Lost in the City and Lost Underground

The sleeper train had delivered us safely to HCMC train station. All we had to do now was get to the hotel. Nic has been our default hotel booker but this time it was my shot to show that I can do it too. I had picked a hotel online and made the reservation in Hue for it so there was nothing to worry about until we realised I hadn't written any of the important information down. I say important, I hadn't actually written anything down. What with the train and all and the general passing of time, I couldn't even remember the hotel's name or the street name. This was the situation as we stepped out into the sun and the army of Taxi touts trying to take us to a hotel. In the end, we had to just pull out our tired and trusted S.E Asia guidebook, now in it's last country, in fact last city, and pick a hotel out of the hat to ask a taxi to take us to. We hoped that where there was one hotel we would find others and maybe work out a new deal where ever we ended up. There was an army of touts trying to get us to jump in their cars but we avoided them for two reasons, first they would have taken us to their cousin's hotel in the middle of no-where which needs guests and second, the fare they quoted for our chosen pick was twice what the book suggested it should be, and that was after we had bargained it down from the ridiculous. In the end we found a metred cab making no effort to get customers further down the road and got taken to where he thought our new hotel was. The price came in bang on the quote though he had dropped us off outside someone's house, having gotten confused and hoping we would just pay and get out so he wouldn't have to deal with the language difficulty. We were happy to oblige despite knowing all this, because two minutes walk back up the road was the very hotel I had booked. Nic spotting it after I had remembered it's name in the car, round about the time a big white tourist decided he had had enough of Vietnam and stood in the middle of the pedestrian crossing shouting and gesturing to all the cars who were responding as you might expect.

Our hotel was expecting us and showed us to our room, however we had passed several others on the stretch of road and realised it's rate was a little high. A check of the room and we were decided that it was not good value. We made our apologies and checked into a different place just up the road. By fault rather than successful design we had plonked ourselves in the centre of backpacker HCMC and were delighted with our result.

One of our first places of 'interest' that we fell into was a massive electrics department store which was utterly mobbed with music blaring and crowds shoving. We let ourselves get caught up in the flow and took a tour of the digital cameras, PCs, Air Con Units and Tumble Dryers before being spat out at the bottom again with a ringing in our ears and a wobble under our feet. These people go mad for store openings.

HCMC was already revealing itself to be quite different from Hanoi and we were pleased to discover this. The roads were wide, much cleaner and people actually treated us just like anyone else. It just felt like we all had a little bit more air to breath and the effects were obvious.

We didn't have a lot of time to spend in HCMC so there wasn't a lot of sights we could fit in. One attraction that we did make the time for though was the Cu Chi Tunnels which is a complex about 2 hours out of the city on a tour bus. The Cu Chi Tunnels are where the Viet-Cong hid out in resistance to the occupying US forces during the war. The tunnels lay under a major artery linking HCMC to Laos and this was a route used by the US to bring supplies into the city. The deliveries of food and weapons were often ambushed and taken by the underground movement. There are hundreds of miles of tunnels, all just shy of 4 feet high and about 2 feet wide, and there are three levels which form a dizzying network linking villages and armed posts. It proved unbeatable by the Americans and our very proud guide wasted no opportunity to stamp Vietnam's supremacy over the defeated American's weaknesses. First we watched a particularly dull propaganda video, twice, and then got taken on a tour of a re-created village. In the village they showed us the make shift Kitchens used by the Vietnamese, these like their other buildings were big square holes in the ground with rattan apexes placed over the top. Next we were shown the traps that they laid which were particularly unpleasant, usually resulting in someone becoming impaled on bamboo spikes by one method or another. It was all quite unpleasant but fascinating all the same. I wondered how an American might consider the tour as it was so skewed against them, and proud in its insistence the soldiers deserved such torturous deaths, still refusing to accept any complicity between the US and a fair proportion of Vietnam. Just as we were thinking that we weren't going to get to go down any tunnels, our guide led us to an entrance and said we could go down, and either come out the first or second exit. We duly launched ourselves down the murky tunnel which was lit by the odd little bulb in places but was pitch dark in others, passing connecting tunnels as we went. It was like a giant mole tunnel, being dug straight through the earth with no lining or treatment to the walls. Our enthusiasm got the better of us and we missed the second stop, or rather saw another exit just a bit further on and saw no harm in going to that one. It was great that we did because it was much more exciting with big steps to jump down inside the tunnel, leading us to the second level. We reached the source of daylight and popped out blinking having decided we'd better not go on to the fourth exit. We found four other people from our tour, also Scots and wandered back to the meeting point to discover that everyone else had already run through the tunnel and out (didn't we all come here to spend time in them?) and had now gone somewhere else with the guide. We got quite lost trying to find them but we did find another couple of even cooler tunnels which we took full advantage of and scrambled through. We then noticed that the time table of the day said we were supposed to arrive back in HCMC, 2 hours away, in 30 minutes - and these tours never give you extra free time. With a more alert sense of urgency we found our way out of the village only to meet our very panicky guide who was heading back in for the third time to find us. We boarded our bus which was full of very hot and unhappy people who had spent the best part of an hour sitting waiting for us and we sat quietly staring at our feet for the journey home.

That evening, over dinner, I pondered what the chances were that the four people who got lost were all Scots. Was it some genetic deficiency in our sense of direction (I had always thought mine rather good)? Did we unconsciously club together into a little subterranean clan? Was it just chance? Just as I thought we would never know, Nic reckoned she had the answer - it was just another case of the Scots trying to ring every last penny worth out of the experience.