Final Destination: Saigon

The bus to Saigon was our last long bus ride and was fairly uneventful except for one girl being sick. She nearly made it out of the bus but threw up on the steps.

We arrived in Saigon at about 6 and headed to the place where we had agreed to meet with Shana and Fernando. Unfortunately we picked up a moto driver and he followed us in and exchanged a few words with the owner in Vietnamese and told us there weren't any rooms left. We found out later that it wasn't.

He continued to follow us around and so we ducked into the next place quickly and said straight away that he wasn't with us. It took a few hours for them to get a room ready but we went to an internet cafe for a bit first then checked in. Dave crashed for a while and I headed out for a walking tour of Saigon.

Our hotel was on Phang Ngu Lao which is the backpacker haunt in Saigon and has lots of small alleys off various streets with hostels, tailors and shops selling all kinds of stuff. Saigon was very active by now and I was getting the usual 'moto?' requests. The road ended at a large roundabout with a statue of Tran Nguyen Hai who is a Vietnamese hero. The other side was Ben Thanh markets, a big old style building where you could buy just about anything and I bought nothing cos I've got no money left. Ok, a little.

From there I wandered up towards the central district (called district 1) and to the Ho Chi Minh Museum. It had a few war remnants in the courtyard including an A-1 and a Huey. There was a wedding going on - well the wedding photos anyway but the museum was still open although I had to change direction a few times to avoid being in some of the happy couple's snaps. The museum was a history of Vietnam with a lot of historic artifacts but with a focus (unsurprisingly) on the French and American wars. I even got stopped by an old Vietnamese guy who wanted his picture taken with me. The perils of being famous!!

After the museum I wandered towards Notre Dame cathedral which was made of red brick and so wasn't that impressive and the main post office which was very impressive. Old colonial style and all that. I slowly wandered back to the hotel and woke Dave up at this point.

After lunch we headed to the Presidential palace which was where the VC tanks crashed through the gates famously in 1975 after the American withdrawal. Most of the palace remains just as it was in 1975. The first floor was mainly reception rooms (different ones for domestic guests and for international guests and they looked pretty much the same. Oh the extravangancies...) Other floors had a games room and a cinema. On the rooftop was another Huey (the Americans seem to have left a lot behind) and two markers from a direct hit by a VC bomber.

We then headed to the War Remnants Museum (previously called the American and Chinese War Crimes Museum). This was on a par with S-21 and the Killing Fields as a traumatic experience. The first exhibition was about the journalists who covered the war, many of whom lost their lives doing so. There were some phenomenal photos including the famous photo of the girl just after a Napalm attack and a family trying to swim for safety. One I hadn't seen before was a plane about to crash.

The courtyard was full of tanks, planes and, you've guessed it, a Huey.

There was another exhibition full of photos of victims of the war - mainly disfigured by Agent Orange. It was yet another harrowing experience and we were very down leaving the museum reflecting on everything we'd seen.