Is it Ho Chi Minh City or is it Saigon? If you're in an airport or looking at a street sign, it's Ho Chi Minh City...if you're talking to anyone, looking in a brochure or pretty much anything else, it's still Saigon. Either way, that's where we spent our first three nights in Vietnam.
The very first thing we noticed was that traffic here is reminiscent of Bali, with motorbikes dominating the roads.
I'm not sure whether the traffic was lighter than Bali or if we're just getting used to it, but crossing the streets in Vietnam didn't seem nearly as daunting as in Indonesia.
Our first full day in Vietnam we took a three-hour bus ride to the Mekong River where we boarded a thatched-roofed boat.
We drifted through a floating market...
And made our first stop at a honeybee farm where we sampled some honey tea and Royal Jelly (jelly created by the worker bees for the queen bee that enables her to live almost four times as long as the other bees).
We then walked around the corner to a rice factory where we saw workers create rice paper...
Delicious coconut-rice candy...
Rice cakes...
And even rice wine!
The boat then took us across the river past rice paddies and fish farms to a small village where we enjoyed a traditional Vietnamese lunch. After the meal, we returned to the river to discover that our boat was gone! In its place were a bunch of women in row boats waiting to escort us to our next stop.
Our lady even gave us conical hats!
The hats came in handy because it was HOT! I have no idea how she got four of us 500 meters down the river in that heat...in long sleeves and long pants no less! She did it though, and dropped us back at our boat, which then transported us back to a market on the mainland.
The smell was pungent and the fare was often unsightly...
Let's just say that these snakes and eels were much easier on the nose and eyes than a lot of the other stuff!
That night we each enjoyed a bowl of pho (soup) at a restaurant near our hotel in the Pham Ngu Lau area of the city.
Kelly wasn't feeling well for our second full day in Vietnam, so I trudged on solo! In the morning I took a bus to the Cu Chi Tunnels, an elaborate network of tunnels, three levels in depth and spanning over 200 kilometers! The tunnels were used extensively in what we refer to as the Vietnam War (it obviously is not referred to as such here: I've most frequently heard the "Vietnamese-American War" and the "War of American Aggression"). The intricacies of the tunnels were fascinating. From the entrances...
(this is about six inches wider than usual, by the way)...
To the air holes...
The booby traps...
To the holes for smoke to escape from the kitchens.
For the sake of tourists (read "fat Americans"), they created entrances with stairs and enlarged/fortified the tunnels.
That afternoon, Kelly (sort of) and I went to the War Remnants Museum. Between the museum and the tunnels, it was very interesting to see a very different perspective of the war. On the whole, Ho Chi Minh City...or Saigon...was a very interesting, fast-paced place, but now it's off to the land of Ho Chi Minh himself: Hanoi!
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