Saigon turned out to be a very nice city, and the people there were extremely welcoming and didn't really care if you were an American. We did a couple Vietnam War related excursions there. We went to the War Remnants Museum which was anti-American and really went into the Agent Orange drops. Overall it was a good museum, but didn't show any of the misdeeds the VC perpetrated, which was annoying. It wasn't like the Hiroshima Museum that explains war is bad and no one is in the right. Yet after going to North Vietnam I can see the people there setting up a museum like this. We also went to the tunnels that some of the VC lived in throughout the war and saw some of the traps they used.
The tunnels were made bigger for tourists, but were still very very very small. The tunnel you can go into ran for 100 yards and only 2 people out of our group made it all the way through. I seriously don't understand how they could live in those tunnels for 15 years.
This was one of the traps they used, and it wasn't even the worse kind. They were all meant to maim and slow down a group. One of the biggest reasons these tunnels were so important was that the American brass decided to make the main airfield outside Saigon right over them, which allowed the VC to pop out of the ground and surprise our troops.The only other thing we did around Saigon was go on a tour of the Mekong Delta. Which was very touristy. We rode in little paddle boats, wore stupid hats, held a boa, went to a coconut candy shop, and went for a donkey ride in the jungle. This was actually pretty cool and fun trip, and the best part was the entire day trip cost 7$. Vietnam was the cheapest country I've ever been to, but you really had to barter over every little thing, and it got really bad in the North as the people just tried to rip off every non-North Vietnamese (we even ran into a SV couple who got ripped real bad on the Ha Long Bay tour just b/c their accent was different). Everyone I spoke to didn't like the NV as a people.
We flew into Hanoi and it was a very pretty city with old French architecture and a pretty lake in the middle of it. The best part of the city was the Pho, which was extremely cheap and delicious. Another cool this was they had homemade beer and they would put out little chairs on the sidewalk for people to come and drink, but other than that there wasn't much to do there.
I am told this is the lake the John McCain parachuted into when he was captured. There is also a terrapin that lives in the lake and that island in the middle is a temple dedicated to them.The best part of Hanoi was going to Ha Long Bay. It was a little scary because we went six days after one of the boats went down and 11 people drowned on it. Alex was nervous, and woke me up in the middle of the night when the engine turned on to reposition the boat. But I felt that was probably the safest time ever to go because Vietnam would lose a lot of money if another boat went down (I also think this would be a good time to fly Southwest). The highlights of the cruise was kayaking around the islands, watching how the people lived on the water and sold food to tourists, and going through the two big caves.
After getting back to Hanoi we decided to take the sleeper bus to Laos. WORST BUS EVER. Instead of lying about the AC they lied about having a bathroom. 25 hours without a bathroom! Good thing they stopped a bunch.
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