Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City

After our ten hour sleeper train we arrived at Saigon! Strapped on our bags and walked to the War Remnants Museum which turned out to be pretty upsetting. There were lots descriptions and photographs of the torture administered to the prisoners of the Vietnam War. The most shocking were the removal of teeth, decapitation and nailing of body parts...We headed in from the "Tiger Cage" (the tiger cage was a cage 2ft by 5ft by 1ft and there would be up to three people imprisoned and tourtured in them) into the memorial building. More shocking photographs, footage and weaponry were on display in here aswell as some disturbing facts about the chemical bombs americans dropped on the innocent and the suffering of the people now 30+ years later.

We left the museum and headed to the backpackers area and found the perfect $10 room. Offloaded the bags, quick shower and change and headed to subway for breakie! We booked our tours and buses, done our laundry and headed to Ben Dinh market for a wander. We ended our day with some local grub and had an early one ahead of tomorrows visit to Cu Chi tunnels and the Firing Range!

Cu chi tunnels day! Jumped on the bus with our brews and off we went! 90mins later we arrived in the middle of a village and could already here the gun fire. We travelled along the path seeing various hideouts and traps used to catch and kill american soldiers. We stopped for lunch and to visit the shooting range! There were three machine guns and four rifles we chose the carbine Rifle :-) Gem shot 2 rounds and was too scared to do more and I shot the other 8. You dont realise how loud a gun is until you fire one! We then carried on the tour and climbed through some seriously claustrophobic tunnels. We had now finished the tour and completely lost our group along with our bus and had to find another bus to get on...we managed to jump on another bus though and were home for 3 and went to Kims Tour company to make a small complaint...which ended pretty well by getting back 300,000 dong (£10!) which was what we paid! The rest of the day was spent preparing for our border crossing into Cambodia tomorrow!