After having breakfast we sat and waited for the 8.30 tour bus along with 4 American girls on the same tour as us. When the guide turned up and we got up to go on of the girls st reception came over and asked if we were going on the tour today, which we replied yes. We actually booked it the day we arrived, checked on that day twice that it had been done then checked again plus the timings the day after, twice. She looked a little panicked and went to speak to the guide....we thought we wouldn't get onto this tour because they'd clearly forgotten to book us on. Luckily the guide arranged it so we could go (all of this being done in the corner but it was obvious what had happened!) and away we went. The bus was full, we couldn't sit together and we had clearly taken up the last seats because the guide stood the whole 2 hours!
Luckily the guide was brilliant, he was really funny and made the journey very informative and entertaining. We learned more in the time on that bus about Vietnam than we have in the last 3 weeks. We've discussed before today how disappointed we are that we've not really been immersed in the culture as we were in Nepal, it's been great and we love it but its been very touristy. When people talk about the "well trodden tourist route of Vietnam" they're not exaggerating, it really is just a tourist track and feels like its been more of a holiday rather than what we're here for which is the culture. In Nepal we learned a lot of the language, here we know hello and Thankyou...we havnt needed any more than that and besides, there's been nobody around to teach us more even if we wanted! I spoke to the girl sitting next to me about the whole thing and she felt exactly the same and had had the same problem. She had managed to get to somewhere "off the track" but it had been a nightmare with 3 separate tour agents refusing to help her go anywhere other than the main tourist places due to it being dangerous and also difficult to get to. She ended up having to take several buses completely alone and having a terrifying couple of days with nobody speaking a word of English and no real help to guide her through the whole thing.
Anyway we learned a few things from the guide that we had been wondering about since getting here. Firstly we learned why there are so many karaoke clubs, it being due to the fact that Japan had full control of Vietnam for a number of years and they brought it over! It's stayed because they all love it, nobody can go on holidays, a lot of people can't really afford to go to the cinema very often so most people karaoke, a lot. Talking of holidays he told us a story of one of the tour group with a couple and their 3 young children about 3 years ago, and the man suffered a stroke on the bus on the way to the tunnels. So he had to think quick and managed to call an ambulance and get stuff sorted for the tour to go on without him so he could go with the family to the hospital. He babysat their children for a while and general stayed around to help and translate etc. 3 weeks later they returned to oz, paying a bomb to get him back due to his multiple problems due to the stroke. A few weeks later he was contacted by the family asking him to visit them in Australia, they would pay all his costs and he could stay with them for free. "Great!" He thought, and straight away updated his Facebook....Melbourne here I come! " within half an hour I had over 100 likes on my comment!" We'll...considering nobody ever really goes on holiday here I can believe it. Anyway his hopes were dashed. It turns out despite them paying for EVERYTHING, if you're poor here you simply cannot leave the country. You have to deposit 7k US dollars into the Vietnamese system for them to keep until you return, to guarantee your return. With an average wage of 8 dollars a day that just isn't possible.....so only the rich get to leave vietnam. I don't think he's given up just yet though!
Secondly we learned why on earth a lot of the men have that one long little fingernail I mentioned about all those weeks ago in Nepal. It's because of feng shui. He showed us that on a mans left hand, if his little finger is below the last joint crease (distal interphalangeal joint to any of my study friends reading this!) of the ring finger then it predicts a short life. Same for women but on the right hand. And so if its shorter many people grow that fingernail so it's longer to lengthen their life! It's also the same for a lot of people wearing these odd rings we've seen from time to time. If you hold your hand up (left for men right for women) with fingers together, if there are any gaps in between the fingers it means you will be short on money in your life. So they buy rings to fill in the gaps!
We also learned why so many places have things written in Russian as well as English and Vietnamese. We assumed it was due to a rise in tourism from those key groups but he informed us it was to do with when the Soviet Union had control over Vietnam (which call us stupid we had NO idea about!). They got the French out after the hundred years or whatever of them being in control, to then be in the grasp of the Russians for their help...or at least that's what I took from what he said. I think he said they were linked with soviet Russia for 20 years or so and in those years everybody had to speak Russian and what happened in Russia happened in Vietnam. The guide, chi, who is 35 told us of how when he was a boy they learned russian at school, were on food and clothes rations and how all the boys in his family shared one pair of shoes and one shirt to take turns to go out. Then somewhere down the line that ended and the war with America began. Then after THAT they were attacked by Cambodia in the south and I think Korea? From the north....I have a very limited understanding of all this political and war stuff so it's all only half of what he said but hopefully I've not got it all completely wrong and I've learned something. Either way I'm certain the Vietnamese have had it pretty hard!!
