Sayonara Saigon

It’s Tuesday, March 19th but we’re going to do a little time traveling in this blog post...all the way back to March 15 and our first day in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam (okay, time travelling just means I got lazy and didn’t blog, sorry).

 

Ho Chi Minh took Carlyn and I by surprise.  While similarly-sized Asian cities thus far have been

crowded, dangerous (watch out for that motorbike!), and claustrophobic - HCM was the complete opposite!  Okay, maybe that’s a stretch...HCM is relatively more “westernized” in its appearance but it still has the occasionally nauseating musk and shoddy infrastructure we’ve come to adore from our Asian travels.

 

A few highlights from our time in HCM:

Day 1:

Reunification Palace

After fueling up at ABC Bakery, we proceeded to walk to many of HCM’s historical sites.  Stops included the Reunification Palace (where communist tanks rolled in to end the Vietnam War and depose the S. Vietnamese gov’t), the Old Post Office (go figure, it looks like an old post office), and Vietnam’s first Starbucks - opened only 1 month ago!  Our final stop was at the War Remnants Museum which, like most museums we’ve visited in Vietnam, had a heavy dose of anti-US propaganda and half-truths that makes you sick to see tourists ingesting.  A heavy rainstorm forced us into a Gloria Jean’s coffee shop for 2 hours in the afternoon...no complaints, we enjoy our afternoon brew and pastry.

 

Day 1 ended with an INCREDIBLE dinner at Skewers! (the exclamation point is part of the name...but well deserved).  We had some of the best eggplant parmesan ever and a fantastic gyros. Yummers.

 

Day 2:  A pretty lazy day by most accounts.  Walked to the FITO Museum in the morning.  The museum details the history of Vietnamese - and Asian more broadly - medicine dating back to the 11th century.  We learned a lot about traditional herbs and remedies and saw a lot of traditional pottery and medical equipment.  Very interesting and well worth a visit.  Our afternoon included a low-key nap and work out at the Sheraton.  Dinner at an old opium factory in downtown HCM...we got some great tilapia & pineapple with friend rice.

 

In front of a wall of traditional Vietnamese medicinal herbs!

Notre Dame Cathedral - HCMC

Day 3: Woke up and went to the famous Notre Dame cathedral in city center for Sunday mass. Church was packed in the morning and stifling hot despite all the fans blowing.  A beautiful church, however, with a great choir...it was nice.  That afternoon, we caught a bus to the Cu Chi tunnels!!  A sprawling network of tunnels 60km northwest of HCMC.  We had a great tour guide (Luan) who gave us a factual account of the lives of Viet Cong militia who lived in these tunnels for decades during the war.  Luan showed us a lot of improvised booby trap devices used by the Viet Cong and led us through a segment of the tunnel - only ~3 feet high and sweltering hot.  Carlyn and I couldn’t stand it for 30 seconds much less 10 years!  The trip was fascinating and a sobering reminder of how cunning and deceptive the Vietnamese guerrillas were and how destructive war can be on the human psyche.  Carlyn and I have been reading as many books and articles about the Vietnam War while we’ve been here to try and get a better understanding of this pivotal period in time.  Seeing the Cu Chi tunnels was an appropriate capstone to this 2-week long history lesson.

 

Our 100lb guide - Luan - emerging from a tiny Viet Cong tunnel 

Horrible picture of Carlyn shuffling through the Cu Chi tunnels

That’s about it from Ho Chi Minh/Saigon.  In all, a great last stop to wrap up our Vietnam travels.  Fast forward to present day and we just arrived in Hong Kong for a quick 58 hour excursion.  So far, we LOVE Hong Kong...but I’ll leave that for another post.