple of times early in the morning (I'd been woken up by the girls leaving at the crack of dawn) to see if they were up and heard no answer so I assumed they were both still asleep and went for a wander up and down our road for a little bit, just to check out what we had around us and what the city was like. When I went to their room about 30 mins later I found them both in bed and heard about how Al had been mugged the night before and had her handbag stolen :( she had been wearing an over the shoulder bag and a man on the back of a motorbike had cut the strip as he drove past. Many of her valuables were inside and obviously she was quite upset and shaken by it. Later in the day once they'd gotten up, we all went to the police station to full out a crime report, which was pretty difficult as the police staff did not speak a word of English! Al poor thing was quite jumpy and obviously wary about being too close to the road or anything but we tried to reassure her that she was safe and we'd try to look after her. Once we'd submitted the form we went back to the dorm to try and wipe all of the information from her iPhone via the "find my iPhone" app. And then we went for a walk, via a giant bakery which ha millions of free samples of tasty croissants and the girls brought a garlic bread stick each and then we found a brand newly opened Topshop, a mango and a warehouse so we thought a bit of retail therapy wouldn't go a miss! We were in our element looking at the clothes and wishing we could a) afford them and b) that they were practical for our next couple of countries, which they wernt! We then found a body shop after some more wandering and we three literally all went ma inside, taking over the whole make over and testing station, cleansing and moisturising our faces, conditioning our hair and cooking our feet with peppermint spray.we must have been in there for at least 45 minutes just trying and smelling all the creams. I don't even get excited about the body shop at home but here, with its nice smells, calming music, fierce aircon and wash basin, we were very happy! Helen did buy something in the end though which made us feel less embarrassed about looking like western hobos in a shop far to expensive for us!

We walked back to the hostel, which took about twenty minutes as it began to get dark, around six thirty and on the way we stopped in at the travel agents we'd stopped at on our first night and booked a trip for all five of us the following morning to the Chu Chi tunnels. The girls arrived a little while after we'd gotten back and once they'd showered we went to get some late dinner at a place recommended by lonely planet not to far away. It was a Mexican place that served a good selection of vegetarian food and Al and I had black bean enchiladas which were pretty tasty, although sat heavy in my stomach as we didn't eat until 11:30!

I went to bed late that night and so was very tired the next morning when we all got up at 7am for an 8am pick up to the Chu Chi tunnels, just west of HCMC. We didn't realise that the mini bus ride to the tunnels was two and a bit hours long and when we got there it was the heat of the day. Our tour guide spoke fantastic English and we were in a group of about 20 people and boy did we launch straight in at the deep end. We started off by watching a short educational film about the Viet Com and their invasion to south Vietnam and the war with the USA, of which lots of people had very differing opinions. And how the Vietnamese people built a network of tunnels spanning over 200km to essentially outsmart the Americans. The first thing we saw in the forest like landscape was a small and concealed tunnel entrance, no wider than my hips and hidden by leaves over the top of the wooden 'lid' sort of thing. We all had the classic photos taken with us stranding in one of the original tunnels and then the guide said of we wanted to go through it, it was 5m long or something we could. Having spoken to a couple of people who had done it before, they'd told us that the tunnels had all been widened for western tourists and that they were lit, clean and with lots of exit points, so Kate and I volunteered to go in them. Kate went first and just as I was climbing I to the tunnel after her she came back to the entrance, even though they're only one way systems and desperate to get out. I climbed quickly out of the way and we got her out. She had said shed seen a bat and really didn't like it. I thought I'd still go down as I wanted to see them, having spent so much time in GCSE history studying them! I climbed in and immediately had to crouch very low to be able to fit through the tunnel. The walls were only as wide as my shoulders and they got very small pretty quickly, reducing me to hands and knees and then actually onto my front at one point. The tunnels were pitch black inside and tremendously hot and the ground was covered in leaves and dirt which freaked me out as I had no idea what kind of creepy crawlies I could be in such close proximity with, including snakes and the dreaded spiders! Kate was right about the bats as well, there were loads of then cocooned in their wings and hanging from the ceiling. At first I thought they were spiders too and my pace quickened with my heart rate and then as I shone the iPhone flash light in front of me it disturbed some of them and they started flying and swooping everywhere and I could feel them onto back... For a five meter tunnel it felt a hell of a lot longer! I had gotten to the point where I really wanted to get out and I realised I would have to just finish off the tunnel as I didn't know if anyone was behind me and I figured I must have been at least half way. I came to a fork in the tunnel almost straight after that which made me panic as the guide hadn't mentioned anything about a turning and I knew once I'd chosen one way or the other it would be near impossible to turn around in the narrow, shallow passageway. I took a guess to the left, you couldn't see sunlight or any sign of life along at the end of either paths and so I was jolly lucky that left was intact the correct way and as I rounded a right corner on my knees, I saw the sunlight and literally ran up the ladder to get out. The girls said I looked like I'd seen a ghost afterwards I was so pale and shaky. they asked me how it was obviously and all I could do was burst into tears, hyperventilate a little bit and have a mini panic attack! It took me a while to cool down, stop sweating and feel back to normal after that experience and I just felt really emotional when our guide wa talking about people living in those tunnels for upto ten years solidly in order to hide and shelter from the Americans and the war. It made me so sad and the tour guide said he had actually been born down in the tunnels which must have been quite harrowing and made the location quite pivotal for him. Walking through the forest, on paths following the tops of the tunnels, we learnt about how cooking could only be conducted late at night or early in the mornings below ground and several smoke chambers had to be built around the kitchen rooms which were still only just big enough to sit up in an some not even that, in order to stop the Americans noticing the smoke and also how they use to use perfumed soap by the air vents to the tunnels to disguise the smell of the Vietnamese, so that the sniffer dogs couldn't detect the tunnel locations. It was absolutely fascinating an the Vietnamese people were so resourceful and thought about every detail and really its no wonder they won in the end and really goes to show that its in the small things rather than just throwing brute force at something. I felt as though the forest was quite quiet bit as there was a shooting range on the estate where you could pay to fire any of the old AK47s etc and so it felt eerily similar to how it could have done oh so recently back then. We had the opportunity to go down another slightly longer tunnel and this was the one that had been widened for westerners, cleaned, lit and with exit points every 20m. I managed the first twenty metres but was quite scared that the tunnels would get a lot narrower again so all of us bailed apart from Kate, who made it to the end and said actually the didn't get thinner at all. After the tunnels we headed back to the hostel and ran around a little bit trying to find some lunch at close to 3pm. Al and I discovered a cute little cafe called Sozo, where she had a toasted cream cheese bagel and I had the best spring rolls in Asia! The others had gone to a Pho shop, beef soup, so neither Al nor I were keen. After that we got in a taxi to Siagon Square market and had a good onset around. It was annoying that all of the stall owners really wouldn't budge on their prices or negotiate and i didnt even give the tone of day to those who started too high in the first place. There were lots of Kipling, gap, banana republic and Abercrombie branded things and we actually wondered whether they were real, as otherwise it was an odd selection of brands to have. I brought an iPhone power pack which probably cost more that it should have done but it givens my iPhone an extra full battery charge, which is handy as it always goes on the busses etc.

