Tour People

"I think we all need to not see each other for the next5 hours."

Morgan is probably right, so I came to the internet while the Luce gang naps in hammocks. We are in Cambodia, but I want to write about Vietnam. A lot has happened in our first week, and the brief time we spent in Vietnam (though fortunately not as brief as our first attempt) is worth sharing about.

We became tour people on the first day in Saigon, and haven't looked back. The one thing we wanted to see in Saigon was the Cu Chi tunnels; the huge underground network where the Viet Cong entrenched itself just outside Saigon. There was actually an American base only 5 kms away!



We completely lucked out on our tour guide: He was a war veteran who fought for the south ("that's why I have no pension"), so his stories were great and his perspective priceless. You could really tell that he wasn't worried about saying something that would get him into trouble. In the above picture he is showing us sandals made from tire and tubes.

After the war his family was moved out of the city and forced to farm rice for ten years or so. When the Cold War melted under the new glasnost policies in the USSR, Vietnam followed suit, and our guide returned to Saigon and eventually became a tour guide. That English came in quite handy after all! Economically, I honestly can't tell what about Vietnam is actually socialist. Unless socialist simply means that there is only one party and you can't vote. Anyway...



The tunnels themselves were quite interesting. My favorite part was actually going in the tunnels, which have been widened to let western tourists through. It's still quite a squeeze though, at one point it was a downhill belly crawl! I'm pretty sure the original idea was that you would have to be Vietnamese to squeeze into those tunnels.



There was also a display of booby traps, an American tank (can you see Mitchell?), and a shooting range where you could fire anything from an AK47 to an M80. $1 per bullet. Sidenote: Here in Cambodia you can chuck a live grenade for $30, and while it's tempting, I'm not trusting my life to Pol Pot's 30 year old leftovers.



Let's move on to the next day. Mitch was excited to boat on the Mekong, so we booked a three day, 2 night tour that started in Saigon and ended in Phnom Penh. Under $50. Booyah. It was a great trip. I felt that we really got to see what the life of people in the Mekong Delta was like, from rice factories to floating markets to coconut candy to tropical orchards. On the last day we spent about 7 hours in a small boat heading up river into Cambodia. We stayed close to the banks and just observed. It was a wonderfully relaxing birthday. The best way for me to express how great it was it to show you the pictures. Here are a few of my favorites, there are many more on our flickr site (just click on a photo and it will take you there):


Rice paper drying in the sun


Loading melons to sell in Can Tho


Climbing on a "monkey bridge"in a fruit orchard


Huge spider

I'll post more pictures when I get them uploaded, and fill you in on Angkor Wat in the next couple days. Peace!