He spoke of the war a bit, of some cultural things to do with Vietnam and generally kept us entertained on the bus. We stopped for a "bathroom break" which was one of the typical obviously pre planned " oh you might as well go into this store whilst you're here and we will get commission on what you buy!" kind of deal. However this one was actually interesting! It was a lacquer workshop and all of the workers were disabled in some way. They were all sat at work benches, each with their own stage to do in the process. Some were making black board by spreading emollient stuff on it and letting it dry. Some were drawing basic drawings with chalk on the boards ready for others to begin working their magic. They were using different colour paints, silicon leaf, egg shells. All done bit by bit and left to dry before adding more layers and more colours along with varnish. Each layer needs to be dried and polished before adding the next and they can polish certain parts more to bring out certain colours, and scrape certain parts to make different textures. Is all so interesting and they put so much time into each piece. We went into the show room....I could have spent a LONG time in there, and I'm sure Liam feels the same way. The work was beautiful and so many varying things that they've made from pictures, pots, inlayed chopsticks and combs, coasters, jewellery boxes....it was all so great! We ended up buying a picture made from layers of egg shell, a little naughty to spend that money but its a complete original and we loved the place. We were also swayed by the fact that it was disabled people making it all, ive got the impression the disabled arent as well cared for here as they are at home, even though a lot are disabled from land mines and the effects of agent orange. So it was lovely to see them employed and making a living. We asked for a business card to look them up online....but they charge 150 dollars to send anything to the uk so maybe that won't be happening!
We then travelled the remaining half hour or so to cu chi tunnels. It was really interesting and we're very glad we went. There are over 200km of underground tunnels connecting the cu chi area to saigon and they were used during the war for communicating between each other, sending supplies and shelter of the cu chi people. From what I understood during this period the north Vietnamese were communist, the south were republican and the cu chi were sin between people refusing to pick a side. They were a simple people who were villagers and farmers brought into the war simply because their land was attacked and bombed. The video they showed was a pretty old video and wad surprisingly one sided, and very bitter against the Americans...probably understandably but still we're not used to that kind of stuff back home I guess. At one point the Americans were referred to as "devils", it said they were "intent on destroying a peaceful land" and people wernt just awarded medals for being a war hero they were awarded medals for being "American killers"! Afterwards one of the guides did a short talk and more or less said he understood it was very biased, and told it from a slightly less unbiased point of view even though he was there and part of the war.
The tunnels were used by the Viet cong guerrillas during the war and they played a massive part in resisting the American troops. The Americans were aware of the tunnels but apparently they were so well protected and such a clever network that they never managed to infiltrate them. They would drop bombs to no avail due to there being 3 different levels and very deep. They would try to gas them out which again, didn't work due to the different levels and they just retreat to the next level down and close off the level above using their clever air filtration system. Same with water and trying to flood them, they built the tunnels on a slight incline so any water from rainfall or the enemy would just filter down. The Americans would sometimes send somebody in to a tunnel if one was found, but they were so small, dark and maze like that they were extremely difficult to navigate. The Vietnamese would also set up booby traps and spike pits to stop further advancement into the tunnels. The air system was clever because they used ant hills to provide fresh air to the tunnels by making small holes to the outside. They surrounded the ant hills with salt and chilli to put any sniffer dogs off their scent. They also set up traps for any sniffer dogs by laying things like fish sauce on an area of ground with a rotating door covered with leaves, when the dog went over it would fall through into a pit with spikes. Same goes for people, there were all kinds of traps all with horrendous looking metal spikes. We were also showed some fox holes which were tiny holes in the ground about a meter deep with an area dug vertically at the bottom for the legs to go. The reason for that is the Vietnamese would get inside, pull over the camouflaged "roof" and sit in hiding for the whole day until night fall. They would also put booby traps on the roof so that if a soldier were to find it, when they shot at it a mine would blow up in their faces.
The people of cu chi lived underground for years, only surfacing under the cover of darkness to wash in the river, expose of their waste into the parts of the river with the strong currents etc. They had exits under the river so they could come out in detected to escape, attack boats or whatever they needed to do, and they would swim with bamboo shoots reaching the top to breathe. When the war was finally over a lot of people had many health problems such as back problems from bending over all the time, skin problems, malnutrition, light sensitivity. It took weeks after the war was over for some people to even begin surfacing. The tunnels are tiny, because the Vietnamese are tiny and it also meant the enemy couldn't fit! But for the purpose of tourism some of the tunnels have been resized but despite that you still have to either hunch over or crawl to get through them. We went through them, then afterwards tried some of the food that they all lived on which was kind of like potato but with no taste. There was a dip that was kind of crushed peanuts and chili which was quite nice but, we know all too well from having dal bat every day would not be fun!
