saigon

So to Saigon via Da Nang airport – like a bus station but smaller. Ian and I have both been to Saigon before so we didn’t redo a lot of the main tourist things. It’s just a nice city to walk around with pleasant cafes and tree lined boulevards. In the evening we met up with our friend Sean, who has been working here for the last two years. He took us to the latest hotspots. Saigon is on the up and up and I noticed the streets seemed a lot bigger even than a year ago – major traffic jams now at rush hour, with noticeably more cars (mostly flashy 4WD Lexuses and Land Cruisers). Someone is obviously making money here – but the two wheeled culture will not last much monger at this rate.
We visited the Ku Chi tunnels just outside Saigon and saw the amazing lengths to which the Viet Cong went to evade the colonial and later the American powers. There were huge networks of tunnels, sometimes on several levels, with spaces for all the functions of a guerrilla army, built over decades. We crawled through a claustrophobic section (specially widened for foreigners – the Viet Cong being somewhat leaner than most of us westerners) and I was glad to get out after two minutes.