Asian Adventure (Part VII)

The first day in Ho Chi Minh City we set off on Lonely Planet's suggested walking tour, it quoted 6 hours, just right to see the city's sights and easily achievable by us young types in a day. The map led us to the bein tanh market, a warren of delights such as weasel coffee interspersed with stomach churning smells from fish and meat stalls (I'm still unsure how most natives aren't extinguished at a young age by a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning, if some of the examples of why passes for food hygiene I've seen are anything to go by...).

Continuing on we headed for lunch despite the best efforts of Lonely Planet's cartographers (marking it in different but equally inaccurate positions on two separate maps) we eventually found Quon An Ngon restaurant. The brainchild of a Vietnamese entrepreneur and gastronome, this restaurant takes the best street food vendors and arranges them around a beautifully decorated restaurant but still charges near street prices.

Afterwards we headed onwards with the tour to the War Remnants museum - a 'must see' of HCMC. The courtyard in front of the museum proudly displays various captured American aircraft and armoured vehicles. A brief but shocking exhibit talked of the shocking conditions North Vietnamese 'Patriot' prisoners were kept in by the Americans and the Southern 'lackeys' (no mention of how the north treated their prisoners but I'm guessing not 5 star luxury suites...). We then continued to the 'Historical Truths' exhibit to get a grounding on the war's history - again this was tainted by a most unsubtle 'history is written by the victor' syndrome. Even the boards around the American produced exhibition celebrating and commemorating the War's press photographers were infected it seems the North Vietnamese had 'martyr photographer comrades' while the rest of the world merely had journalists who were killed... Despite that, the photography exhibit really was stunning. It brought home the realities of the war and giving some insight into the lives of those who covered it.

Before we knew it, it was 5pm and the museum was closing. Though we had been out all day, we had barely completed a third of the walking tour. We decided to leave the independence palace until the next day. Instead we headed for a quick look at the catholic cathedral and pick up some stamps in the post office. An impressive building, vast maps of Vietnam and the Mekong Delta adorned the wall and beautiful telephone booths (some converted for ATMs) lined the lobby. Afterwards we went for a (rather expensive) cocktail on the 24th floor of the Sheraton hotel with a friend of Fred's who we had met, by chance, at the war remnants museum.

That evening we went out to take advantage of Vietnam's famously cheap beers- bottles starting at 10000 VND ($0.5 or ~30p). The next day we were up at the crack for a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels a short way outside HCMC. We really got lucky with our tour guide, he was a Vietnamese officer in the US Navy, and gave us an as near to balanced account as can be hoped for. Indeed he stood and told us how the North Vietnamese Soldiers were superior to his American comrades at jungle fighting and explained why the American tactics were inferior. The tour was great, weaving through the jungle, scrambling on tanks, squeezing into sniper holes and crawling through tunnels. Fred even took the opportunity to pay to shoot a M1 Carbine.