There was a very bizarre part of the place where there's a military shooting range and you can shoot the original guns from the war like ak47 and stuff. Oddly enough if was also in the area you sat in for the lunch stop. There were quite a few doing it, mostly men. The reason behind wanting to is beyond me....considering how horrific the war was and the area in which we were in and the atrocities that took place I can't figure out why people would get a kick out of shooting from the rifles that have literally killed hundreds of people in a war. But...each to their own! So after a couple of hours or so there we took the journey back to the city. Some people were dropped off at the war remnants museum whilst there were taken to their hotels. Liam and I wanted to see the museum so we got dropped off there.
It was a really hard going museum, and although I can whole heatedly understand WHY they presented thing the way they did we're not so used to a biased view being shown I suppose. It was so one sided and ultimately anti American. It's actually only recently been renamed, before it was called the exhibition house of US and puppet crimes and after that called the exhibition house for crimes of war and aggression. Although they've dropped the "US" in the title the content in side is still the same. There are a few different themes including military equipment like bombs, planes, tanks etc which were outside and really interesting to look at because they're in really good condition. Also outside is a section about the prison, where the south Vietnamese kept political prisoners and tortured them in all kinds of nasty ways graphically described. It was called "tiger cage" presumably because the main way of torture was to put several prisoners in small cages lined its barbed wire out in the sun for hours and hours.
There were different levels to the museum, the first floor was mainly propaganda posters and a lot of information and photos of various countries in support of the Vietnamese in the war, which they call the "American war". The second floor had many very graphic photos of the war crimes committed by the Americans against the Vietnamese, and whilst they very impactful and really make you thinks out the horrors of war and the terrible things done, they seemed to us quite distorted. For example there was a photo of a Vietnamese man being detained and underneath said " a poor peasant man being detained in front of his small children for being a "suspect" ". There were such graphic photos of dead bodies, decapitated,beheaded, blown up, burned, dragged from tanks....all with descriptions that ultimately made it sound like the American troops were enjoying themselves the whole time. Some of the images were truly disturbing, to the point where I feel they should have a warning on entering that its not suitable for under 18s. There was another room dedicated to "agent orange" and the horrendous consequences of it. Again, some real eye opening pictures of some of the defects and disabilities of the generations because of the chemicals. There were a couple of of pictures of Americans suffering due to the chemicals as well and American children with birth defects, all written in such a way that, to me, seemed like they were saying well serves them right! They also had a container with preserved foetuses and still borns that were deformed from the toxins which was pretty disturbing. Liam had to step out of that section, I think he was more than a bit overwhelmed by it and he wasn't alone, it sickened me and you could tell from a few of the people sitting outside that they either couldn't go in at all or had come out prematurely.
Throughout the museum they had big posters up with quotes from Americans saying terrible things, and information about the so called human rights movement and geneva and all the promises America made which were all broken when they committed all the war crimes. They had a section with some truly moving photos taken by documentary journalists who died during the war as well. Ultimately the horrors of the war were shown to you full force, which I really do think was good because we need to know of the things that happen. I think it's so important for people to see what humans are capable of doing to each other and hopefully be sickened enough to prevent it happening all over again. And I can understand why it was portrayed so one sided and at times very bitterly, but I think perhaps a lot of the photos descriptions were distorted to fit how they wants to portray events....but if I think about it more deeply that goes on Everywhere to sway you to the version the media want you to believe?? All in all it was a very emotional and painful couple of hours but we're both in agreement it was the best day of our trip in Vietnam because we learned and saw so much.
After all of it was getting on a bit so we went to a Vietnamese restaurant which was recommended by the lady who owns our hostel as "yummy real Vietnamese food". Well, either "tourist" Vietnamese food truly is nothing like real Vietnamese food because it tastes so much better, or the lady is just friends with the restaurant and tries to get them business ( I vote the latter). The food really wasn't that great and not much cheaper than anywhere else we've been since being here. After spending a bit of time in our room we then headed back out to find a nice cup of tea and relax for an hour in nice chairs. We've recently found ourselves fantasising about owning our own coffee shop and discussing how it would be laid out with a book store etc....very odd as its not what either of us would have thought of a few months ago but it seems to be a reoccurring theme in conversation! So who knows what we might end up doing after this trip!
The next day isn't really much to talk about, we did our laundry, wandered around and spent a lot of time in a coffee shop where we found English tea and catching up on our programmes that need Internet etc. It was more if a relax and prepare for onward travel day and that's all I will say about it.
