We spent most of Saturday travelling back to the old capital and when we did get there, we were shattered so some food and it was time to spend some time with my bed. We already spent a couple of days here, before we visited Can Tho, to say our goodbyes to Jeff Burns (Elliot), Arab (Nadine) and monkey boy (Gee) and because we had to come back here, we moved on straight away.
Now we're here to do the sightseeing and main thing we wanted to see was Cu Chi tunnels, which we booked through the guesthouse and ended up going with a huge tour group, which are never good because everything is scheduled. Our tour guide, Bang spoke decent enough broken English to understand if you really concentrated. The first 20 minute of the tour was with Bang speaking about himself and the Vietnamese tradition. The one that we loved the most was that the man is allowed to marry another woman after 3 years if she hasn't given birth to a boy, so he told us that he knew a guy who had 9 wives and each wife shares responsibility of looking after this one kid -PIMPING.
I've always wondered how a country so small as Vietnam defeated America in their own backyard and visiting these tunnels answered this question for me. The booby traps, the bombs they developed and the Cu Chi tunnels they made just baffled the Americans and this system obviously worked. We saw the tunnels they had to get through, they were 40 cm wide and 80cm high-just enough space for a skinny Vietnamese. They even had a hospital and a kitchen that was underground, so they could hide under there for a while. We were able to go through some tunnels that were 5 x bigger than the normal size and even that was a struglle for westerneres, especially a big lad like me.
We came back to Saigon for 2pm and had booked a bus to Cambodia (Pnom Penh) at 3pm-no messing about! We got there around 9pm and got hassled by tuk tuk drivers straight away and for some reason, even though their currency is Rial, they prefer to use US dollars, which is weird but thats they way it goes I suppose.
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