Good morning Vietnam!!!

Haha - sorry about the title, so cheesy but so hard to resist!

We've been here 8 days and covered three very different areas: First Saigon, big city, moto madness with a power cable sky; then Mui Ne, a stunning little fishing village grown by the tourist industry into a halfway there resort destination; and now Dalat, way up in the mountains, a refreshingly cool, clean, forested town with coffee plantations, and vineyards galore- bliss.
So - first Saigon, we spent our time divided between city exploring and war history.

The city was like a cross between Singapore and Bangkok. Clean and green in many parts like Singapore with actual, walkable sidewalks unlike most of Cambodia, and spacious parks on every few blocks, but also chaotic like BKK with the famed motorbike mania, and where biggest cars on the road gets the right of way.

Still a lot of poor people about but not half as many as BKK or 1/4 as many as Cambodia. Their tactics were different too. Instead of straight begging they offered packs of gum or packs of tissues in exchange. Maybe this made it legal practise so they could enter the retaurant and approach you mid mouthful, which they did. Don't know. What was new was women carrying their kids while begging as a heartstring yanker. Argh.

So on the war side of things we covered two tourist destinations, the Cu Chi tunnels and the War Remnants Museum.

The Museum was hard going, particularly the section on chemical weapons. Agent Orange, Phospherous and Napalm. The graphic photos of the effects are no short of horrific. To use weapons like those is a kind of heartlesness I am scared to admit exists, and seeing the effect on the people made me angry, nauseus and sad at once. I don't know if it has phappened already but I hope the US has recognised and apologised for what they did and are effectively still doing here, due to residual chemicals, and also beyond Vietnam, scattered over the border into Laos and Cambodia.

Napalm, Agent Orange, Phosperuos and Cluster bombs rained down on VC guerillas, civillians and neighbouring countries alike during the war . The effects are still felt today, with those that still bear the scars, walking the streets I saw, but also with birth defects from Agent Orange and ecosystem damage predicted to last for hundreds of years to come. Disgusting.
We also visited the Cu Chi tunnels, crawled through some, saw the bamboo traps, B52 bomb craters, heard guns cracked off by enthusiastic tourists (not us), and watched some genuine propoganda videos from the 1960's. Brett, you would have loved the Life Aquatic style backing music to this, I of course filmed some for you.

The tunnels were amazing. We were standing there chatting to the guide about the tunnels, and she asked, 'where do you think they are?' I smartly pointed to the ground, like derr, right under our feet, she conceeded, then asked 'but how do you enter?'...we looked round, could see the widened openings with step ladders for the tourists and pointed to those. She grinned, kicked the dirt from under her feet to expose a very very small wood lid. It was about the length of my shoulders and the width of my forearm. (photo to come). wow. She lept in, then Andy, then me. Easy going in, awkward coming out as you need to put your arms up to get out, or your shoulders will be too broad.

I then witnessed a worst nightmare come true... everyone was giving the hole a go, and lots of the girls worried they wouldnt fit. there was one, genuinly concerned but the guide encouraged her she'd be fine. she wasnt. she got stuck!

It was horrible, going in was ok, but as she tried to get out she got jammed. She started freaking in that so very awkard joking manner, half laughing, half shrieking about her 'damned fat ass' and profusely apologising to everyone for holding them up. it was hard to watch and hard to resist the little red guy on my shoulder pushing me to take a photo! in the end, Andy and a ex US soldier turned bagel eating bohemith yanked her out using her pants as wedgy leverage. she wont be forgetting that in a hurry, poor gal!

The propaganda here is subtle to the Vietnamese I imagine, but rings clear for us. One of the stories we heard from our passionate, freindly and oh so eccentric tour guide was: '2 million American Imperialists were killed at the Cu Chi tunnels!' .... We found this strange and questioned this with her at the time only to have it repeated back to us, strange because only 1.4 million millitary personel were killed in total during the entire Vietnam War, and 6% of this figure were US troops. I also felt the propoganda vibe at the War Remnants Museum where they exposed the torture and massacres the US carried out on the VC which is something that should be brought to light and remebered but I couldnt help but feel uncomfortable with the one sided natureof the story telling.

YUCK YUCK YUCK

I know that I am just a babe in the woods and know little about what went on here which is a good thing for my sanity, and too hard to imagine anyway. But what has resounded for me both in early days in Vietnam and throughout my Cambodia experience is that we are a scary, ruthless species when driven to it. I keep thinking to myself, wow, how could this have happened, how could someone make that decision, or phsically do that, but at the same time having waves of realisation that it is still happening all over the world in different manners in diferent stories, that are talked about like histories.

Nicer post coming soon, promise. We're off on a hired moto today to explore Dalat today. Going to check out some coffee plantations and waterfalls.There are loads of tours, even our lovely hotel manager offeringto take us on a private tour of his village but due to our budget and and our desire to get away from the tourist buses and regimented timetables will opt for independant moto travel.

Andy - the enigma at the mo - is considering posting at some point soon. I can report he's loving the trip and is particulrly excited about Dalat. Within a few minutes of being here he was trying to figure out an extra day into our schedule to stay here longer. it's funny, in our last days in Cambodia we were both feeling like skipping Vietnam and going straight to Jordan as we were feeling like a big change but now we realise there is so much to see here and so little time!

I have a ridiculous amount of photos to upload but not computer fit enough to upload them.

Oh and thanks for the comments I can see have been posted but frustratingly I cant view them. Dont know whats going on but I can post using the back end of this site but I cant view my blog....ever since we hit Vietnam. strange eh.