Al decided not to come for dinner that night and by the time we had gotten back from the market it was quite late again, we went for a quick bagel over the road at Sozos and I made the girls order the incredible spring rolls and then we all had cake pudding - my chocolate brownie was the best I've had since being away! After dinner we went up the street a little where the locals every night set up little beer corners, with tiny plastic stools on the pavement and dirt cheap drinks - I had a G and T for less than £1 and it was alright! And the girls beers. All the chairs face the road and more are set on the opposite pavement facing out as well, creating an amphitheatre almost with everyone looking in on the road and the millions of things going on at once - a boy blowing fire, a moped crash, a blind begger, the police can driving down the street and the mad shuffle to get every chair stool and beer drinking local or backpacker on to the defined pavement space before they caught anyone. It was crazy! So much fun but I did cling to my bum bag as I didn't want to find myself as the next victim of a motorbike bag grab.

We had a nice lie in the following morning before heading to the war remnants museum after a peanut butter and rye bread sandwich at Sozos (again!) which was extremely emotional. It wasn't the usual museum set up, but more of a photographic gallery, all sorted by category. At the start we saw how the school children on north Vietnam we taught in class not only to read and write but also basic survival methods and how to help their parents who were at war. Then we moved on to a lot of propaganda posters and support from communist parties the world over for the VietCom and against the USA. It was easy to forget that the museums as funded by the Vietnamese communist party and therefore on many levels was extremely biased in the presentation of a lot of articles. Although even so, what the Americans did to the country of Vietnam, destroying everything in their path with either brutality or poisonous gases is pretty hard to sugar coat, whatever way you look at it. We saw pictures of the war in action, pictures of dead, beheaded or disembowelled men, women and children, terribly disabled and disfigured people from the napalm gas and also of young American soldiers, believing they were doing something for the good of the country but looking absolutely terrified still. It made me think a lot about my brother and how important something like that exhibition would be for him to see - the terror in their eyes and the distraction and depression they could cause. The army is not just boys playing with guns and metaphorically sacrificing themselves for their country but actually killing people and arghhh I got all choked up just thinking about it! It was pretty intense and we went to market afterwards and all walked around in a bit of a daze! I managed to pick up some toothpaste at a cheap price as I had run out and also a sleeping bag liner for Lora when she comes out in a few days time :) We were meant to meet Helen at the market but she didn't show up so we headed back to the hostel wondering if something had cropped up as was unable to contact us, as we had no wifi and she no phone. We found that the Indian visa office had Ben on the phone with her and she had then stayed with Al to help her submit her insurance claim email with details of what had happened. We all felt like we needed a bit of cheering up and thought it was only right that on our last evening of Vietnam we went for a curry at our favourite chain - Ganesh! We were starving and literally the second our bottoms touched the chairs we all bleeted our orders before even asking for any drinks! I had a very spicy mixed veg curry which was delish but was HOT! And some pilaw rice which was with saffron and vegetables and paneer cheese - so yummy! We demolished our food in silence and so so quickly it was unreal! Afterwards we all sat, so full and satisfied and happy but feeling like we needed to be rolled home to bed!

On our last morning Kate and I went in search of a pharmacy to get some pills for her thumb which had swollen up and was painful and to get some snacks for the bus journey we would be taking that afternoon to Phenom Penh, Cambodia. She Christa and Helen went for Pho one last time for lunch as well and I popped into Sozos to ask for a rye bead sandwich. It was the heat of the day again when we were walking with out backpacks in the sun to the travel agents where the boarder crossing bus would depart from. Ho Chi Minh city wasn't my favourite city, it was pretty hectic and I think we were all quite shaken by what happened to Al on the first night so we all had our guard up; the roads were crazy, with motorbikes just coming from every direction, with the only way to cross just to step out slowly and confidently and let the traffic weave around you and also the cleanliness of the city or lack of, no one likes seeing rats! Saigon was also the place where the language barrier between English and Vietnamese was the most prominent and frustrating, where we'd ask if someone had something and they'd say no, and then we'd ask again and they'd say yes of course - confusing!! I am ashamed as a sun worshipper to report too that I actually prefer a city not to be as hot and humid as HCMC, as the weather and heat exhausted us quickly and made us unmotivated to do too much walking or exploring! We shall see what Cambodia has to offer next...!