Hello Ho Chi Minh City

So yes! I left Kampot in fairly poor spirits, having otherwise had an excellent time there. Maybe I’ll go back one day to tidy up unfinished business, and finally tackle the dino-rib challenge.

We got a bus back to Phnom Penh, ready for the next leg of our journey towards the further east. What should have been a three hour ride stretched beyond four, and we were pretty exhausted by the time we made it back to PP in the evening. At this stage, we were faced with the prospect of an 8am bus the next day to Ho Chi Minh City, scheduled to take 6.5 hours. Frankly, I was still pretty green around the gills at this point, and some quick research online showed us that equivalent flights were pretty reasonable, and took 45 minutes instead, so, sorry mother nature, but we made a very easy decision and flew instead, arriving in comfort in Vietnam, our third country of the trip!

Of course, getting through immigration took nearly as long as the bus journey would have done, but shush you. That’s not the point.

Ho Chi Minh City! Named after Mr Chi Minh himself, the father of the country, who’s very name means ‘Bringer of Light’. Having done a little reading about his country in the airport, we were excited to see it. Essentially, Vietnam has been under the thumb from various groups for hundreds and hundreds of years - first the Chinese for aeons, then the French for a century, and finally the USA for decades. Ho Chi Minh was instrumental in Vietnamese independence, and is rightly celebrated in their country.

He led the call for independence from the French after WW2, and succeeded! Then, when the Americans started propping up the government of South Vietnam, he led the resistance against them in his efforts to re-unify the country. Sadly he died before seeing this happen, but the people are, it’s fair to say, quite fond of him (more on just how fond to come…).

Ho Chi Minh City, or HCMC as I shall henceforth call it, was a hive of activity similar to Bangkok but not quite as developed - where there we found three or four levels of traffic (canal, subway, road and sky train), here seemed to be the same number of people (on motorbikes), crammed into one road at a time. We arrived pretty late, and went out for food before retreating to our hotel (me still with zero appetite and looking miserable, apparently!).

By this stage, we had seen more than our fair share of big Asian cities, and we were starting to look ahead and see that even three months isn’t long enough to see everything we wanted to, so even before arriving in HCMC, we had decided to stay there only two nights before moving on to the north of the country, which we were very excited about.

So, we had but one full day in HCMC. I was still feeling pretty sorry for myself, so as much as we were really keen to go and see examples of the tunnels used by the Vietcong to hide from US troops and keep their supplies coming from the north, the idea of a three hour round trip to get there put paid to those plans. Oh well! Instead, we went to the Reunification Palace, which had previously been to seat of power for the South Vietnamese government during the war, and has been kept pretty much as it was found in 1978 when troops from the north drove a tank through the front gate and planted their flag.

It was an interesting exhibit, with abandoned tanks and jets outside, and a mixture of state rooms and war bunkers to explore inside. A favourite feature of mine was the meditation room at the top of the building, initially designed for the ruler to sit in and look out in all four directions when making important decisions regarding matters of state, but re-fitted with bomb-proof glass once things started turning south (or rather, north). There were nice views of the city all around, and a helicopter parked up just in case on a roof nearby.

Escape Route

After that, it was lunch. I was starting to feel human again, halleluiah! After that, it was the War Remnants museum, with more stunning machines of war outside, and a variety of interesting exhibits inside.

The piece that shocked both of us the most was a display on photojournalists in the Vietnam war - they had elected to hilight photos taken by people who had died in the war, with particular emphasis on their final roll of film. This, combined with displays on the legacy of Agent Orange and some galling infographics (for example, more bombs dropped in the Vietnam war than WW2), left us pretty stunned afterwards. The museum closed before we could see everything we wanted, which was a shame, as this was the best one we had seen on our travels to date - would certainly like to have spent more time there.

But, the world kept spinning and we watched Good Morning Vietnam that night, as some much-needed comic relief. The next day, was a flight to Hanoi, in the North of the country...