Saigon--Ho Chi Minh City. Full of history of the war, in which first the French then the Americans managed to lose the peace after winning most of the battles. But now, 27 years after the tanks crashed through the gates of the southern Presidential palace and 57 years after Ho Chi Minh invited ONLY the USA to his independence celebration (and here's a poster telling the Viet Minh to be nice to American airman in 1945). Saigon has gone back to being a capitalist haven, complete with competing camera shops (This girl sold me new SD disks), and pre-war Citroens used as taxis, in this case by a former ARVN army capatin who did 2 years re-education after 1975. I took the standard visits to the war museum (Lots on American and French brutality, not so much about how the Viet Cong weren't exactly using kid-gloves, see this American's version), the Re-Unification Palace (full set of photos) , and the Chu Chi tunnels (full set of photos) about 60 miles out of Vietnam. Crawling around in the dark was pretty claustrophobic and you sweat very quickly. Yet whole villages lived and mostly died down there in 250 Kms of tunnels that the Americans could contain but never completely wipe out. The same day trip takes in the very odd Coau Dai temple....which is a bizarre mix of every eastern religion, with Victor Hugo as a major saint. Plus in the 1950s it had its own army! (Full Caou Dai set is here)
After buying a gazillion pirated CDs for 70 cents each, I bought a 30$ fake Sony CD walkman, that immeditely went wrong on the bus to Dalat--the center of French "culture" in Vietnam but now an adventure sport center. More on hanging around (literally) with Geordies, Israelis, Dutch and Americans in the next episode!
