Back in ‘Nam’
Only 3 weeks until home time! Can’t believe the year is almost finished, but not quite yet still more countries to visit, things to see and lots more to buy. And Vietnam is a good place to go shopping! We arrived in Ho Chi Min, formally known as Saigon, in the evening and tried about 10 places before we found a room, a expensive room but with hot water. Ho Chi Min is a big busy city, lots to do and see, most of which we didn’t do. Had a full day in the city where we quickly learned the Vietnam road rules. Basically motorbikes never stop so you just walk out and they avoid you. Sounds simple right? But when faced with hundreds of motorbikes speeding past you and having to just step out in from of them, well its no so fun. Its really best to close your eyes and walk, really it’s the best way because if you stop then they’ll hit you! But we have survived thus far.
Crazy cheap food which off sets our expensive (OK well $5 each) hotel room, cheap markets where we went through all of our money within about 10 minutes and tailors for cheap, cheap dresses. So me and Tash both had a dress made. Also great fruit shakes and iced coffees for about 30 cents, Vietnam is good times!
Our last day in the south we headed on a full day tour out to the Cao Dai temple and the famous Cu Chi tunnels.
An interesting day, always fun times on group tours. We loaded into a bus with stickers to identify us, a long drive out to the weirdest temple for the weirdest religion of all time.Cao Dai is a weird religion, started in 1924 and is a mix of Catholisom, Buddahism, and Taoism. The worship Buddah, Jesus, Confusious and….Jules Verne, the French Novelist.
The Temple is a mix of a French Cathedral a Chinese pagoda and some sort of Vegas casino. colourful, psychedelic and just weird. The holy eye (left eye always) is everywhere, grape vines, and just other strange things decorate the outside. All the worshipers are dressed in long white white robes with the ‘higher’ people are either in Red for Catholic, Yellow for Buddahist or blue for Toaism. When it was time to go for the service we all filled in, different sides for men and women. The whole thing had turned into a bit of a tourist attraction so there was heaps of tourists gawking at the whole strange thing. We all went inside up to the balcony where the interior was even stranger than the exterior. Tinfoil stars were all over the roof and the pillars had giant snakes all over them. The service involved all the people standing in lines kneeling to bizarre music. The whole thing was just a bit surreal.
So after our religious education we were back on the bus, quick stop off for average over priced lunch, then on to the tunnels. They were built for the people of the Cu Chi area to hide from the Americans and to fight them. Its kind of the ‘thing to do’ in Vietnam. Started off with an introduction video, can’t imagine it going down with Americans in the audience.
Obviously a very very old video that hasn’t been updated to a more PC version.
Cue peaceful village scenes “The happy Cu Chi people lived in harmony until the evil Malicious Americans destroyed their way of life. The people nowhere near Washington, yet the devil worshiping Americans murdered the innocent people” and so on and so on. Showing pictures of hero’s awarded for how many Americans they killed. Hilarious. Well we thought so, not sure the other people actually got how incredibly blatant it was. So after the movie we went through the forest dotted with holes from B-52 bombs, traps set for the ‘evil Americans’. I don’t know what sort of people think up these sort of traps. Holes that you step in with massive spikes in them and other awful maiming type things. Clearly some of the people on the tour were a wee bit more into war than we were. One guy ( A NZder actually) was decked out with gloves, a head torch and cargo pants. He was jumping down all the tunnels and rolling around in the dirt, climbing over the old tanks taking photos. No surprise we lost him at the shooting range were you could pay a few bucks and fire off a few rounds of a machine gun. The actual tunnels are this massive network all over the area that the soldiers lived in for months on end, the ones we climbed through were 3 times larger than usual, only 50 meters long and had lights through them. Its hard to believe that people could actually get through tunnels smaller than we were in, we came out dirty and sweaty and pretty over it after 10 minutes. SO don’t think I would have been too good in war time. So back to the city and straight away jumped on an overnight bus up the coast to a beach town called Nha Trang for some more sun.
Tags: blogsherpa, cao-dai, ho-chi-min, Travel, Vietnam, war
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