We're now in Vietnam which is the part of the trip we were most excited for. We spent 2 days in Ho Chi Minh City visiting the War Museum, Cu Chi Tunnels and a waterpark.
The sound of the city is the beeping from all the motorbikes (of which there are thousands!) and cars on the road. It's a complete free-for-all. There don't seem to be any rules whether you're a pedestrian or a road user which means you take your life in your hands every time you try to cross the road!.
We arrived in the city early evening and promptly joined in on the pub quiz going on in our hostel. Surprisingly, our team came third, none of which was down to me! We continued the night at a rooftop bar round the corner with the guys we'd met at the quiz and ended up bumping into two guys from the year below at school - small world!
That evening Ben and George had told us about this really fun waterpark in the city which they were headed to the next day so we decided to join them.
We went to the War Museum in the morning with Ben who hadn't seen it yet and all of us were almost moved to tears. It was so harrowing to see the photos of the horrific effects of agent orange and the extreme deformaties these people have. There were even 'specimens' preserved in formaldehyde of still born deformed babies which really made it hit home.
One of the stories on the wall was about an American massacre of a family believed to support the Viet Cong. The American soldiers had sliced the necks of the grandparents then brought out their three grandchildren who had been hiding, killing two and disembowelling the little girl while making the grandparents watch. Disgustingly, one of these soldiers went on to be a Senator in the US and admitted to the slaughter in 2001. Shocking.
I also hadn't realised that there had been Americans dying for the cause in the US. There were a few shootings of people who were campaigning against the Vietnam war and a few martyrs who set themselves on fire in protest.
All in all the War Museum was pretty tough to visit but it's so important to understand what the people of this country have been through so I'm really glad we went.
We had a lighter afternoon at the waterpark with the boys going on all sorts of scary/fun rides. Our favourites were the slides that you went down on in a rubber ring because the rides without them were a bit painful! The other one we really enjoyed was a zip wire across a waterfall and then you drop (or rather splat) into the water.
The next day we visited the Cu Chi Tunnels 50km North of HCMC. The Americans destroyed Cu Chi so the people created a network of tunnels and bunkers up to 10m underground in which to live in. The network was massive and spanned 250km.
On the tour they showed us the different types of boobie traps that the Cu Chi people left for the American soldiers. The actual tunnels were only 50cm high and only large enough for Vietnamese people to fit in. The government had made one set of tunnels larger so that tourists could go in and see what it was like. We went in one and they still felt tiny! I couldn't imagine living down there let alone being born there and never seeing the light of day for 6 years.
Our favourite part of the tour was the gun range. They had a number of guns you could pay to shoot and the sound made the tunnel experience seem all the more real. It was £1 a bullet and we both bought 10 rounds for the M30 machine gun. Yes, I fired a machine gun! (Jamie and Rhianna are you jealous?!) It was so much fun, the gun was mounted on the back of a truck and was sooo loud!
We had a night bus to our next stop, Mui Ne, booked for 8pm and the coach from Cu Chi got back to the travel agent at 7.30. We hadn't eaten all day and were starving so we thought we'd have time to grab a pizza from Pizza Hut to eat on the bus - mistake. The pizza took about 20mins and the walk back to the hostel (where the bus was picking us up from) was about 20mins;much longer than we'd anticipated! We ended up legging it all the way back to the hostel, taking it in turns to hold the pizza out in front as we ran - we looked hilarious! Luckily we made it back to the hostel with minutes to spare before the bus came but we were exhausted - I have not run that much since sports day at school!
Y x
