Miss Saigon

Hello All!

I don't really remember the last time that I posted - one of the nice things about traveling is losing all track of time. But I just wanted to let you all know that I am currently in Nha Trang - the beach! Today we went to the Monkey Island, but I have some other things to tell you about first.

So, Saigon was awesome! The heat is on in Saigon - but not in that hooker-brothel kind of way (at least my experience was whore less - I can't comment on the old men with really young ladies...). I love that city! We stayed at a nice guesthouse that only had about 4 rooms to rent out, so it was nice and quiet, the location was perfect too. Right near the main backpacker area, but down a little alley, so away from a lot of the noise.

I was feeling pretty rough when we arrived, so we didn't do too much - just bummed around town, looked at a market and went to the fine arts museum. The museum was okay, nothing too outstanding. For some reason all of the paintings looked a little muddy to me. Don't know if was because of the heat, the lack of sleep or if the colors just looked muddy. So, I wandered around the galleries for little bit not really looking at the pictures and then went home.

The next day we did a little walking tour of the area - we went to a couple of museums - both war related, the former palace (looked like a very amped up version of the Brady's home with a war room ready basement). Communist "revolution" museums are not very interesting to me. Reading some of the signage is interesting to a point, but generally it gets old after a bit and coming from China.... I guess that revolution would be a major event in the history of a nation, but it just seems to be soooo influential that much of the art and cultural/history museums are solely dedicated to the propaganda. Gets boring. Nuff said. At one of the museums they had a guillotine and a very disturbing display about the effects of agent orange.

Okay, so the next day we got n a tour out to see the main Cao Dai Temple. Cao Dai seems like an interesting religion. It is a mix of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Christianity. One of he main western spirits/saints of the religion is Victor Hugo and the symbol is that eye in the pyramid picture. Groovy. We went and watched one of the prayer sessions from the balcony above and now, I don't know which country can truly boast having the rudest tourists (a toss up between the French and the Chinese).

--Oh side note - when going through immigration when entering Vietnam, there was a huge crowd of people waiting to go through. There was a little gap along the side of the mass of people and sure enough the 3 Chinese people cut and bumped their way to the Head of the line, pissing off quite a few people in the process. But what was even more amusing was that the line wasn't moving at all! You had to wait for the officials to call out your name before you could go through. The Chinese were just about dead last to go through. HA!

Okay, back to Vietnam.

After the trippy Cao Dai temple, we went to the Cu Chi tunnels. Very interesting and, um, small. Our tour leader told us about some of the history (he was a communications officer for the South Vietnamese Army) about the area and the war. That was probably one of the more interesting parts of the tour - hearing about some of the first hand experiences. But we saw some of the nasty booby traps that were put out to snare US soldiers. Also watched a very interesting video about the soldiers - I just remember a line that went something like this: Look at this young little girl. She is very small and weak, but she is one of the soldiers fighting for our country! Even though she is just a girl she has received hero awards/recognition for killing Americans. Then we walked around the grounds some more and saw some of the craters left by bombs and some people chose to shoot some guns ($1.3/bullet with a minimum of 10 bullets).

A little later we went through the tunnels. They had been widened to about double the size they were originally. Damn, they were small! I don't know how Matt got through. I was following a girl from Germany (who was right behind the guide). It was pitch black and small and hot. She suddenly said, "hole!" I didn't realize that it was an actual hole that dropped down, so yes, I fell through the hole in the most ungraceful way possible. I managed to wedge my left leg and right arm up while the rest of me dropped to the ground below. Ouch!

I was really happy to get out of the tunnels. I can't imagine going through the original tunnels and having to live in them underground! We surfaced in the old hospital dug out - coincidence?

Anyhow, after all of that excitement, we jumped a bus to Nah Trang. I love it here too! Not the busy, busy time here so not overly crowded. I mentioned we went to the Monkey Island earlier. That was a creepy experience. There weren't very many people there and um...just seemed spooky to be on this amusement parkish island but have virtually no people, just monkeys. Did they eat the people? What was going on? We bought some monkey feed and were quickly assaulted by monkeys - a couple watched Matt buying it and then followed him out of the shop. So, fed the monkeys, had them follow us around. There was this one little monkey who had a bloody gash across his face and he was just screaming and screaming at us (going "ape shit" if you will) this was really freaky - I mean, what kind of "outbreak" island was this?Fun. Still creeped out.

After creepy Monkey Island, we went to see a waterfall. The waterfall was really cool, more of a hike than I thought it would be but it was fun climbing out over the rocks to get to it. Also, no one else was out there so Matt and I had a private viewing of the falls. Cool.

Today, we are just killing some time before we catch our next bus to Hoi An. We went down to a practically deserted beach and playing in the water/sand for a few hours. Met some local kids who were trying to sell us stuff, but apparently the allure of digging a big, deep hole is enough distraction for Matt, Molly and the under 15 crew. So we dug holes and built little sand walls. The kids were pretty cool, one asked me to buy postcards, I said, that I didn't need any. Then he suggested that I go with him to buy him some ice cream! Kids. Gotta love 'em.

Anyhow, just ate a really great pub burger with all the fixins and am just wating for 6PM to roll around to hop another bus. So, that is the update for now, talk to you later!