Xin Gio! I am having a good time in Vietnam! Right now I'm in Saigon with two friends. I've been here for three nights. I'm enjoying the food. I've had pho and spring rolls. I also liked Vietnamese Iced Tea.
Saigon is officially called Ho Chi Minh City. Uncle Ho's communist forces invaded or "liberated" Saigon on 30 April 1975. But many locals still call it Saigon. One local said with a bit of resentment that Saigon is the capitalist name not the communist name. The city has about 8 million residents. The traffic is crazy. I have never seen such chaos. Following the traffic lights is optional. Everyone just goes when there is an opening. I'll have to double check, but I think a tour guide said that there were about 20,000 traffic accidents last year.
Most people ride around on motorbikes- either made in China or Japan. Our tour guide said there are 2 million of them in Saigon. According to him 1 out of 8 people owns one in Vietnam. Vietnam has about 80 million people. That's a lot of bikes. They only cost about $400 American.
The road is also filled with cyclos (rickshaws) which are wheeled carts attached to bicycles and people carrying heavy loads of food or goods. Sometimes animals get into the road too.
Fortunately, we became friends with a girl who took us on a tour of the city. We went to the War Museum, Notre Dame, and the Chinese Market. The War Museum was a heart-breaking place. There were many disturbing pictures, but the ones that stand out were of the children who were deformed by Agent Orange. Yesterday we went on a tour of the Mekong Delta. There were floating markets on the river. We also saw women making spring rolls and heard some farmers play music.
Today we went to the Cu Chi tunnels. I crawled around in one of the tunnels. It was very small. One lady in front of us was panicking. She couldn't see very well and wasn't sure if the guide was in front of her.
Our tour guide was funny today. He joked that sometimes he looses tourists in the tunnels. He said, "Some go all the way to Cambodia without a visa."
We're leaving tonight to go Nha Trang. Three friends are there already. We're going scuba diving. We'll fly out of Hanoi to Bangkok on the 17th. I don't know what else we'll do before then.
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