Goodnight Saigon!

So I realise this is my thrid post, and that we were supposed to rotate the writing of this thing, but the blog has fallen a week behind so I said I better update it. In fairness, one of the rules of the blog was that we were going to update it with photos and videos at every opportunity, but a week in and we've had a bit of misfortune on the camera front which hasn't helped. First off, Conor forgot to bring the USB cable for his two cameras, then in Bangkok my camera, despite being waterproof and shockproof, didn't hold up to the Thailand heat, and stopped working. Finally when Micheal was trying to free up more space on his camera, he tried to look under "Format", which actually meant to reformat the memory card, meaning all the photos so far were lost. Just bought a new cable for Conor's camera tho so we should be back in buisness soon to keep you entertained! For the meantinme I just robbed some photos from the internet

So back to the story. Ho Chi Minh City is the capitol of Vietnam, although the locals still refer to it as Saigon, so that's what we used. I must say, we were very economical with our time here, and somehow managed to get everything we wanted to do in less than 2 days, knowing that our next stop was going to be a beach, so it was a bit of a quick stop off. Landing in about 2pm, we were greeted by easily the heaviest rain we have ever felt. Literally crossing a one lane road soaked us. It was like walking under a waterfall. Thankfully that only held up for about an hour, so after that we headed to the Vietnam War Museum.

We came here not knowing a whole lot about the history of South East Asia. Well, in the past week, we've learnt quite a lot. Between lonely planet and the museums, I reckon I've finally got my head around the war. Basically, Vietnam was divided between the North and the South, which were battling it out for supremacy. The yanks reckoned that if the North won, it would lead to a communist country, and alos they would have to pay more for supplies from China. They brought everyone, and bombed the whole place. In the end the Vietnamese were a lot smarter. We saw a lot of the weapons used by both sides, and the Americans were far superior in most ways. The Vietnamese were a lot smarter tho used a lot of ambushes in the jungle to beat them back. The Americans got fed up of these ambushes, so decided to used chemicals (called Agent Orange) to kill all the trees. Unfortunaltey this also killed and messed up a lot of the locals. The Americans left, the North won, and Vientam ended up a peaceful, republic country. So long story short, Americans went to war, for something the "thought" was gonna happen, lost, and left eventually, tails between their legs. I'm sure it'll never happen again!


So after a quite moving afternoon, we hit the local hotspots. Having gone a bit overboard on the budget so far, we decided to try the kerbsirde eating. Lovely stuff. Pretty much anything you want for a dollar. Lovely food. I'm sure the health inspectors wouldn't agree, but we're still alive anyway. Then we found a bar with a buy one get one free offer on beers. Darragh, with his Applied Maths leaving cert pointed out that 5 people don't fit in well to these schemes, so we decided to buy 6 every round, and someone would have an extra beer each time. We were quite giddy after a few hours of this arrangement and wandered into a nightclub. What followed, is something that nobody who was there will ever forget. 5 pasty white Irish lads, hit the dancefloor and start a danceoff that lasted 3 hours. The moves pulled out were ridiculous. In no particular order, there was:

• The Worm
• The Homer Simpson
• Limbo
• Congo Line
• Around the World
• Rolly Poly
• Polishing the floor
• Riverdance
  

The following day we were actually feeling quite good. That much dancing means ya can't buy beer, and that much dancing clears the system quite well. So we went to the Cu Chi tunnels. These were one of the main reasons the Vietnamese won the war. They started during the earlier Indochina war, and by the time the Vietnamese war ended it was a 250km network of underground tunnels around an area. The locals were nifty enough to scatter around them, but the Yanks hadn't a hope. We crept 100m through them and we were in bits after them. I can't imagine anyone ever invading them to be honest.



Saigon was a lovely city actually, although the traffic was manic. I could definately have spent a few more days there, but with our time being quite limited, the sights done and the beached of Nha Trang waiting for us, we were more than happy to hop on the next train out of here. Unortunately we got 3rd class tickets which means 9 hours on wooden seats and no Air Conditioning. This might not be good....