The first day in Saigon was spent doing all the major tourist attractions which became a very boy-y day, going to the Revolutionary museum and learning about war and looking at guns aircraft and old bomb parts. There was a section upstairs dedicated to anti-French and anti-American propaganda which you got the feeling was definitely a slight distortion of facts about the Indochinese and American wars but was nevertheless quite amusing. Next was the War Remnants Museum which was GRUESOME. There was row upon row of really macabre shocking photos taken from the war with America - halls filled with pictures of mutilated bodies, people who had been tortured and maimed by napalm bombs, pictures of soldiers pointing their guns at rows of people and then captions underneath telling you about the terrible things that would happen after the photo was taken, pictures of children crying, villages up in flames etc. and then there was another section dedicated to the victims of Agent Orange and the 75million litres of chemical defoliants dumped across the country - like pictures of children that had been born from the survivors of the war (Vietnamese and American) that were hideously disfigured, and to top it all off there was just a big tank of malformed foetuses. It was truely horrible, and that was the first day that I felt properly homesick.

After our intensely grim war-filled day, we went to have dinner in a place filled only with locals where you sit at your table on tiny little stools and you're given either a grill or a cooker along with a mixture of ingredients so you can cook for yourself at your table. We chose to have goat meat and they brought along a whole bunch of raw ingredients and we had no idea what they were (maybe bits of liver/intestines) but put them in our stew anyway and ended up with an amazing goat fondue-esque meal.
We met some people we knew from Hoi An and went out to a bar next to our hotel, and this is where me and Tom ended up having the first fall out of the group so far - it was basically about coldplay and involved me storming out of the bar like a phat diva and ended up with us hugging it out 15 minutes later. Pretty tame!


This is the GANGSTER watch I bought at this incredible mall called Saigon Square which was filed with loads of fake designer clothes, watches, sunglasses, electronics etc. so there were hundreds of like chanel, gucci, prada, rado, rolex watches I could have gone for. Except that this one was the sickest by far.

The next day was spent on a tour of Cu Chi tunnels which was an area surrounding Saigon that was home to Vietnamese soldiers during the American war so they dug themselves an intiricate network of tunnels to protect themselves. There was a kitchen area, a weapon making and uniform making room, even a honeymoon suite. Going down into the tunnels was so dark and dirty and claustrophobic and you had to kneel down the entire way through meaning you came out the other end all hot and sweaty. Then we found out that there were tunnels that ran 100m below ground level and that some of the soldiers lived down there for 17 years and that the ones we went through had actually been widened for tourists.
We also saw loads of traps like this rolling trap, a see saw trap, a clipping armpit trap, a door trap that was literally just a swinging door with loads of spikes on it.

That evening we had dinner in China town then bumped into some guys from our tour and met them for drinks in a really fancy expat bar in the centre that we all decided was maybe too fancy so went to the irish bar instead and the boys sat around telling really funny jokes.. We were then taken to a club called Apocalypse Now by a very drunk lady from Newcastle who owned the only contemporary art art gallery in Saigon. It was such a strange club - it was FULL of prostitutes (and ladyboys) just hanging by the bar, playing pool, on the dancefloor, and you'd see these horrible disgusting fat middleaged western men also hanging around trying to pick them up, and when they'd succeeded you 'd see them go over to the dancefloor and try and dance awkwardly with whichever prostitute theyd picked up. It was NASTY.