We've arrived into Saigon...as we get off the coach we're once again surrounded by groups of men trying to sell us a hotel room or taxi ride to the centre. When you've just been on a coach for over 8 hours, the last thing you want is hassle! It's hard not to sound rude when you answer back, but you really just want to be left alone and get to the guesthouse as quick as possible. We had picked a hotel called 'Kim's' from the Lonely Planet which sounded cheap and was on the main 'Koh San Rd' of Saigon. A guy approached us with a business card for 'Kims' saying he knew where it was and could take us there. He kept mentioning his home was nearby, we certainly didn't want to get taken to his home, so we went into a travel agents along the road we had been dropped at to get directions - about 10 minutes walk. So we set off carrying our backpacks in the direction she had pointed us. We had the same guy who had tried to direct us first of all, trying to follow us to the gusethouse - CREEPY! The hotel was a shop on the ground level, didn't look anything like the pictures we'd seen on the Internet a few days before..still it was $12 per night so $6pppn. We were in a central location, so accepted the room. Little did we know that the a/c didn't work, the sink had no water pipe, so when washing your hands or brushing your teeth - everything just fell on your feet! Hmm...maybe $6 isn't so great, should be more like $2 for the state the room was in. We know to check everything before accepting a room next time! We had suspicions that the guesthouse was more than just a 'shop' downstairs, on the 2 floors below us were 'massage' rooms...hmm That evening we went to a Vietnamese restaurant, very cute with small wooden tables and cushions on benches with lanterns dangled around the walls and ceiling. I had noodles with lemongrass and chili tofu -HOT! Very yummy, but perhaps a bit too much chili. I'd read in the guidebook that tofu and lemongrass is a very popular Vietnamese dish. Lucy had spaghetti. About 20 mins after eating Lucy came over really sick. We decided to head back to the guesthouse, but just as we did a massive downpour of rain came on for about half an hour, so we sat in the entrance sipping some free green tea (gross) and waited for the rain to calm down. We got back to Kim's and for the next 24 hours Lucy was really ill. I became quite worried about her throughout the night, she was really pale and weak constantly being sick. We thought it was possibly food poisoning as it came on so quickly. I managed to sleep but was aware she wasn't well so kept waking up to check on her, I think she spent most of her night in the bathroom bless her. I remember waking at one point in the night to hear her crying my name, she was in such a bad state, I asked her if she needed anything and she replied 'My Mum!'. 22.10.10 The next morning, we had booked to go on a tour to the Cu Chi Tunnels. Our Vietnamese tour guide had really bad English, he spoke ridiculously fast so was hard to understand what he was saying most of the time! Bit unfortunate when the history of the Cu Chi Tunnels was really interesting. We were shown the Vietnamese traps - some looked really lethal, once stood on their hole body would be trapped between metal spikes and there would be no way of survival!
We had the opportunity to go down into the tunnels, unfortunately Lucy was still really ill and weak so had to sit out of this bit. I decided to go down with some others from our tour group. The tunnels have since been made slightly bigger to enable westerners to fit inside them, for me they were still tiny and claustrophobic. The first set of tunnels were 45M long and went up to over 100M long. It was 2 metres below ground level and very stuffy...with small lamps every metre or so fitted onto the wall, it wasn't very easy to see where I had to go. I got about half way and had to stop, my breathing became a bit wheezy and my heart was going crazy - do I really want to do this. Either I carry on and get out at 45 metres or I go back (which would be hard considering there was a Que of people behind me)...so I carried on, crawling on my hands and knees wishing that I would see daylight any minute and a ladder to climb back up to the top! Luckily just round the corner I saw daylight and darted out of the tunnel as quick as I could! I'm glad I managed it, but any longer and I would have been panicking!